Pearl Lam (林明珠): Hello, this is Pearl Lam Podcast. I am in LA. I am in LA and sitting beside this really young entrepreneur, Henry Elkus and really delighted to get him on this podcast. After I last had dinner with him, I called the hostess and said I must get him onto this podcast. Henry, please tell us about your journey, and about Helena.

Henry Elkus: Well, it’s always great to speak with you and I always enjoy hanging out with you, so thank you for doing this with me. I’m Henry Elkus, I’m the founder and CEO of Helena. The organisation’s goal is to be a problem-solving institution, which is a very grand and.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): How old are you, Henry?

Henry Elkus: I’m 29.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): 29 And when did you start Helena?

Henry Elkus: Started at sophomore year of college. I was at Yale, and came out of the dorm room at Yale.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Continue, please.

Henry Elkus: So nine years in, we have a portfolio of individual projects where the goal is very simple, identify solutions to very important societal problems, do due diligence, which is always very hard to figure out whether the project has a chance at success, whether it should be implemented on a moral and ethical level. And then the Step 3 is actually implementation, which is the hard part. And we now have built a portfolio of these projects in three areas. The first is business, so we’re investors and we’re building businesses. The second is through nonprofit projects, because sometimes the best way to implement a solution is not to make money. And in fact, making money from it is actually going to corrupt the incentive structure. And then the third is actually legislation both nationally and internationally. And we’re generalists, so our projects have spanned from investing in nuclear fusion to address the energy crisis.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Nuclear fusion?

Henry Elkus: Which we can get into all the way to alternatives for plastics, Styrofoam, all the way to nonprofit projects to protect the electrical grid from the many threats that it faces to depolarization projects. And so, but the main thing that we’re trying to do over time is I want to run this the rest of my life and hand it off. I want to build something that’s a very long-term institution and to go into why we’re doing this.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): At the age of 20 years old, you started Helena. At the age of 20 years old, you should be partying and going to nightclubs. I mean, this is incredible.

Henry Elkus: Well, I think there’s a, I think there’s a reason why people when they’re very young, take on very ambitious things, which is delusion. And I think if I had known the challenges that we would face and how hard this was, it would have been very different of a decision. But when you’re, when you’re that age, I think there’s a huge amount of benefit to your outlook on the world. And, and what, what do you think is possible? It’s actually it’s a much more simple world because you don’t know what you’re going to face.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): I wouldn’t use the word delusion but fearless because you don’t know the obstacles, so you became fearless.

Henry Elkus: Somebody very famous said this quote, but the to pretend that you have courage is actually just to have courage, right? To fake it, to fake courage actually means that you’re as long because as long as you’re actually doing it. So I, you know, I think I made I and we, because we have an amazing team now, made every mistake under the book. We embarrassed ourselves. We’ve done, you know, a lot of different things, but it was such an amazing education to go through over the last now decade and I think the next decade for us is going to be amazing as well.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Can you simply tell your how you start Helena and then you drop out from Yale and just to focus in and in doing Helena so, but at 20 years old drop out. What did your parents say? I mean, are you crazy dropping out from from university and doing something? Helena is an NGO. You’re not making a living.

Henry Elkus: So but we are. But we now have a for…

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Of course, of course, (at the time that I I just started), at the time under 20 years old, they would say, what are you doing? How do you persuade your parents?

Henry Elkus: Well, I’ll answer why. Yeah, why we started first. I was, I think it was a combination of very selfish and practical things with a more grandiose set of ideals. I was, you know, sophomore year at Yale. It’s a very competitive environment. And your friends start looking at internships. That’s the first thing they think is you work so hard to get into this amazing university. What am I going to do next? And I would, I think, observe my friends and their, shall we say, mental model of what they want to do with their life. And what scared me was, was how quickly it jumped from while I’m at Yale, I need to go to Goldman or I need to go do this as the, and there’s very real reasons for that, which I deeply respect. But it scared me a lot because I, I said I don’t want to make a blind decision to jump into a career. So that got me to start really thinking in a, in a very kind of low pressure way. If I had all the resources in the world, if I could do whatever I want, what would I actually want to do? And this is also at the time where you have your kind of like 1/5 life crisis when you’re 20 and you kind of start thinking these existential thoughts. And what was really concerning to me was, you know, again, I’d be very open the kind of the male ego of of I want to do something important in the world when you.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Change the world.

Henry Elkus: While I was reading history at Yale and when you, when you study history in very long time spans, it, it’s very clear that there’s a very small number of things that actually matter every 100 years. Like when the 21st century will be written by historians in the 23rd century. We’re not going to be talking about all these small, you know, kind of technologies and things. We’re going to be talking about AI. We’re going to be talking about biology.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Biotech.

Henry Elkus: Biotech and there there’s a very small number. So I want to be involved in those things and that got me to say, OK, how, how can I be involved in those things? And there’s a set of organisations that we rely on as a society to solve major, major issues. So I started to study those organisations and there was something that was really, really powerful to me about what, what I kind of learned just from, again, a very kind of delusional and very kind of first principles, low information environment, which is we are undergoing an extraordinarily radical shift in the world right now in which starting with the Manhattan Project, when we created the nuclear weapon, we are creating exponential technologies, some of which have the capacity to destroy the world. (Wow) Starting with nuclear weapons. But now we’re doing like 20 of these Manhattan Projects at once. We’re doing it in biology and in energy. So this is happening. So then the organisations that we’ve set up and relied upon these institutions to solve these problems, that should actually be helping further these further humanity’s response to these technologies.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah.  

Henry Elkus: They were often built hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And so the structure of these organisations, even though they were extraordinarily well-intentioned, most of them are actually quite archaic and they’re decaying. And so I’m sitting there at a young age and going, OK, there’s actually an extraordinary opportunity, but one that has very high stakes, which is instead of just working on one technology or one thing, what if I could actually build an institution that did something at a more broad level, What if I could build something that was actually native to the way the 21st century worked, that actually tries to improve upon or actually just start something afresh? So the question I asked myself is if there was going to be a successful problem solving organisation that was actually native to the 21st century and what modalities we’re going to see and what movements we’re going to see, what would that look like? So I started studying the structures of all these organisations over the last couple, 100 years. Some of them were NGOs, some of them were think tanks, some of them were capitalist institutions, so large funds, sovereign wealth funds and try to think about what was right about them, what was wrong, what were their incentives. And so, from that I kind of challenged myself and said you.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Did a case study.

