Ian Frazier Among the Drone Racers

Summary

Podcast Summary: Ian Frazier Among the Drone Racers

Podcast: The New Yorker Radio Hour
Host: David Remnick
Episode Date: February 13, 2018

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Episode Overview

This episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, hosted by David Remnick, delves into the fast-evolving world of competitive drone racing. Staff writer Ian Frazier profiles some of America’s top drone racers, exploring the culture, lifestyle, thrill, and challenges that come with the sport. The episode offers a behind-the-scenes look into this new and unconventional profession, where passion and vocation blend in unexpected ways.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Rise of Drone Racing

• Drones in Popular Imagination: David Remnick kicks off the episode by highlighting the different ways people think about drones—from military use to consumer gadgets. But here, the focus is on drones used for high-speed racing.

  “If I just say the word drone, do you imagine an unmanned plane dropping bombs...a little Amazon robot?...Or a Christmas present that was lost or broken...?” (00:29)

• Transition to a Legitimate Sport: Ian Frazier recounts attending the 2016 Drone National Championships, noting the early, somewhat disordered state of the sport and the incredible speeds involved (up to 180 mph in trials).

  “It was one of those things that happen early on in the development of a sport...not really very well thought out.” (01:30)

Meeting the Drone Racers

• The Fort Collins House: Frazier visits the home of three drone pilots—Zachary "Anoob" Thayer, Jordan "Jet" Tempkin, and Travis McIntyre. The house is entirely dedicated to drone racing, with trophies, equipment, and custom-built drones filling every room.
  • Trophies from worldwide competitions: “California, Arizona, Dubai, New York. Man, lots of places.” – Zachary Thayer (03:46)
  • The chaos of their workshop resembles the Wright brothers’ famous bicycle shop.
  • Custom-designed drones for mountain flying, prioritizing their unique needs over mass market.

The Experience of Racing and Building Drones

• Engineering Meets Adventure: The pilots design their own drone frames for specific challenges, like mountain flights, seeking better flight times and speeds.
  • “We want something that’s better for mountains...because mountains are deceivingly large.” – Zachary Thayer (05:34)
• Practice in the Rocky Mountains: The pilots regularly take their custom drones into the mountains near Fort Collins for high-adrenaline practices—pulling off the road, launching drones at cliffs, and maneuvering along rivers.
  • “So like Travis, right now, he’s just an empty carcass of a body standing there, and his consciousness is somewhere flying around this mountain.” – Travis McIntyre (07:02)
• The Thrill of FPV (First Person View): Ian Frazier tries FPV goggles, describing it as a completely immersive, exhilarating experience, akin to flying in a dream.
  • “It’s exhilarating. I mean, it just absolutely gets your entire body wired.” – Ian Frazier (08:58)
  • “There’s no feeling of your own self. It’s mostly like what flying in a dream feels like...” (09:50)

The Drone Racer Lifestyle

• A Haven for Adrenaline Junkies: Many racers are former enthusiasts of extreme sports—skateboarding, skiing, motocross—drawn to drone racing for the thrill minus the physical danger.
  • “They had a bad motorcycle accident and this is their outlet to getting this sensation of, ‘I’m going 100 miles an hour an inch from the ground.’” – Travis McIntyre (10:13)
• Struggles with Professional Identity: The pilots grapple with describing their profession, sometimes settling on “entertainer” or “artist” for practical reasons.
  • "I sort of chuckle and say I'm a professional drone racer because it doesn't seem like I should be able to say that or that it's real." – Zachary Thayer (11:04)

The Drone Racing League (DRL) and Competitive Racing

• From Hobby to Profession: Top pilots like "Jet" and "Anoob" race for the DRL, which is televised globally by ESPN and other networks.
  • Courses take place in complex locations: stadiums, abandoned malls, and historical buildings.
• Skill Transfer from the Mountains: Their training in challenging mountain terrain gives them a competitive edge on intricate racecourses, helping Jet (Jordan) become the 2017 world champion.
  • “Jet finds another gear. He beats Gab in the U turn. He takes it. Jet wins it all.” – DRL Announcer (13:27)
• Financial Realities: It’s difficult to make a living solely from prize winnings. Contracts for appearances and filming are the main source of income.
  • “Where’s the money? There’s not much right now. There’s a little bit here and there, so you got to sort of fight for it and scrape by.” – Zachary Thayer (14:09)

