April 4, 2025
Henry Elkus joins me and Jess Mah to discuss solving societies biggest problems at scale.
In this podcast we talk about the following.
- Helena’s Mission: Henry Elkus founded Helena as a problem-solving organization that implements solutions to major societal challenges—through nonprofits, businesses, or legislation—based on first-principles thinking.
- SHIELD Project: One of Helena’s earliest wins was helping secure the U.S. electrical grid against threats like cyberattacks and solar storms, leading to passed legislation and executive orders.
- MDMA-Assisted Therapy: Helena invested in the rollout of MDMA for PTSD treatment (via Lykos), supporting FDA approval efforts and advocating for psychedelic-assisted mental health care.
- America in One Room: Helena brought together a representative group of Americans for structured deliberation on political issues, significantly reducing polarization and shifting opinions—proving the power of face-to-face democracy.
- Nonpartisan by Design: Henry emphasized the importance of staying politically neutral to effectively implement change across divides—structuring Helena to avoid typical incentives that corrupt mission-driven work.
- And many more.
Video
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Full Transcript
Henry Elkus: I kind of had what, like a one-fifth life crisis, shall we say, in college? Like everybody, we’re doing like 20 Manhattan Projects in parallel as a species right now. And we’ve gone, we barely made it through one, and we’re doing like 20. A lot of people fail because they’re actually grasping at these straws of, like, the 1% of somebody’s time. I want to dedicate the rest of my life to building an enduring platform that can actually, in a non-BS way, address societal problems.
Jess Mah: Henry, what is up? Welcome to the pod.
Henry Elkus: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be with you guys.
Jess Mah: It’s a Tuesday, end of the day after work. Thanks for joining us. Really briefly, tell us about what you’re up to, who you are, and what you’re passionate about.
Henry Elkus: I’m Henry Elkus. I’m founder and CEO of an organization called Helena. Sure, we’ll talk a little bit about it. I was born in LA, grew up here. I was a ski racer. Randomly fell in love with reading late. It became a huge part of my life, and then I have dedicated the last, say, nine years—now it’s been a while—to building this organization that we’re at the very beginning of, and I’m here talking to you guys.
Noah Berkson: You started ski racing. Was that at a really young age?
Henry Elkus: Yeah, I was—I mean, I just loved—I love sports. I mean, for the first period of my life, I was really unintellectual. Actually, when you’re a teenager, I don’t think you’re very intellectual in the first place. But there’s a lot of people I know, I’m sure you guys know, that are like prodigies at a very young age. I was just incredibly interested in the human body and sports, and it was a very pure kind of focus at the time. I wasn’t really multitasking. So yeah, I started skiing really, really young. I mean, before I could walk, just once or twice a year for a week or two, I just fell in love with the sport. I never got to be, you know, Olympic level or anything of that nature, but it was a huge, huge part of my life.
Jess Mah: But people do call you a prodigy. And I’ve met many people who’ve said your ability to connect and network is insane. So on that note, I’m wondering if you could tell us about Helena. What was it like nine years ago, and what is it today?
Henry Elkus: Yeah, so I’ll say really briefly what it is, and then I can give the background of why. You know, we’re building a problem-solving organization that does basically the following three things: identify solutions to societal problems, conduct due diligence to figure out whether a potential solution should be implemented or not, which is obviously very qualitative, and then the third and most important thing is do our best to actually implement it somehow, whether that’s providing capital, building it as a company or as a nonprofit or as a legislative arm. And we’ve built a portfolio of these projects over the last nine years. And so that’s what the organization is.
Jess Mah: And has it always been that way from day one, or on day one were you only doing for-profit or only nonprofit solutions?