Henry Elkus: Of yeah. And again, I had the benefit of standing on the shoulders of hundreds and hundreds of years, if not more of people that have tried to solve this problem. And it’s not really their fault, obviously, because a lot of these institutions, how could you possibly know 500 years before that something like AI would occur, right? So that was what ended up becoming Helena, which ended up being a very simple structure, which is just build an organisation that can do the following things. Step one, be really world class if possible at attracting the best ideas that could solve important problems of any type, businesses, nonprofits. Step 2, somehow be able to do the due diligence, somehow be able to ascertain whether these ideas should be implemented or not. And for that you need a lot of expertise. And then Step 3, have the operational capability of actually manifesting these projects, whether it’s putting capital towards them, whether it’s actually running them. So I wanted to build that whole thing. And the more and more I’ve kind of built this organisation, the more I’ve realised this is a more than a lifetime of work, that we’re at the very, very beginning of this. And it’s very humbling because we’ve barely scratched the service of, of, of impact. I think what we’ve done is is great so far, but we we have so much more to do.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): But when you start it, you need capital and you drop out from Yale and what do your parents say then? How do you raise money? And how do you get your get people to trust you, to believe in you, to work together with you?

Henry Elkus: So it was, it was the was the mother of chicken and egg problems. Because if you think about the organisations that do what Helena does, they usually start with a huge endowment or they’re a Family Foundation or they’re a Family Office where they start with a large amount of money and then they allocate that capital. But when you start without that, you have to build that up. And so, what we did was.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): When you say we, who is we?

Henry Elkus: Yeah, myself and then my team that we’ve now built and my Sam Feinberg, who dropped out of school with me and he’s been.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): So, so the both of you drop out and the both of you were working together the team.

Henry Elkus: Yes. And so the problem that we had to solve was how do we get the resources to do this?

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yes, exactly.

Henry Elkus: So this is what we did. We had this idea of let’s create a membership, Let’s create a membership of people 1st and somehow let’s try to, this is crazy, but let’s try to convince some of the top leaders across disciplines in industry, but also in the arts, the sciences to join our organisation. And the idea there was very simple, which is people represent those resources. People represent capital, they represent political will, they represent political capital, they represent expertise, they represent all the things that we would need to have. And so instead of trying to raise the capital, I actually said, what if we first get the people and then put them in some sort of system in which they want to be there? And so the idea was actually to do the complete inverse of a Davos or a Ted in which we don’t charge them anything, but we somehow try to convince these people to join. So in the dorm room, what I did is I is I wrote out and researched thousands of these people and just emailed them cold. And I, my thinking was I have the yale.edu e-mail address from a student. So maybe they’ll see the Yale address and then, and then want to join. And I wrote these hilarious emails that I cringe when I look at them basically saying I’m a student at Yale and I have this vision to create an organisation that does this. And, and I really am trying to build this network first. And then I’m going to work with the members once they come in to then work on the projects and do the projects. And obviously when you’re pitch that there’s an advantage from pitching it from a young person, which is that it’s, it’s, yeah.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): People want to support.

Henry Elkus: You, yeah, they want to support you, but I think the the reality is it is an incredibly infeasible idea when there’s no track record. So we got absolutely nearly no responses, but you only need one.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): One person again.

Henry Elkus: One and the first person that joined was Myron Scholes, who I’m eternally grateful for. Myron won the Nobel Prize in Economics and we were able to then leverage.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): He just I mean respond to your letter.

Henry Elkus: It took a while. We had to communicate with him a lot and tell him about the vision and all of that and it wasn’t easy. But once we had that, we were able to then get two or more.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because you have one.

Henry Elkus: Yeah. And So what we were very skilled at was getting making bets on younger leaders who represented technologies that older leaders or people have more advanced age who already ran and very important institutions wanted to hear about. So some of the younger Helena members were innovating in in AI and cryptocurrency and all these areas that at the time and still are, are very, very important, very new technologies that people didn’t understand that well. And so there was a huge desire from the members that are the four-star generals in the military or the running large institutions to actually use Helena as a way to communicate with them. So for the first year, we raised no money. We didn’t do any projects. We actually just ran this group, but we did it in the complete inverse of a networking group. There was no monetization of it. We never asked anybody for money and we just said, let’s run this where you tell me exactly what you want to do during the next couple years of your life. And then when you go to sleep at night, every night and you worry you’re not going to achieve that, why? And when you ask that question to a billionaire or somebody running a large institution, it’s usually not I need more money. It’s usually, hey, there’s this specific discipline that I don’t have access to or there’s a specific idea I want to learn more about. And so I would find the other person in our network that we could bring and I would set them up and we would and still do this. We wouldn’t just make an introduction. We would host the meeting, take all the notes and then do the follow up. So we wanted to become indispensable to this group. And so after a year of building this group of people up, we were then able to use these meetings to generate the ideas that later became the projects. And that’s how we started the organisation into the operational side. Then we did five years of these nonprofit projects. Then we started the parallel for profit and started investing.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): When you say parallel per profit, how?

Henry Elkus: Well, we started Helena and it was just the members and that was the first chapter. Then we started to do a couple of these nonprofit projects that I can tell you about in in carbon capture. So taking carbon dioxide out of the air, sequestering it, storing it underground and building an industry there, protecting the electrical grid, which was an electric legislative project we did. And then America in One Room which we can talk about. So we build a portfolio of these nonprofit projects and we raised, you know, 10s of millions of dollars. This was over a 5 year period. Once we built that track record, we then said, you know, our vision has always been to have not just legislative and nonprofit, but we do need to interact with the business community. And so then we we launched with some seed capital that we raised the for profit investment side of Helena, which does the same thing. It just invests in projects and builds companies that are addressing critical societal issues.

Pearl Lam: I just read about your America in One Room talking about the deliberative democracy, which is really interesting because today we are talking about American election and you are trying to address and get and get to know what Americans want. So can you briefly tell us about this? Because how do you get the sampling of 500 and you spend four days? I thought, wow, at the at your age at 20 something you can do things like it’s wild.