The Future of Drone Racing

• A Sport for All Ages: New, younger competitors are beginning to outpace veterans, illustrating how rapidly the sport is evolving.
  • “There are these guys who live in places like Indiana and all they do is practice every single day and they’re getting incredibly fast and precise.” – Travis McIntyre (14:53)
• Fusion of Passion and Work: Ian Frazier concludes with a parallel to a Robert Frost poem about uniting one’s calling with their passion, echoing the racers’ devotion to their craft.
  • “My object in living is to unite my avocation with my vocation, as my two eyes are one in sight only where love and need are one, and the work is play for mortal stakes.” – Robert Frost, quoted by Ian Frazier (15:16)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Immersion:
  "You’re so engulfed in just being that drone, right?" – Travis McIntyre (09:45)

• On the Sensation of Flying:
  "It’s mostly like what flying in a dream feels like. Only I’ve never had a dream in which I did a loop de loop or anything." – Ian Frazier (09:50)

• On Adrenaline and Safety:
  "Worst case, I crash and break a twenty dollar motor." – Travis McIntyre (10:13)

• On Blurring Professional Lines:
  "My object in living is to unite my avocation with my vocation..." – Robert Frost, via Ian Frazier (15:16)

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Notable Segment Timestamps

• [01:30] – Ian Frazier describes the early drone racing scene.
• [03:40] – Inside the racers’ Fort Collins house and their commitment to the craft.
• [05:34] – Designing specialized drones for mountain flying.
• [06:47–09:45] – Ian Frazier experiences first person drone flight.
• [10:13] – The crossover of extreme sports and drone pilots.
• [11:04] – The challenge of describing drone racing as a profession.
• [12:50] – The unique setups and international scope of DRL events.
• [13:27] – Jet wins the 2017 DRL championship finals.
• [14:09] – Realistic economics of pro drone racing.
• [15:16] – Poetic reflection on combining work and passion.

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Conclusion

This episode underlines how drone racing blurs the lines between hobby, sport, and profession, creating a unique subculture rooted in technology, adrenaline, and camaraderie. Against the backdrop of evolving competitive landscapes, the racers live in pursuit of exhilaration and mastery, embodying the challenge of uniting one's deepest passions with their daily labor.

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For further reading: Find Ian Frazier’s written piece about drone racing (and more) at newyorker.com.

Transcript

[Ian Fraser]

Floor 38.

[Zachary Thayer]

These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent.

[Ian Fraser]

And I think it'd be interesting to really try to unravel what his ties.

[Zachary Thayer]

There's this sort of country city divide.

[Travis McIntyre]

They're unconvenient ends, and it's not clear.

[Ian Fraser]

Where it goes next.

[Host]

From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

[David Remnick]

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, here's a litmus test of a certain kind. If I just say the word drone, do you imagine an unmanned plane dropping bombs on a remote village? A little Amazon robot delivering your packages within hours? Or a Christmas present that was lost or broken well before New Year's Eve? Drones, in fact, are proliferating at an incredible rate. And one sign of that is a new class of drone pilots. They're not amateurs, and they're not military either. They're drone racers flying specialty vehicles designed for speed, and I do mean speed. One of those Little drones with four propellers reached about 180 miles an hour in a trial, and so we asked staff writer Ian Fraser to take a look at the sport. And one of his first stops was something billed as the Drone National Championships. This was back in 2016.

[Zachary Thayer]

2016 US drilling nationals. Thank you to all of our local corporate and national partners, and we'll get to you in just a little bit as we make history.

[Ian Fraser]

It was one of those things that happen early on in the development of a sport, I guess, in that it was not really very well thought out.

[Drone Racing League Announcer]

Pilot's goggles down. Arm your co. Arm your copters. We are on the tone in less than five.