Henry Elkus: So the order in which we did it is kind of backwards, actually. So the first thing that we did was build a network called the Helena Members. Before we did any projects, then we built a nonprofit. And that, for about five years, was all we did. It was through a 501(c)(3), and those were nonprofit projects and legislative projects. And then we actually built the for-profit side. And so a lot of people, I think, actually start in traditional capitalism business. So we did it in a bit of an inverted way. There was a real reason to do that. As for your first question, was it always the plan to do it this way? My answer is yes. But I will say I had this amazing—somebody said something to me that there’s this thing called the—like, Peter Thiel calls it the reverse founder syndrome, where you ask somebody like 10 years in, like, did you plan it to be this way? And there’s so much, like, accumulated trauma in this person’s brain from having to go through the process, and they’ve kind of gone through this narrative so many times that they kind of simplify it. And I’m sure that, as I would live it through again, it would have been a much rockier road than my brain tells me it was. But with all of that said, yes. I mean, when I was in the dorm room and we were building this at the very beginning, it was this idea of actually, in what meticulous order should we build this structure for it to stand on its own and work and not have the incentive issues that a lot of other organizations that have tried this failed with?
Noah Berkson: How did you originally have this idea? Because you’re in college when you start this. Are you thinking, I’m going to go start a business that isn’t a business and makes no money but starts to solve societal problems? How are you thinking about this?
Henry Elkus: So I kind of had, like, a one-fifth life crisis, shall we say, in college, like everybody does. And I—
Jess Mah: It’s very early, yeah. Well, I just—
Henry Elkus: I had the thing of kind of, okay, what do I do with my life? Like, everybody’s—and this came around the time that a lot of my friends defaulted into, okay, I really need the Goldman internship. I was at Yale, you know, fancy pants. And so everybody was thinking, like, what is the next step? And I kind of had the—like, the panic, probably born out of laziness, to be honest, of, like, is this really what I want to do? But that kind of set me into, like, a search function of what do I want to do with my life? And it was around that time I really started to become fascinated, oddly, with the role of institutions that solve societal problems. Basically, as a species, we—we do this. Like, we—we’ve decided to rely on organizations to solve our societal problems. And that was fascinating to me that that’s, like, a thing that we do as a species. And there’s a set of organizations that we rely on in capitalism and government and think tanks, NGOs, to do this. The problem that I was very interested in as a college student started with the Manhattan Project, which is we had this kind of moment in which we created a technology in the nuclear bomb that was instantly global. It was instantly exponential, and it completely rewired the way the world worked. And it was—obviously, there have been many times before, but it was a great case study of just breaking institutions that solve societal problems. Because we created this nuclear bomb and we said, wait a second, all our geopolitical framework for how the world works just got broken. The Westphalian state system, which says this—oh, we can’t do that anymore because now we can destroy the world. And there’s this Venn diagram now of people that have access to this thing that they could press a button and likely end humanity, and then people crazy enough to do it. And those circles are converging, and we—if you just read history, you can see how the world almost ended: Cuban Missile Crisis, all this. I was fascinated with that. And then I’m sitting in college in, you know, the 2010s, you know, and going, holy shit, we’re doing, like, 20 Manhattan Projects in parallel as a species right now. And we’ve gone—we barely made it through one, and we’re doing, like, 20. So then you retrofit that back in, and you go, there’s these institutions that we rely on to solve these problems. The vast majority of them were built way before the Manhattan Project. Some of them were built in, like, 1500. We still use them. They almost broke with the Manhattan Project, and now we’re doing so many more versions of that. Who is innovating in the white space of trying to reimagine those models for the 21st century so that we can survive as a species? And I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of, like, I want to be involved in that. It was more just, like, that’s a very fascinating intellectual problem. And so I think with the freedom of, like, not having a job or not feeling like I had to do something, I was thinking about that very deeply. And that was actually what made me think, okay, I really want to do something in this space. I don’t know what it is, but that’s, like, this is a problem that is, like, the sexiest problem in the world to me. It’s the most important one, and I want to spend the rest of my life involved in it in some way, but I don’t fully know how. And that was kind of the impetus.
Noah Berkson: How did that first piece come together? What was kind of the first puzzle piece that was, hey, we’re going to start this new thing? I’m going to bring people around me to be able to build a team or have a partner. What did that look like?