Henry Elkus: Well, it wasn’t just me. It it took an incredible group of people to do.

Pearl Lam: And you were working with Stanford University, right?

Henry Elkus: Yeah, so I’ll tell you the story. I was one of the Helena members. His name is Nicholas Berggruen.

Pearl Lam: Oh, I know, Nick, Yes.

Henry Elkus: He’s an amazing guy and I’m very grateful for him and, and his introductions and the work that we’ve done with him and through him. I was, I went to one of his amazing philosophy galas where he gives away $1,000,000 a year, kind of like the Nobel Prize for philosophy. And I sat next to somebody who later became a Helena member named James Fishkin, who runs is one of the two leaders of the Stanford Centre for Deliberative Democracy. And he sat next to me during this dinner and then kind of in this amazing mad scientist kind of way, unfurled to me what deliberative democracy is. And it’s this incredible idea which is a scientific way of selecting a group of people that is representative of a country. So could you get 500 plus people where that group of 500 on, on demographics, etcetera, etcetera are actually as representative as possible of the entire nation? And it turns out that there’s actually a long history of being able to do this in which you can actually put together a sample. And this has been done in 30 different countries over 100 different times by Stanford. And so there’s this amazing track record of this. At the same time, we’re now dealing with some of the worst polarisation.

Pearl Lam: In this country, which is.

Henry Elkus: A huge limiting factor to doing anything. If you can’t communicate, you can’t make decisions, then you’re not going to be able to solve these problems. So I’ll just tell you a couple interesting things. There was a study that I find really interesting where they asked a million Americans what they thought of the Civic Affairs Act. And everybody had a very powerful opinion on this. I said I either like it or I don’t like it. So they did this poll and they asked him what they what they thought. But the Civic Affairs Act doesn’t exist.

Pearl Lam: OK.

Henry Elkus: So it’s an example of how polling, which is understanding what the will of the people is, which is what the founding fathers of America and kind of the underpinning of democracy is understanding what the people want and then making decisions based upon that. But the normal way that we do polling has so many flaws. So there’s a huge need to actually have a better system of understanding what the will of the people is. That is especially accentuated in today’s kind of media age in which everything is manipulated. So that was a very clear need. And then when we heard about what Stanford was doing with the Deliberative Democracy Centre, what the track record was that generated this really profound and kind of crazy idea, which is what if we could put all of America representatively in one room? What if we could actually select a sample of people that represented the entire country of voters? And so we actually did it. We raised the money and we did a project. We had these amazing partners we did with Helena and Stanford, James Fishkin and Larry Diamond and others. It was in 2019 and there was two groups. There was the group of 500 plus people. I think it’s about 535 people. And then there was a control group of also 500 people that didn’t go to the event.

Pearl Lam: OK, control group.

Henry Elkus: So here’s what we did. We bought out the largest hotel in Texas. It’s this giant hotel called the Gaylord Texan Hotel, and it’s just like this mall. It’s enormous. And we kicked everybody out, and then we flew in, all 535 people. So we actually put America into one room. And they spent three straight days with each other. Before they arrived, they did an extensive poll about what their incoming views were on the five most important issues facing the country for the election. So what are your views on immigration in these areas? What are your views on foreign policy? So we got their starting value. Then what they did for the next three days is they spent 8 hours in small groups talking over and over and over again debating these issues. And they had fact checkers. They had a full briefing document with the best arguments from both sides. I can get into the architecture of how that works. And at the end of those eight hours, we had everybody converge to one room. We had America in One Room. And the photos are just wonderful. It was the most diverse room, I think statistically in American history. If you think about it, it was this ballroom in Texas where and then they would actually ask questions to the presidential candidates or to experts that represented those views. So they did this for three straight days. And it was obviously on a data level, this magical thing. But it was also this huge moment in which during this incredibly polarised time, nobody fought. No, you know, people were extremely, they were passionate, but they, they cared about each other. So then we gave them the same poll. Remember there was a poll at the beginning. We gave them the same poll at the end of the three days. And their views have radically changed over those three days. And this is not us saying this. We had the New York Times, you know, we had, we had an incredible amount of press coverage that we gave open kimono all of the data to, to say this is our methodology, this is how we’re doing it. And the results were endorsed by both the right and the left. And what we saw was up to 50% changes in people’s political views over these three days. And the stories are absolutely incredible. For example, I met a woman who was in a abusive marriage and she was just wasn’t allowed to talk about politics. Her husband would beat her and she had this opportunity to come to this event without her husband there and she for the first time she was able to even discuss these issues and she was able to actually realise what she believed. There’s also somebody very like this, the funny story where we had to milk somebody’s cow because somebody was in a farm and they I’ll go to the event but I’m going to be 3 days away. And so we just set these things up which were really interesting. So this was became a real sensation in the media because it was this the New York Times did portraits of all 500 plus people and they put on the cover and Obama tweeted it out. And so it was two things. The first is it was this data that showed that Americans actually agree so much more than the media says they do. There was no cell phones, the no social media. It was just human to human like we’re talking now. But then the second thing was just the spectacle of of democracy actually working. And of course, it was in a vacuum. It was in a it was in a very controlled environment. But here’s one thing that’s interesting. The New York Times surprised us about a year later and without our permission, which is totally their right, they went and they polled the same group of people, but in their hometowns because a year had passed. And the the thinking is obvious, which is you go to this amazing three day. You have these major changes, but then you come back to your hometown.

Pearl Lam: You will flip back.

Henry Elkus: You flip back, but they didn’t. That’s the interesting thing is in the follow up study, we showed a remarkable amount of stickiness in their opinions. And what happened was these people became celebrities in their hometown. They wrote op eds, they went on local television and I’m still in contact with a lot of them now even five years later. So the magic of this is actually that it’s, it’s not just a transformational experience for these folks in that room, but they bring it back to their hometowns and it spreads. And so Stanford, for example, has now done this in high schools across the country. And we’ve now done multiple of these America in One Rooms. The one that we just did finished about a month or two ago and it was just on first time voters. So we’ve built this kind of this this kind of project that we’ve now done many different times, all about bringing together a scientifically representative sample of the country and then to understand what the will of the people is. And then to get that to politicians and get that to elected officials and institutions so they can make decisions based upon it.