[Ian Fraser]

You couldn't really tell who was in first and who was in second because drones are small and drones can go really fast. 80 miles an hour is a kind of regular speed. When maneuvering gets complicated, they may go down to 60 miles an hour. It was hard to follow, but in the course of it, there were two pilots who I knew about. Anub is Zachary Thayer. That was his racing name. And jet is Jordan Tempkin. Zach won both the race and also the freestyle competition, so he came away with 12,000 bucks. I did follow them starting at that point because they were really exciting and really good racers. And then I found out that they shared a house out in Fort Collins, Colorado. And they were also. There was a third drone guy named Travis. So I went out and visited them.

[Travis McIntyre]

And I have Travis.

[Ian Fraser]

How's it Going all right.

[Travis McIntyre]

Yeah. Welcome.

[Ian Fraser]

I am Travis McIntyre.

[Zachary Thayer]

And I'm Zachary Thayer.

[Travis McIntyre]

So, yeah, we live just outside of Fort Collins on a little one acre property. It's pretty much just a house that us three live in. And all we do is drone things.

[Zachary Thayer]

Has sweet lacy curtains, too.

[Travis McIntyre]

They're not really our style, but.

[Zachary Thayer]

No, they're our style now, man.

[Ian Fraser]

Jordan and Zach are both 26. Travis is 31. He does not race competitively very often, although he does sometimes. And this is just a, you know, I think maybe two, three bedroom ranch house in a suburban development. They moved there, they said, in order to become better drone pilots. And they succeeded, which is kind of great.

[Travis McIntyre]

But. Yeah, first thing that you pretty much see when you walk in the door is this giant wall of trophies.

[Zachary Thayer]

Yeah. California, Arizona, Dubai, New York. Man, lots of places.

[Travis McIntyre]

Yeah.

[Ian Fraser]

Well, they do travel a lot. And these trophies are from all these different places where they've raced and placed.

[Travis McIntyre]

And then there's more drones in the kitchen. Oh, yeah. And more drone chargers and laptops and.

[Zachary Thayer]

More controllers and more batteries.

[Ian Fraser]

And there's the basement. And the basement is. It was a workshop, so our drone.

[Travis McIntyre]

Basement is a bit of chaos, but.

[Ian Fraser]

Oh, man, this is just amazing.

[Travis McIntyre]

You got a little video.

[Ian Fraser]

This is really incredible. This is like a drone fleet. This is just.

[Travis McIntyre]

This is mostly stuff that doesn't really ever fly anymore. So these are like relatives don't fly anymore?

[T.C. Boyle]

No.

[Travis McIntyre]

So these work. We just never fly them.

[Zachary Thayer]

We went through a lot of crap.

[Ian Fraser]

I thought, you know, the Wright brothers would have recognized this. This would have been like their bicycle shop. You know, they're doing all kinds of different things in this rather familiar place. I mean, what's more familiar than a basement of a ranch house? They have all kinds of equipment for soldering cables and plastic milk crates with all kinds of stuff in them. 15 or 20 along one wall that are mostly propellers.

[Zachary Thayer]

Imagine an entire Amazon truck just rolled over in your house. And they're all full of props.

[Ian Fraser]

They have a lot of different drones, but there's one drone frame that they have manufactured themselves. So basically, this is a foot square.

[Travis McIntyre]

Yeah.

[Ian Fraser]

But the shape is. It's like a cross. It's like. And this is a quad. I mean, that would be the term.

[Travis McIntyre]

Yes. So quad for motors.

[Zachary Thayer]

We don't necessarily design for everyone else. We design for what we need. A recent goal we've been working on for a while is we want something that's better for mountains, something that's a little bit faster and maybe can fly a little longer, because mountains are Deceivingly large. They're gonna be a 2,000 foot cliff over there, and we'll be up to the top, you know, in a matter of seconds. Without, you know, requires a lot of energy and different stuff. So we've been trying to perfect the mountain cruiser formula for a while.

[Ian Fraser]

I think usually that's the one that they're flying when they're just out practicing. They practice up in the Cache La Poudre Canyon, northwest of Fort Collins. It's a drive, a short drive from Fort Collins. Yeah, it's in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. And so they go up this road up into the canyon, and there are a lot of pullouts along the road.

[Travis McIntyre]

So this is what we do. We pull off on the side of.