Henry Elkus: I mean, it’s very freeing when you don’t actually—when you’ve not actually done anything, it’s very freeing because you get to put the pieces together how you want them and reiterate and reiterate. I think for me, it was two things. It was studying existing organizations that had tried to do this and seeing how they had failed or what they were limited by. And I was very interested in that. For example, there are some really amazing nonprofit organizations, and I’ve benefited by being involved in these and working with them. But I’ve noticed that they have this idea, which is, let’s bring together incredible people to address societal problems. But the structures of these organizations oftentimes say, okay, well, let’s monetize it by having a conference and selling content. But then you’re selling access to people’s names, and then are they going to be involved in private to actually do these projects? And so on and so forth. And so there was, I think, a laundry list of, like, things looking at past organizations that had done this and said, okay, this doesn’t work. And then I’m concurrently going, if I were to do this from scratch and I had infinite resources, how would I do it? And just thinking I would actually do it very similarly to how a family office would do it that has infinite money is, you wouldn’t think, oh, I’m going to build this, I’m going to build this. You would actually do the reverse: you would just try to accumulate the smartest kind of collective intelligence of people around you, hear the best ideas, rely on that group to do diligence on those ideas to figure out which to actually do. And then if it happened to be that the solution to a given problem was, let’s go pass a bill, you wouldn’t say, oh well, I’m a for-profit and I don’t pass bills. You would just say, what do I need to do to go pass this bill? And you would do it in that corner. Or if the best solution was, let’s build a business, you would incubate a business. And so it’s from that kind of first-principles-like idea that came out, okay, what if you could actually try to build an organization to do that? The problem being we didn’t have the money to start it or those resources. So you have to build it from scratch as opposed to from the top down. And that was the chicken-and-egg problem that we still have to solve. Even nine years in, we still, every single day, deal with this. But it was a really big issue when we were starting out.
Jess Mah: So there’s this moral hazard of wanting to accumulate capital in order to do all these things. So how did you not get stuck only on for-profit projects and stay motivated to do nonprofit legislative work as well?
Henry Elkus: I’ll say a couple of, like, prefacing things. The first is there’s no way I could ever say—and if I ever say it, then somebody should slap me in the face—that we’re doing it perfectly or that we are free from the incentive issues or the moral hazard that you’re describing. That’s number one.
Jess Mah: That’s very honest. I appreciate that. Yeah, I know, I’ve struggled with that because I—I want to do everything you’re doing. You have my dream job.
Henry Elkus: Oh, thank you.
Jess Mah: You know, and yeah, anyway, please.
Henry Elkus: So that’s number one. Another reason—I agree with that question, and I’m not trying to avoid it. I will answer it.
Jess Mah: Yeah.
Henry Elkus: One thing that’s not discussed enough is there are a lot of people that make billions of dollars in the hedge fund industry or building a tech company or so be it. To do that is an incredibly hard thing to do. But it also—it’s a game that you are playing, which is capitalism. And there’s a way to win that game that builds a specific mental model of how the world works, which is a very accurate mental model of how the world works. But it is not complete because it is only in one modality of getting things done, which is capitalism. One of the things that is the moral hazard is that people accumulate that wealth, and then they say, now I’m going to go do philanthropy—the definition of the word philanthropy, for the good of humanity. But then they say, because I made my money in this hedge fund world, I’m going to do capital allocation like a hedge fund to solve these problems. Or because I’m a VC, I’m going to do venture philanthropy because that is my mental model of how the world works. And it’s very challenging once you are calcified in doing that. Another great example is academia, where somebody gets tenure by delivering one idea over and over. But then what if you have tenure 30 years in, and then you’re informed that that idea is wrong? But your house, your salary, your Wikipedia page—all of that is predicated on the fact you had that idea. You get calcified. So those are two reasons why your question is really good. So our question was, is there any way to free ourselves from that? And I don’t think the answer is no, because people have egos and people like money, and these are incentive structures. With that all said, our idea was, do the nonprofit first. We’ll first accumulate the network, demonstrate to that network that we’re doing things from the bottom of our heart, that we’re trying to solve these problems. We’re not trying to do this to just make money. Then try to prove ourselves operationally, zero to one, doing nonprofit projects that don’t make us wealth. And then from that point on, with that level of trust, then try to build the most ethical, the best kind of oriented for-profit that we can, that is rooted in that legacy. And it is absolutely the case, though, that when you run a—when you don’t have money to start with, you have to raise money from investors. Those are your clients. And so you have to set up that incentive. My argument, though, is that of the kind of evils that you have to deal with, there’s a very direct relationship you have with a limited partner in a fund or an investor, which is, they are committing capital to you for an express purpose. If you’re going to place it in these types of strategies, with these types of return profiles, and when you silo that, and it’s actually clearly defined—to me, that’s a lot better than saying, hey, I want you to join the board of my organization, pay a million dollars a year, and then there’s kind of a backhanded thing of, are you going to do this for me or do that? And I think that’s a huge issue.