Pearl Lam: But you are saying that the will of the people, even when they return back home, it hasn’t changed.

Henry Elkus: To be as accurate as possible, there of course are some.

Pearl Lam: Changes of course. Of course. I mean in in general.

Henry Elkus: In general, there is a remarkable correlation to the data being very sticky to people actually keeping their opinions, but not just keeping them privately espousing them to their families.

Pearl Lam: Yes, of course you influence you. You start discussing about it. You know that. So, so who was the one who do? Who did all the Do you prepare all the questions, the topics and all that, and how did that come out?

Henry Elkus: So it was very important. First of all, we, we are not experts in political science anywhere close to what Stanford is. So there’s on that front. But number two it’s very important that we were able to show that Helena was not involved in anything that could manipulate the data because we’re an organisation has many different projects. So our role was to put the project together, the branding, raise the capital and orchestrate the effort. But Stanford has continuously has been an exceptional partner in in doing all of the political contents. And there’s really important thing. So you have to put together an advisory group that represents all political views on an issue. So if we’re talking about environment, we need somebody from a right leaning hedge fund think tank and then the left one. So that has to be put together and then there’s what they produce of these amazing briefing documents, these 55 page kind of papers that state all. And you know what’s interesting? A lot of people told us, you’re going to put everyday Americans in one room and you’re going to expect them to read this 55 page document, which is actually incredibly insulting to think about that. But what happened was everybody read it and everybody read it. These are people who they all sat down and they, they saw this event as a sacred and very important thing. And they read these documents end to end and incorporated into their ideas. And so the entire project was such an emotional experience for me. Because in your heart, you know, there’s this philosophical debate, are humans inherently good or evil? Rousseau versus Hobbes, right?

Pearl Lam: That’s the why, yeah.

Henry Elkus: Exactly, and my belief is humans are inherently good, but they can be manipulated by outside stimuli, social media, all this stuff. Because when you have a trillion dollar corporation that is using an algorithm to micro schedule in your brain, I’m going to show you this content, this content, it can manipulate people. And this is what we’ve seen throughout history. But my assumption was you can actually create an environment in which humans can talk to humans and they will actually respect and love each other and they will want to solve problems. And I think that was proven over and over and over again by this project. So now our question is, can we scale it up so that millions of people can go through this experience rather than just thousands?

Pearl Lam: And could this influence your your polling system as well?

Henry Elkus: So it’s a great question. I think if I had all the money in the world and I could do whatever, whatever I would like with the America in One Room Project, I would do one of these every month. So there would be a, and think about it, it would be like an Advisory Council for the American people.

Pearl Lam: It is, it is.

Henry Elkus: Is there would be a citizen group that is representative of the country that is consistently meeting? And my hope is that that would actually influence and hopefully to its logical extent, replace polling, because would you rather have a poll that just calls somebody?

Pearl Lam: Up at 3:00 AM in the morning.

Henry Elkus: But the issue is polls are accurate because they do get what people think. But if you ask somebody what they think about NAFTA and they haven’t spent three days talking to the world’s experts about NAFTA, they’re gonna have a different view once they do.

Pearl Lam: That of course, of course this is their view becomes result of all the communication and all what they are and.

Henry Elkus: This goes back to why Helena should exist and why there needs to be another type of institution to address large societal problems. We’re now in a world in which the complexity of the development of technology, the complexity of what’s happening, is so large that we need to provide as a service to the American people as much information in as pure of a way as possible for them to make the most important decisions of their lives when they vote.

Pearl Lam: Absolutely. Because you did mention about technology and also media that affects the world especially. I mean the last, I mean the last 100 years there’s a big change. But now we have technology and media. So how and how do you see with all that that affecting the world?

Henry Elkus: Well, you need media. I think it’s, it’s, it’s a double edged sword because it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s essential that there be a, a rigorous media that can educate the public that can, you know, use sunshine as a disinfectant, as they say. There’s an amazing quote from a founding father that if there was a choice between the perfect democracy and a perfect media, you would choose the perfect media because it always creates the perfect democracy. So you need to have an information system that provides.

Pearl Lam: But today do you consider that that is a great, I mean?

Henry Elkus: Of course not. And I think, you know, one of the big things that Helena and a lot of its members like Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin work on is how can social media companies, which I do think are led by people that have good hearts.

Pearl Lam: Absolutely well-intentioned.

Henry Elkus: Well-intentioned people, but they’ve built something of such power that can influence people’s thinking in these subconscious ways. And we just never dealt with that as a species before. We’re not, we’re not designed, our brains are not designed to stand up to. And you see this with the suicidality rate, the mental health stuff with young people using social media. Because if you’re shown, for example, my mom was a ballerina, she was a dancer and I was having a conversation with her about this, you know, when she was 13, 14 years old, there was no social media. She was able to just focus on her craft and she was never comparing. But now if you’re a 13 year old ballerina, you go on TikTok or Instagram and you see the best 13 year old ballerina in the world, somebody who you will potentially never become as good at. That’s extraordinarily demoralising. And think about that manifest in every possible category. Our brains are not really meant to be subjected to that type of force. So it’s a very, you know, so when when you define media, then you say, okay, well, is that media or you know, is like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and the answer is both. Media is the the the data that that we are intaking.

Pearl Lam: But the problem today is your generation, your Gen Z and generation, you don’t even like to read long news. I mean, and if there’s coverage which is written very, very long, you just ignore it, even in the social media if there’s an interview, No. And so how do you think that, you know, why wouldn’t they just buy in social media news? Because it’s short, it’s to your face and there’s no due diligence. I’ve never seen any Gen Z would go and try and find out this is right or wrong so.

Henry Elkus: Why are people still addicted to opioids?

Pearl Lam: Yeah, yeah.

Henry Elkus: No, seriously, if you feed, if you feed an addictive drug to a population, they’re going to be addicted to it. It’s very simple. And so we’re feeding junk food. We’re feeding junk food and you can see this actually, the human attention span itself has decreased over the last 50.

Pearl Lam: Weeks. Exactly. You know the younger generation doesn’t have the attention span.