[Ian Fraser]

The road.

[Travis McIntyre]

Jump out.

[Ian Fraser]

The first place we stopped, we were against a cliff wall, and the road is next to us, and then the river's on the other side, and you have the drone at your feet. And then the drone just goes. And just goes right straight up out of sight.

[Travis McIntyre]

See how fast this thing goes?

[Ian Fraser]

The pilot is wearing goggles which are exclusively the feed from the camera on the drone. So you lose yourself in it.

[Travis McIntyre]

So like Travis, right now, he's just an empty carcass of a body standing there, and his consciousness is somewhere flying around this mountain.

[Ian Fraser]

You can set yourself challenges, like how close can you fly to the Kashlipudra River? I mean, they're dodging rocks in the river, and it trains them, and it's good for reflexes, and it's good for a sense of the drone's capabilities and how close you can get to something and what you have to look out for. The wind was knocking me around real good up there.

[Travis McIntyre]

You wanna go for a ride?

[Ian Fraser]

Okay. They brought along extra goggles so I could just watch the feedback.

[Travis McIntyre]

You might want to sit here.

[Ian Fraser]

Better to sit than the stand, you think? Yes, but I'm already feeling a little nervous about this.

[Travis McIntyre]

And take the goggles off at any time you feel nauseous.

[Ian Fraser]

Okay. Okay. You don't think you're gonna react, but it's impossible. Okay, but I just saw that car go by, so.

[Travis McIntyre]

Yes, you did. That car did go by. Okay, so it's not virtual reality. It is streaming reality. Right. You are just transforming, transplanted somewhere else.

[Ian Fraser]

Okay. Oh, my gosh. Whoa. So I'm now right on top of that ridge that's on the other side, and I'm looking down on all these spires and things. Okay. Okay. Now I'm going along the river now. I went by that big spot that's sticking out there, and I go right down by that spire. And now I'm coming down the road and I'm going over the river, man. I'm going over the river. Okay. And this is the fastest I've ever gone over a river.

[Travis McIntyre]

It's exhilarating, huh?

[Ian Fraser]

It's exhilarating. I mean, it just absolutely gets your entire body wired. It's just everything, everything. I mean, you feel it. I mean, you feel it in your toes and your knees and everything. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Was that. Did you just flip it over there?

[Travis McIntyre]

Yeah.

[Ian Fraser]

Whoa. You feel like you're about to die. I found it necessary to hold on to the car tightly so that I did have some tactile grounding in actual physical reality.

[Travis McIntyre]

Whoa.

[Ian Fraser]

It is really strange. Ah, yeah. It feels like you're flying it and.

[Travis McIntyre]

You'Re so engulfed in just being that drone, right?

[Ian Fraser]

There's no feeling of your own self. It's mostly like what flying in a dream feels like. Only I've never had a dream in which I did a loop de loop or anything. You know, like spun around and we can't stop flying. So, yeah.

[Travis McIntyre]

A lot of the people who fly are ex adrenaline junkies. So, like skateboarder, I'm a skier. Zach came from a motocross background. We know a lot of people from motorcycle. You know, they had a bad motorcycle accident and this is their outlet to getting this sensation of, I'm going 100 miles an hour an inch from the ground, and it's thrilling. And worst case, I crash and I break a twenty dollar motor.

[Ian Fraser]

So if you meet somebody just at a party or on the street and they ask you what you do, what do you say you do?

[Travis McIntyre]

So that's actually this question that I've been struggling with myself.

[Zachary Thayer]

I sort of chuckle and say I'm a professional drone racer because it doesn't seem like I should be able to say that or that it's real.

[Ian Fraser]

That's cool.

[Travis McIntyre]

That's still something that's really hard for me to say to somebody. Um, like for example, when I bought my car a month ago and I was looking for car insurance, right? They're like, what is your profession? And I went, well, I don't know. And one guy put down artist and one guy put down entertainer. And I said, all right, entertainer. Because I'm on tv, you know, that, that works. Eight of the best from the whole year.

[Ian Fraser]

The best pilots in the world.

[Zachary Thayer]

I'm here to win.

[Ian Fraser]

I can be the best. And that's why I'm here to prove it.