Jess Mah: It’s unclear then what the drivers are in a relationship like that, whereas LPs in your fund—it’s just very black and white, you think?
Henry Elkus: I think that’s one thing. I think the other thing that we benefited from was that because I’m not Bill Gates, because I don’t have that—I’m not nearly as successful, I don’t have that track record anyway, not yet. I’m not a known entity starting an organization like this. I think we benefited from the anonymity of—it’s not about me, it’s about the actual work, and it’s about the collective that we’re putting together or my staff as well. It’s not about—and the great people we’ve worked with. And so I think that when somebody starts with, hey, I made $10 billion, I’m going to go do this thing, there’s this implicit issue that they actually end up dealing with, which is maybe they’ve made enemies to make that money. Maybe they’ve kind of entrenched themselves in one pocket of society that prevents them from actually doing the important political work they need to do because they’ve defined themselves as a Democrat or a Republican. So I was able to start largely without those issues. And I think building it from a more relatively pure base was beneficial to us.
Noah Berkson: And you’re this—you’re a young college student. The members that you have at Helena today are CEOs and titans of industry and government officials, Nobel Prize winners. How do you get their attention? Because you’re a college student, you’re young, probably naive, and you say, hey, I want to help solve a lot of the world’s biggest problems to people that have the capital to probably solve the world’s biggest problems—maybe they haven’t been successful in it. How do you get their attention?
Henry Elkus: This was an unbelievably easy thing in retrospect. And if we had any insight, it would be this, actually. And I’m not going to say anything that’s revolutionary. And I’m sure a thousand other people have had the same idea. But here’s exactly what we do and what we did when somebody joined the organization. We sit with them, we do an onboarding just like any other membership, and we just literally ask them the following question. We ask them a lot of other questions, but the following question is the core question. We say, when you look at the next, like, tell me about the next five, 10 years of your career—not, like, what school you want your kids to go to or, like, the 1% that is your—that is outside of that—but, like, what is the 99% of, like, your schedule? Because these people are busy. Why are they busy? Well, because there’s a large portion of their schedule where they’re doing things. So tell me about that. Tell me what, exactly, in as much detail as you can, what you want to accomplish in the next five to 10 years. When you go to sleep at night and you worry that you will not accomplish those things, what asset do you not feel like you are going to have access to that you need to have access to to accomplish those things? It’s an incredibly simple question. And so we all go to—and I only asked the members that because that was what I was asking myself, going to sleep. But you go to sleep at night, and you’re an entrepreneur, and you say, I deeply believe in my business model, but I don’t have technical expertise in this one area. Or I need a massive amount of capital. I would imagine if you ask Ken Griffin or Bill Gates that answer, it’s not, I need more capital necessarily. It’s, there’s a specific area of expertise I want to have access to, or there’s this or that. So we would get this information from the members when they joined, and we would essentially just have a mental dossier of what they need. And then the genius of it is—if there’s any genius to it—is just, there’s somebody else in the network that probably has the asset that they’re needing to do their thing. And if you connect those two people together, there’s actually an incredible value. So one of the first members was your friend—or our friend—Nancy Liu. Nancy—I remember seeing this click.