Henry Elkus: So I’ll tell you the probably the most, the most, the most meaningful thing I’ve done in my life is get extraordinarily into reading and reading books. I, I read constantly. And when I started to read books, you know, this is embarrassing to say, but I, I never really read in college. I always kind of be asked it, I would do just, just enough reading to go to the class, right. I never really sat down and had the joy of reading a great work, you know, a Tolstoy front to back or something of that nature. And when I started, Helena, I had a really formidable conversation with a friend of mine where he was kind of, you know, as friends do, being very directed me saying, look, you’re smart, but you’re not smart enough to deal with these people that you have in your membership. It’s amazing. You’ve got these people, but these are the experts in the world subject. You’re not smart enough to just hang with them. You need to really in a humble way, read at a very deep level about as much as you possibly can and make that a lifelong journey. And I started to do that. But to your point, when I started to read for the first time, just like anybody else my age, I was infected by social media too. And I still am. I still battle with it just like everybody else. It was extraordinarily challenging just to get through one page. But once you force yourself, your brain is a muscle and it becomes elastic. And you can then read longer and longer periods. And once you actually get into this understanding that you can you can actually read about the best ideas that humans have ever come up with for thousands and thousands of years. You can put that in your brain for free, essentially for free. It’s the most beautiful and wonderful thing. And that’s being deprived to a lot of people when their diet is really being weaponized in short form content. And I could speak about this. I’m very passionate about the.

Pearl Lam: Subject. But how can you, how can you as I mean in your organisation? Yeah. How can you create this initiative? And how could you encourage your generation to be more focused on books to read, to have to a better attention span to read through through long essays, articles, and also to have a mind that would do due diligence in everything that they read?

Henry Elkus: It’s.

Pearl Lam: It’s really pretty impossible.

Henry Elkus: It’s not impossible. I think you do have to acknowledge the challenge of that problem because you’re fighting against forces that are they’re growing in power every day.

Pearl Lam: Yes, exactly.

Henry Elkus: But I do think it’s doable. And if I were to guess, because I, I’ve thought about this for a very long time, I’m sure you’ve thought about for longer than I have, I think it has to do with using technology to best understand learning styles and then feed people great information in that style. So for me, for example, my ego is so you know, is if somebody tells me you have to read this when I was 18, 19 years, I would say fno, uck you. I don’t want to.

Pearl Lam: I cant understand.

Henry Elkus: But when you when you, when you go, well, I’m really curious about that thing. And you pick up the book and then you kind of without any pressure start reading it. You go, wait, this is very valuable. I want to keep doing this. And that was the magic that I got when I started to read. And that was very infectious. So that’s my learning style. There are other people that need to be told that you need to read this, then you need to read this, then you need to read this. And that actually jump starts them. So what I think 1 of this goes to AI, right? This will be perhaps the last technology that humans ever invent because every technology after that won’t be invented by humans, it’ll be invented by the AI. Is that when we are able to create a way of thinking artificially that can understand how the brain learns better than we currently understand it? I think then as an example, so, but it’s an incredible threat because AI based selection for media is one of the ways it’s it’s it’s the most powerful tool. You can point it one direction is very negative point, another direction is very.

Pearl Lam: Positive. So since we are talking about AI, the ethics of AII mean have you been researching and you know if you have, if you are using AI in a positive way, right, But what is the limitation? Did anybody think a bit beyond that?

Henry Elkus: Oh, of course. I mean, this is the, this is the most important question in the world perhaps ever. I think when we look back, when historians look back, or they maybe just at that point, the AI historians, but when they look back at, at this era, I think humans have used tools throughout, throughout the history of our species, but we’ve never built a tool that is smarter than us.

Pearl Lam: Smarter than us? Exactly.

Henry Elkus: Right. And so part of this answer is actually not definitionally not really possible to answer. Here’s why. There’s a great philosopher named St Anselm, and his definition of God was that which nothing more can be conceived. What that means is think about what your brain is capable of understanding, and then whatever is beyond that is God. Now think about what the definition of artificial general intelligence is, right? A thinking agent that is more capable at doing stuff and thinking than any human can be at anything, right, Once it surpasses that. So what I mean by this is by definition, we don’t necessarily know what an AI will do once it passes that point because it is beyond our human cognition to think about it. So we’re actually going to be relying on the AI in a deferred judgement way, in a way that is eerily similar to how we did with the gods when in Greek society you would have, well, I believe in Zeus or I believe in XY and Z God, We’re going to the same thing. We’re going to have a AIs that I think are temperamental because we’ve designed them to be that way. They’re going to have this type of personality. So this is a bit of a diatribe, but this goes into how challenging the problem is. So when we go into AI ethics, we also can confront another issue, which is humans have not agreed on what ethics are for the last four or 5000 years. So how can we programme ethics into an AI when we have not yet understood that and the attempts that have been made to do so? You really run into these these quite challenging issues. Then you consult the fact that different cultures have.

Pearl Lam: Been completely, completely different.

Henry Elkus: What ethics are? And so this is This is a exceptionally hard problem. And not to be dark, but I was listening to the the this this amazing podcast that Peter Thiel just did. And he was, he was asked about intelligent extraterrestrial species, right? And there’s this concept called the Great Filter, which is this idea that civilizations end up destroying themselves after a certain point of development because they create nuclear weapons or they use them, or they create an even Godfrey.

Pearl Lam: Self destruction.

Henry Elkus: Exactly. So then the question is what civilizations make it through that phase? And his answer was really depressing to me. But to be honest, it’s hard to think of a better answer, which he says they’re either angels or they’re demons. The demon is the one that has the kind of super Hitler, right? That this authoritarian kind of force that is able to just take power. And so that person’s able to not to guide civilization through it. But then you’ve enslaved the end. So you don’t want that. And then there’s this idea of, of being angels in which somehow we’re enlightened to the point where even though we could exert such harm with these exponential technologies, we don’t. But then you have to think about what type of world would it would we need to have in which everybody, there’s not a single instance of, of, of use of this terrible kind of set of technology. That’s very hard to imagine as well. And so that’s a very fancy way of saying the AI ethics problem is exceptionally hard.

Pearl Lam: Exceptionally.