[Drone Racing League Announcer]

This is Throne Racing, this drl, the Drone Racing League.

[Ian Fraser]

Jordan and Zach are pilots who have contracts with a company called drl, which stands for Drone Racing League. And it packages these races as programs that are shown on ESPN and on other sports networks in 75 countries.

[Drone Racing League Announcer]

In fact, main event, Heat 7.

[Ian Fraser]

Jordan races under the name of Jet. Zach races under the name of Anoob. The race courses are in places where there are opportunities for obstacles, for complicated courses. Miami Dolphins Stadium, for example, they've raced in an abandoned mall. And last year's finals were in Alexandra palace in London.

[Drone Racing League Announcer]

Next is Palm Court and the Gravity Gate Ascent. Gab, Willie, Jack, Anu.

[Ian Fraser]

It isn't just a race on one plane. You have to go on this side of a gate, you have to go through that gate, you have to go over to that side of that obstacle. You then go up and the one race that they had at the Alexander palace, there was a loop de loop going right straight up. And I think that the fact that Jordan and Zach spend so much time in the mountains made them particularly able to deal with that type of a course and help Jordan to win.

[Drone Racing League Announcer]

Jet finds another gear. He beats Gab in the U turn. He takes it. Jett wins it all. Jack, is your 2017 world champion?

[Ian Fraser]

Blown away, Greg.

[Travis McIntyre]

That may have been the greatest pass.

[Ian Fraser]

In drone racing history. I've always wondered what happened to, oh, giant checks. Giant checks. You have a stack of giant checks?

[Travis McIntyre]

Yeah, we got more on the walls.

[Ian Fraser]

He won a contract for the next year and it's a, I guess six figure contract.

[Travis McIntyre]

So he's broke. He's almost broke. And then I have some money. That's kind of the way it is right now.

[Zachary Thayer]

But last year I did. It's really weird. You can either make money off prizes, which is almost. No one does that. Very few people. I was able to do that last year, which was really nice. This year it's sort of DRL pays us for a time filming with them. Where's the money? There's not much right now. There's a little bit here and there, so you got to sort of fight for it and scrape by.

[Ian Fraser]

Zach and Jordan guess that they're probably about 50 pro drone racers in the world. But a lot of people are taking up the sport.

[Zachary Thayer]

But you know, now there's a bunch of 16 year olds and 12 year olds getting into it and starting to kick our butts around every now and then. But we're still pretty competitive.

[Travis McIntyre]

I'm starting to fall behind a little bit, because there are these guys who live in places like Indiana and all they do is race practice every single day and they're getting incredibly fast and incredibly precise. And if I want to be competitive, I can't just be flippy floppy ing in the mountains all day long.

[Ian Fraser]

I mean, it is a life that you get up, you talk about what you want to do and you go out and do has to be fun and it has to be disciplined at the same time. And there's a great part of a poem by Robert Frost, and at the end of it he's explaining how in his own life he does not like to take the professional and the fun and separate them, he says, but yield who will to their separation. My object in living is to unite my avocation with my vocation, as my two eyes are one in sight only where love and need are one, and the work is play for mortal stakes. Is the deed ever really done for heaven and the future's sakes?

[David Remnick]

New Yorker staff writer Ian Fraser. You can find his piece on drone racing and everything that he's written for us, a range of subjects that really boggles the [e-mail] now we're going to close the show with the writer T.C. boyle. Tom Boyle is a novelist and he's written stories and essays for the magazine going back to 1993. That, by coincidence, was right around the time he took up residence in Montecito, California. The town seemed almost like Eden to him then. But Boyle and millions of other Californians have just lived through back to back natural disasters, capping a year of weather related calamities around the country. Tom Boyle wrote about returning home to Montecito a few weeks after the mudslides there.