Jess Mah: She’s one of my best friends.
Henry Elkus: She’s amazing. And we, obviously—one of the benefits we can get to is a lot of the members were young and still are. And so there was, I think, a camaraderie of us being kind of in our 20s or early 30s. And I just vividly remember the first couple member meetings with Nancy where I sat with her and said, tell me exactly what you need. So this is all a long way of saying that when you’ve expressly told somebody, I need this asset, and they call you up and they say, I have a person that represents that asset—could we go and set a meeting up between you two? And let’s have a conversation. And it’s no bullshit. It’s just operational. Then they say, yes. But if you go, hey, I want you to show up at my conference and do a talk, or I want you to do this favor for me, it is in the periphery of their time, and a lot of people fail because they’re actually grasping at these straws of the 1% of somebody’s time. And so it was just the no-bullshit, like, we want to do actual work. Tell me what you need, and we will try to bring you that. And then we had to do it.
Jess Mah: And how often do you think you were able to follow through on that?
Henry Elkus: Enough.
Jess Mah: Like 50%, maybe?
Henry Elkus: You know, again, reverse founder syndrome. So, like, I—I have such beautiful memories of the beginnings of the—of the member meetings because of just how psyched I was to be there. And so, to me, they were all super successful. In retrospect, if I was one of those members, I would probably be in those meetings, go, oh, you know, they set me up with this guy. But I actually, looking back at it, really think that we had—before we did any projects, before there was anything to show for the actual work—I actually really feel as though the beginning member meetings, which I have such fond memories of, were actually incredibly operationally helpful. It might be a better thing to ask some of those members than me, but I think we did a decent job, and I think that allowed us to engender the trust to actually then go, can we do our first couple projects and actually turn this into something operational?
Noah Berkson: Did you then use members to get other members? Typically, was that the—hey, now these people are involved, and I can go tell other people that they’re involved, and so if they want to be involved—was that kind of the snowball effect, or how did that work?
Henry Elkus: Yeah, I think, you know, as word of mouth—we would, of course, if there was somebody that we really respected, that they were really engaged and they were very helpful, I would say, look, you are somebody to me that is very valuable to the organization for these reasons. And we like each other, and we want to work together in the future. There’s a reason for that, which is that we have a mixed person—we have a matched personality—or we want to work together. Given that, my presumption is that the people that are in your circle are similar. So could you introduce us to the two or three people you think would be a best fit? And that was a way for it to organically grow at the beginning. Yeah.
Jess Mah: And how did they present Helena? Like Bob Hertzberg, who’s a mutual friend—he spoke very positively about what you guys are doing. And he’s a bigwig in California government. He, I believe, was the Speaker of the Assembly here in California, among many other things. And he supposedly helped you and sent you a bunch of stuff, but he knows everyone already, and he knows all the big funders to fund his campaign. So how did you convince him that you were worthy of his time and attention back before you were established?