Henry Elkus: Hard. And so some people believe that the only way to solve the AI ethics problem is just to develop this AI, which is inevitable, and then ask it what ethics are. And this is a this is a really fascinating thing I’ve been thinking about quite a lot and talking with a lot of the members on.

Pearl Lam: Because you can’t control the AI when you build something so much more stronger than you, there’s no control. And the end is they will control the world because you have to depend on them.

Henry Elkus: Yes, but we depend on God, we say, And I’m not saying this in a religious context. We’ve defined God as that which nothing more can be conceived. We.

Pearl Lam: Father Almighty.

Henry Elkus: We say it’s omniscient and omnipotent, it’s all powerful and it’s all knowing. But if we develop an AI that we to us is all powerful and all knowing, what is the difference? And so we already have this precedent in civilization of deciding or saying or believing there’s this God and, and, and we need to follow the judgement of that God. And my kind of pessimistic or maybe just realistic view is that while we look at AI go now and maybe we say, OK, well, we’re not going to believe it if it says this or this. When, when that actually happens, when, when there is a development of, of, of AI that is has that level of power and capacity. That is so beyond what we say, when it says, hey, this is the way we solve climate change, build this thing or it says, hey, you need to vote for this. That’s going to be an incredibly powerful statement.

Pearl Lam: Remember, God we worship. We worship God, yes. Do you think that with the human ego we are going to worship an AI that is created by and by human and then AI?

Henry Elkus: AI will understand how to manipulate.

Pearl Lam: And then and then it will become all those movies that was sci-fi movie that I’ve been watching when I was young about human fighting against AI.

Henry Elkus: It may, but it will likely be something that none of the movies have been able to dream up because they were dreamed up by humans. And this goes back to the definitional problem. So no, this is something that I think we are struggling with. But let me bring it back to the practical yes, which is. We can debate, we can debate this ethically, but it’s just going to happen you.

Pearl Lam: Can’t stop. It absolutely will happen. So it can’t be stopped. You can’t stop it. We just have to live, live with it and see.

Henry Elkus: No, I think we have to. No, no, no, I think we have to really actively use this time to give the to come up with the best possible tools for humanity to regulate, understand and develop it. And one of the saddest things that’s happening, we want to do the next America in One Room on AI policy. I hope we can pull it off, but we want to get a representative sample of the American people and actually educate them as best as possible, which would be very challenging because it’s hard to even educate me or anybody on this on the most important ethical policy issues on AI and then actually get a judgement on what the will of the people is on that. That’s an example that’s not going to solve AI ethics, but it’s is at least an attempt at addressing it at a higher level of fidelity.

Pearl Lam: And also to make people aware.

Henry Elkus: Yes.

Pearl Lam: And so awareness is important.

Henry Elkus: And by the way, I have some level of sympathy with the large AI companies the open AIs of the world, because what they’re saying is we want to be regulated. We do actually want to have judgement on what decisions to make. But if you look at the state of even the EU has which has done the best job of, of even thinking about this, they’re so far behind. Then you look at the Americans and you look at how, how slow Congress has been on AI regulation. It is just a fact that the gap between the public sector’s ability to regulate the technology versus the rate of development of the technology is already this wide, and it’s already going to widen in the future.

Pearl Lam: I don’t think the public actually really understand AI in the way that it is going to be developed. So with your America in One Room, if you can do AI policy as a discussion point, it will be amazing, yeah.

Henry Elkus: I think it would. I mean, there are these really, really important questions that are some of them are very philosophical because they exist to because the questions are something that will manifest in the future. But some of them are extraordinarily practical. Like truck driving is one of the largest jobs in America. What happens when we just have autonomous trucks? So it’s very important to have the head of the trucking union really have a good faith, non gotcha discussion with the American people, but also with the developers of this technology on how to do it. The population of horses is much, much smaller now than it was when we were riding horses is the main transportation. So there, it’s not like we’ve never gone through shifts that are similar to this, but we’ve never gone through a shift that is this pronounced. And, and this will be again, this will be the most important invention that humans ever make, because it will create all other future inventions after that.

Pearl Lam: OK, talking about you, you are entrepreneur, right? So so I just read that 14 years old you already have a clothing company, a street fashion clothing company.

Henry Elkus: A very bad one.

Pearl Lam: 14 years old and then how do you raise, I mean, what inspired you with that? What sparks you to to have this fashion company and how do you raise your capital and how do you sell?

Henry Elkus: I I think to call that a legitimate business would be.

Pearl Lam: I mean 14 years old.

Henry Elkus: No, I think I, yeah, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve always been fascinated with, with the creation of things and I’ve always wanted to do it. And I think you, you start in a very kind of misguided and small way and then you iterate and you iterate. But I, I’m very grateful that I had, you know, I think the, the, the one thing I will say is just, I, I’m, I’m more willing to be embarrassed than other people. And I think that that’s a skill that you need is, is that I, I don’t, I’m a very emotional person. I really don’t like being wrong. I really don’t like when I’m being made fun of, But I’m able to bear that. And I don’t know if this is the actual Greek definition or etymology of the word, but somebody told me once that the one of the definitions of entrepreneurship is to bear risk. That entrepreneur is a bear risk.

Pearl Lam: Absolutely.

Henry Elkus: So I, I’ve, I think that there you have to have some level of willingness to, to, to do that. And I think one of the things is that I often see, especially with friends of mine is that I’m, I’m just lucky for, because I, I just did this before I had a job. Is they, they graduate from a top university or they whatever and they get a great job. And there’s obviously the family situation, the financial situation which this gets into, you know, I have an immense privilege. I’m able to do what I do. But beyond that, there’s this security of just saying, if I start this business, what will people think of me? You know, how will I be judged? Will I be made fun of? And this idea that everybody’s going to kind of whisper to each other about you, It’s funny because it will happen no matter what, but also people will forget. And the realisation of how little you matter and how little it matters if people judge you, I think that’s a very liberating and freeing thing.

Pearl Lam: But do you care?

Henry Elkus: Of course I care, of course everybody cares. But I also care more about what my work could do if it is successful. Exactly.

Pearl Lam: Exactly.

Henry Elkus: And you just have to be willing to make those. You have to be. I’m sure you have it in your career. You have.