[T.C. Boyle]

The eerie thing about those first nights back in Montecito after the mudslides had to do with absence. The absence, first of all, of my neighbors, almost all of whom were under a mandatory evacuation order. They were gone, their houses dark, their cars rolling down other streets altogether. Most homes were without electricity, which brought the darkness close and the stillness, too, apart from the sounds of nature, the muffled hoots of the owls come to nest in the woods out back of my house, and the chirrup of the tree frogs enlivened by the first rain here in nearly a year. There was the delicate, almost apologetic beeping of the heavy equipment brought in to clear away the debris. The helicopters were, for the most part, gone, the survivors airlifted to safety, and the search for the missing left to the cadaver dogs. I moved here 25 years ago, attracted by the natural beauty and semi rural ambiance, the short walk to the beach in the Lower Village and the enveloping views of the Santa Ynes Mountains. We have no sidewalks here. If we want sidewalks we can take the five minute drive into Santa Barbara. But we don't want sidewalks. We want dirt, trees, flowers, the chaparral that did its best to green the slopes and declivities of the mountains until last month when the biggest wildfire in California history reduced it all to ash. On the apocalyptic morning of December 16, I was on the roof wearing a surgical mask and wielding a garden hose when a great black cape of smoke enveloped all of Montecito and whitened everything with ash until you might have mistaken it for snow. At 10:30 the police were at the gate enforcing the newly imposed mandatory evacuation order, and I drove up the coast to rejoin my wife, my daughter, and our coddled and oblivious pets. In all, we were stuck in a motel room for 10 days until the order was rescinded and we were able to return home just in time for Christmas. Rain was forecast for the early morning hours of Tuesday, January 9th, and it was expected to be heavy at times very heavy. I welcomed the rain, which came on Monday night, as a long, gentle, misting sacrament that just barely dampened the streets and shimmered in the leaves of the trees. Feeling celebratory, I walked down to my favorite watering hole in the Lower village, and though I barely needed an umbrella, I carried one with me anyway, mindful of the forecast. The rain awoke my wife and me at 3:30 the next morning, an intense hammering rain that seemed to explode all around us. The sky was brightly lit to the north where the mountains lie. What was it? Lightning, I reasoned, and then my head was on the pillow and I was asleep. As I was later to discover, the concentrated rain propelled the debris flow down the slopes of the denuded mountains. A gas main had been sheared off when the escaping methane had exploded in flames, incinerating the houses just below it, even as the debris flow tore into them and raged on past, gathering force and seeking the low ground. We woke to a gentle rain and the wail of sirens. Too many sirens, sirens that multiplied one atop the other and kept on multiplying till it seemed there was no other sound. Electricity was out. There was no newspaper. It wasn't until we drove into Santa Barbara for breakfast and news that we began to understand we were among the lucky ones. Our house, one of the oldest in the community, sits atop a hill at the bottom of which lies the stream bed of Montecito Creek. Through most of the year, the creek barely lives up to the name, but on that night it jumped its banks and swept to the sea, taking with it everything in its path. Houses vanished, trees were uprooted like weeds. Boulders taller than I pounded through the watercourses like the bowling balls of titans. A man who lived just down the street from us was killed, and his teenage son was swept three quarters of a mile down Olive Mill Road and across the freeway to the beach. All of this I learned secondhand through local and national news sources. It wasn't until the sixth day after the storm that I had an opportunity to tour the devastated areas and see the effects for myself. At the bottom of my street there was a remnant riverbed. In the place where once had stood houses I'd seen every day for 25 years, mudflats stretched off into the distance. In her essay the Wreck of Time, Annie Dillard speaks of compassion fatigue in a world in which catastrophe and annihilation come as regularly as the progression of the days. Her point of reference was the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh, which killed 138,000 people and displaced millions. How can we begin to comprehend the magnitude of that, let alone sympathize? These are just figures, digits, symbols on a page. We each inhabit a consciousness, and that consciousness gives us the world and what we can grasp for the apprehension of our five senses. But the universe has no consciousness. It just is. 21 of my neighbors are dead. Two are missing. That probably doesn't mean much to the rest of the world or for that matter, to you. For me, though, it's personal and I want my village back.

[Ian Fraser]

T.C.

[David Remnick]

Boyle. You can read more of his work, fiction and nonfiction, @new yorker.com this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick and thank you for joining us today. I hope you'll join us next week.

[Host]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Toon Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby Kalalea, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Mytha Lee Rao and Steven Valentino, with help from Terence Bernardo, Corey Schreppel, Emily Mann, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.