Henry Elkus: I love Bob, and he’s such a great example of this. So I’ll just tell you a story. And this dovetails into the actual projects because Bob was deeply involved in one of the first projects we ever did during the time where we were transitioning from just this kind of, like, weird, like, what the hell is this group of members to, like, an organization that says it’s trying to do projects, that has actually done projects? Like, what was that transition point? Bob was instrumental in a project we did called SHIELD that we’re still working on in some capacity. And it’s such a great case study. So if I can tell the story, please. So some of the early member meetings were with members of the intelligence agencies, national security. We have a really great contingent of—of people in our network there, and we’re still involved with them. And we had a fascinating set of discussions that were essentially—to say it really simply—like, what are the things that could be existentially bad to the world? And then if there’s a Venn diagram and the other circle is, like, what are the things that are, like—we already have the technology to address, but it has not been addressed yet—that it’s, like, it’s very dumb that we as a species have not solved this. There was something that kept coming up over and over and over again from these, like, heavy intellectual members—some of them in finance, some of them intelligence, some of them in defense. But it kept coming up, and I was interested because it kept coming up from Democrats and Republicans. And it was an incredibly bipartisan thing. And it was the vulnerability of the North American electrical grid to shutting down through many different—being crippled through many different reasons. One of them is a cyberattack from foreign adversaries into the SCADA systems, the kind of operating systems of electrical systems. Another example was coronal mass ejections from the sun, so solar storms that happen like clockwork. There was actually one in the 19th century called the Carrington Event. And if that event had happened today, it would be crippling. But back then, there just wasn’t enough electric infrastructure for it to get screwed up. Another one is just physical attack. And then another one, very important, which has now happened since we started this project, is extreme weather. So wrap this all together—you have a very nerdy solution kind of issue, but it’s one that’s huge, which is, like, we rely on electricity for literally everything. One of the largest machines in the world is the North American electrical grid, and it can go down. And how do we address it? Well, we should update the software. We should put surge protectors and Faraday cages and rubber mats on the critical parts of the grid. We should have better armed security. We should have backup fuel. If a nuclear generator—a nuclear plant—goes down, there’s—these very clear and simple solutions need to come in. So what does this have to do with Bob Hertzberg? When it graduated—and Bob is a very intellectual guy—just wasn’t involved in the kind of think-tank component of this. But when it graduated from the think-tank idea to, like, what do we actually do? It was time to pass a damn bill.
Jess Mah: Yeah. What—is he the person to know?
Henry Elkus: Exactly. And so we went—and I hope he’s okay with me saying this—we went and we—
Jess Mah: I’m sure he would be. I mean, he loves—yeah.
Henry Elkus: Went to his house and, you know, he was—had his stogies, and we were—we were in his tiki bar at his house, and we just sat there and we said, this is, like, a deeply important issue. It’s not getting enough attention, and it’s a bipartisan issue. This would be a win. Let’s go do this. And we actually did it. The bills were passed in California. We did a summit in—it was a classified and unclassified summit that we worked with other members during the Trump administration that we did in Virginia that actually led to us working very deeply on an executive order that was signed during the Trump administration, another one that we worked on during the Biden administration. Now we’re doing this project internationally as well. And so this really turned into something truly operational. But going back to someone like Bob is—I didn’t say, Bob, come to my conference. I said, Bob, let’s go pass a bill—like, this is what you do.
Jess Mah: And he’s genuinely motivated to do good, I think—like, based on what I know about him, he basically teed up a lot of this stuff for him because he’s got so much on his plate. Is that part of the value here?
Henry Elkus: I think it’s—I think it’s definitely part of the value. And he also goes back to—again, because—because I’m not a billionaire tech CEO who made his money and then wants to do a thing—I would imagine you can ask Bob, but if you’re somebody like Bob and somebody like that comes to you, there’s an agenda. We—we had the distinction of literally just being, like, 22-year-old kids.
Jess Mah: Yeah.
Henry Elkus: Me and Sam Feinberg, my partner—we were just sitting there on the couch.
Jess Mah: Going—Sam’s very impressive as well. I have so much respect for Sam.
Henry Elkus: He’s amazing. And we’re just sitting on his couch and going, like, we really want to do this. We don’t want to do this because, like, we’ll make money from it. We don’t want to do this because we have a political agenda. We don’t even know whether this is a Republican or Democratic solution. We just really want to do it. And that, I think, is a very pure motivating factor to do stuff. And we continue to have that. I mean, our ego gets aggrandized and benefited from the actual success of the project—not it’s a Democratic or Republican solution. That’s a very unique, I think, advantage to have in an organization.
Jess Mah: So then if someone asked, are you a Democrat or Republican, would you answer at all? Or would you say you’re an independent, or you don’t even identify with that?