Pearl Lam: To be willing to make.

Henry Elkus: Those judgments and also I think I’m still young, but the older I get, the less I care. I think too is that the more that I’ve just. I’m very engrossed with what can be done with the work that we’re doing, but.

Pearl Lam: For 14 years old, a street fashion. You know what street fashion was when you were 14?

Henry Elkus: No, it was horrendous. It was I, I, I there, I I still have some. I still have some. It’s like the designs. Yeah, but.

Pearl Lam: It’s great. It’s great that you are fearless and you have the courage just to step into it. What is, you know, successful or no? You know this is your dream and you do it, you do it. Do you sell to your friends?

Henry Elkus: Still no. I mean, we sold a, we sold very few of.

Pearl Lam: Them never mind, but at least you did it.

Henry Elkus: And also, it’s, I mean, just kind of boring to say on a podcast, but you go through what is an LLC? What is the entity formation I need to do? How do I take in capital? How do I work with a lawyer? How do you know, how do, how do I do these extraordinarily basic things that by the way, some people who are in their 30s or 40s or 50s who have just always worked for somebody else and have never started something new, they look at these, it is incredible. It’s like looking at Mount Everest from the base. It’s just, oh, but I don’t really know how to do that. And once you just go through those repetitions, I think you’re able to be accustomed to what you can do with business that the allocation of capital, the allocation of time and resources, what what can be achieved in the world through that.

Pearl Lam: Wow, you learn. You learn at 14. That’s that’s brilliant.

Henry Elkus: Make your mistakes young. You make make your mistakes as young as possible when they are as less damaging as possible to your life. It is very valuable to do that.

Pearl Lam: 18 years old you did you were president of an international cooperated fund. What is it what is and then you were sitting sitting on the on the Wall Street Journal expert panel. Talk to me about it. It’s.

Henry Elkus: Nothing really to say. I mean, I, I, these are all these are all, to be honest, failed very small.

Pearl Lam: Because you have the you have the courage to boss to do it at your young age and those are the experience which is really needed to form your.

Henry Elkus: Well, you’re getting to a larger point, which is very important, which is I, I do think that I was talking recently to somebody starting a business who is 20 years old and I caught myself judging that person.

Pearl Lam: Recently.

Henry Elkus: Yeah, I caught myself listening to this and oh, this guy doesn’t. He has no idea. Look how you know how arrogant this guy is and he he’s making these leaps of assumptions of he’s going to do this and this and this. And then I called myself, I was like, well, that was just me. That was, and it still is, by the way. People still look at me and think that way. But people especially did at that age. And I remember getting these emails from people just saying this is really just nasty things. And it’s kind of like bullying. It’s, it’s, it’s somebody has to stop the cycle at some point. If you’re bullied, then you bully somebody else. And so I do think at a cultural level, there is a, there’s problems in the lionification and the of entrepreneurs and seeing them as gods, which they should not be. But there’s also problems in kind of cutting people while they’re weak, cutting them down while they’re weak and when they’re just starting out. And I think there has to be a higher willingness to accept those types of people. There’s to be a better environment for them. We also need to cultivate people that are just tougher, they’re just are just able to get through it. And if you look at the the really great entrepreneurs, they I think name an entrepreneur that has really over a long period of time succeeded where it wasn’t a fluke. It wasn’t just luck that didn’t have grit, that wasn’t wasn’t able to just stay in the game and.

Pearl Lam: You need.

Henry Elkus: To have you need to have that.

Pearl Lam: You need to have that personality, that determination and completely filled with full of convictions.

Henry Elkus: Yes, yes.

Pearl Lam: And I think that’s what that’s what brought you to Helena after, you know, after 14 18. And when you have Helena, you, you focus and you push through.

Henry Elkus: Yeah, And and it’s, it’s kind of like, you know, they say when you meet the person you’re going to spend the rest of your life with, you just know it, it is similar. I mean, these businesses that we start when especially when there are lifelong things, it’s like a marriage. It’s, it’s, it’s something at that level of if it’s not more special. And with, with Helena, I, I, when I look back at that time, there’s something, there’s a, there’s a term, I think it’s called reverse founder syndrome, which is when you talk to somebody 10 years after they started their business and they go, well, here’s exactly what I did this and I did this and I did this. And you just need to do the same thing. And it is complete bullshit, of course, because they’re, they’ve, they’ve been through so much trauma that they’ve actually rewired their memories and their brain to make it a simpler and more linear path or to add more drama to it. In reality, it’s just hard. It’s just really hard. But when you know that what you’re working on, even when it’s at its darkest moment and most people are making fun of you and you haven’t actually proven yourself, when you, when you’re in that moment and you go, wait, I still want to do this. In fact, I’m actually even more motivated. That’s when you really know that you have something. Maybe it’s still not going to work by the way, but you have something that you are going to assign your full self to. And it’s not about the money, it’s not about the power or any of those things. It’s just you want it that badly. That’s that’s what you need.

Pearl Lam: But I think when when you were starting Helena, you, you also have your partner, yes.

Henry Elkus: So I have an incredible business partner.

Pearl Lam: Yes. And so I think with two of you believing in each other, aiding each other is a is really pushing it through.

Henry Elkus: Yes, we, we absolutely need each other. We needed each other. There were times where I was at very, very dark moments and then Sam, my business partner got me out of it. And then vice versa. You also need somebody with the Ying Yang qualities of personality.

Pearl Lam: Yes, of course of.

Henry Elkus: Course they have to have this, they have to have so my business partner was, he was the world debate champion.

Pearl Lam: He was the.

Henry Elkus: World debate. So never debate this guy. I think I’m an OK debater, but I have a different style of communication than him. He was also just he’s incredible at economics and at math. He’s very quantitative. And what’s interesting is I’ve watched actually my skill set in his areas of strength go up just by being around him and I’ve watched vice versa. His areas of weakness get better. And those are the great partnerships in which you are confrontational with each other, but you’re respectful when you you disagree and then you commit. You don’t make fun of each other in public when even when you’ve made a mistake, you, you say that in private. These are all the things you have to cultivate over time. And I I totally.

Pearl Lam: You two raising must money must be dynamic.

Henry Elkus: You know what’s so funny is when you don’t have anything as a track record to show for it and you’re raising money versus when you do, it’s a very different thing to do.

Pearl Lam: Of course, of course.

Henry Elkus: We now have the privilege of. It’s easier now because.

Pearl Lam: Of course you have the track record and then you build trust. When you have nothing and just on paper and dreams and woods, it’s very tough.

Henry Elkus: But I’m obviously everybody has to do it, but I’m very glad that we went through that initial. You know of raising 9 figure amounts of money at this point, hundreds of millions of dollars across the for profit and the nonprofit and we still have a lot more to do. I mean that’s for a lot of people. That’s a huge amount of money for the people that I look up to that’s noting.

Pearl Lam: It’s amazing.

Henry Elkus: Thank you. But but you, you have to communicate a, a confidence that and and you have to communicate that to very sophisticated people with incredible bullshit metres right there, right. And so the only way to do it is to truly believe. I think, you know, I just that’s the personality I have is just like I, I look back at, for example, raising our first for profit capital for these investments. I just, I said this is the research we did on this investment. I deeply believe this company is going to succeed. And I will argue with you for 10 hours about this. And if you tell me something that I’m wrong about, I’m going to go home and read about it, upscale myself, understand it, and then come back to. And I think that is probably one of the reasons why. I think the other reason is luck. I think you have to have. You have to have an.

Pearl Lam: Acceptable. Yeah, of course, you have a great combination. Now if a young person coming to you and ask and ask you, can you give us some tips, some suggestion what I should do? Should I become an entrepreneur? Should I follow my dreams? What will you advise them?

Henry Elkus: One of the worst mistakes I see people make and people make it over and over is they wake up in the morning and say I want to start a company. Terrible idea. You have to have an idea first. It’s I want to do something in the world. I have this idea in my head and it’s burning inside of me so much that I’m feel physical pain if I don’t manifest it. OK, then start the company. So when people say I want to become a serial entrepreneur, that to me is complete (Pearl: gibberish). It’s like, tell me what? Tell me, tell me the differentiated insight that you have, whether I agree with it or not, that is going to motivate you to drive and do this. And if you’re 18 years old or you’re 45 or 90 years old, doesn’t matter that that that’s the reason you should start it. So I don’t, I there’s people that disagree with me on this, but I think that this idea of deciding that your occupation is going to be an entrepreneur is a weird thing to do, right? It’s it’s, I want to do something more. And then you have to think in a very objective and unemotional way. What is the best way for me to implement this? Is it a business? Is it a nonprofit? Is it a bill that I have to pass? Should I become a public speaker and and actually just evangelise this idea? And should I write books? Like you have to then think about what form does it take? Then you have to think about the business plan and how you’re going to manifest it. So I think there’s a lot of people that glamorise the very small number of people that have succeeded in business and then say I’m going to do that too, but they don’t have the idea. Then there’s a lot of people that have amazing ideas but then they don’t believe in themselves enough to start it and that’s a whole other problem. So you.

Pearl Lam: You need to have all the combination. I always say and say that if you have a vision, you need to have a conviction. Yes, even if you have conviction, you don’t have determination, you fail. You have to have the three elements together.

Henry Elkus: Yes, and luck.

Pearl Lam: And luck and luck, luck, Luck is definite, but there’s a lot of people who doesn’t have vision as well.

Henry Elkus: Yeah, that’s true. By the way. It just goes back to the media thing. One of the things that allows you to develop vision. Some people just have it, but it’s it is books in its long form content. If you just subsist off of Tik Toks, if you just think in six second intervals, how are you going to come up with a coherent vision of the future when the content you’re consuming is the definition of the present? It’s the definition of shorts. So when you go and you read biographies of these great leaders and you’ve read 100 of them, you can see how vision starts and how it manifests. And this is again, I just, I’m like a show for the book industry, I guess. Like I’m upset is like, I will pitch books the rest of my life because it’s the greatest tool I’ve ever encountered is you can cheat. You can cheat in life. And the way you can cheat is that you can, you can live 1000 lives by reading 1000 biographies. You can inherit ideas that took thousands of years to come up with. How hard was it for Pythagoras to figure out the Pythagore theory? Now we teach it to people in second third grade, I guess, right. And so things that were so challenging to the activation energy was so infinitesimally high, right? Or so infinitely high, we can now just read and then we can build on top of that. And so one of the things I’ve talked with Nicholas Berggruen about, for example, is the concept of are there ever original ideas? And maybe there are, maybe there aren’t, but the vast majority of ideas are not original. They’re just stacking together other ideas like Legos, like building blocks. So my only point is how could you have a vision if you haven’t if you if you don’t have the blocks to build it on?

Pearl Lam: Business is about ideas but mainly profession I always consider is luck and.

Henry Elkus: Of course

Pearl Lam: Of course, and also opportunities, yes, whether you grab opportunities datas in order to succeed, actually datas help. The more you know, yeah, the better.

Henry Elkus: But it’s hard. It’s it’s hard. Here’s very hard. But here’s the thing.

Pearl Lam: And also you have to have balls to carry.

Henry Elkus: Here’s here’s why you have to have the balls, right? When you accumulate a lot of knowledge from other people, you do realise extraordinarily valuable things about how the world works, about how ideas actually end up manifesting, about experience. You don’t actually have the experience of doing it, but there is a value in In going through that, you also learn all of the reasons why your idea won’t work.

Pearl Lam: Of course, of course.

Henry Elkus: So so it’s it’s there is value again, going back to starting my organisation at a young age was when I was so not well read and I had not actually put that is is you’re delusional enough to not know so.

Pearl Lam: You don’t recognise the the obstacle.

Henry Elkus: It’s exceptionally hard and I think that’s why the people that I’ve met that are more risk on as they get older, that they want to take more risks, they’re more delusional as they get older but can continue to succeed. Those are the extraordinarily special people because there’s a lot of people that are agree. Yeah, it’s very challenging.

Pearl Lam: To do that, we agree. Thank you so much, Henry.

Henry Elkus: Thank you for having me. This is wonderful.

Pearl Lam: Such a wonderful talk, you know you’re brilliant.

Henry Elkus: Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.