Henry Elkus: I think there’s—well, I think there’s two parts of this. The first is, what is Helena’s political affiliation? Which is none. And we will never, I think, have a political affiliation if you define it by, like, a party plank that we subscribe to—correct. Then there’s, what is mine? A, that’s private. But I think B, what I will say about it is, we’re in a political situation now in which I feel like there’s a duopoly. It’s, like, there’s two corporations, and there should be more competition, and you don’t really get the best from either side. And so, I mean, we have—I think part of, again, why we’re dedicating our lives to do Helena is because in past generations, we would probably want to go into politics to get things done. There’s a whole rabbit hole we can go down of why politics is not the most effective way to get things done today. But I think it goes back to—my political belief is just, unfortunately, getting things done is happening more in the private sector than it is in the public sector, at least through elected officials—a very important role that that has to play. But I’ve been very terrified of losing a lot of my time and energy getting into this kind of cul-de-sac of running for office—or doing things like that—so you—
Jess Mah: Don’t think you’ll ever run for office—you’ll play a supporting role from Helena?
Henry Elkus: Or—it is a very simple optimization function for me of, I want to dedicate the rest of my life to building an enduring platform that can actually, in a non-BS way, address societal problems. And I will probably fail. But if I can get even 1% of the way there, it’s meaningful. And if somebody presents me with a way that is better than the private sector to do it, I would—I would not say out of hand, no, I won’t do it, but it would have to—it would—it would—I think the unfortunate reality is, we’re in the most—we’ve done nonprofit projects, like America in One Room, for example, to address—to try to address part of this. But we are in a very inefficient legislative environment, and so getting things done through the pen is very challenging.
Noah Berkson: We want to hear about America in One Room. But I’m curious also, have you had situations happen where it would have been beneficial to be partisan, and you would have been able to get more support or get things done had you not been part of a bipartisan organization and not had a political affiliation?
Henry Elkus: No. I mean, not yet. Take the SHIELD project—this is really interesting. We didn’t raise that much money for this project, and—I mean, by the way, Sam ran this project, so he should get all the credit—I should get 0% of the credit. But when you looked at the organizations that were trying to solve the electrical grid problem, it was really funny. There were Republican partisan organizations, but they were completely ostracized from getting bipartisan solutions passed because they were—the Democrats hated them. And the Democrats looked at the Republicans and said, these are fearmongering people that think that North Korea is going to implode an EMP over Kansas, and that that’s the biggest issue, and that’s not the biggest issue. Then there were the left organizations that said that we want to solve the grid problem, and the Republicans looked at them and they said, look at these idiots who are just trying to put microgrids in California—it’s too expensive, it’ll never work. And there’s actually some good arguments on both sides as to why those were the wrong approaches. If we had come out and been partisan, we would have gotten actually sucked into that sphere. And this is not something that I can say details on, but I will say that in this project, we actually kind of acqui-hired nonprofit organizations that were on both sides of the aisle into our project. But part of the capital we raised was to actually acqui-hire and bring in great people that—and kind of subgroups and organizations that had the technical expertise and the legislative expertise to get this done but were ineffective because they were partisan. And so that’s actually something we’re very proud of, is, like, you can criticize us in a lot of ways that are probably merited—we are not a partisan organization. And I think we can prove that without really having to argue it—because if you just look at the projects we’ve done, it’s kind of confusing what political affiliation we are because we’re not one.
Noah Berkson: Do you think there’s a lot of projects out there that could be very world-changing that are stuck in that kind of rut where it’s just run by a partisan organization, and so they are never going to get the support of the other side?
Henry Elkus: Yes. The way that I would reframe that, though—and this is such an interesting topic, and I don’t want to waste the whole podcast on it—but there are some no-brainer solutions. Like, we have a project that replaces plastic with a sustainable alternative and replaces Styrofoam with a sustainable alternative, and it works price-wise, and we think it’ll get to scale—it’ll be a great business. People are not going to stop you on the street and go, I really disagree with this idea that we should replace plastics, right? So there are some projects like that. I think the best answer to your question is, there’s a lot of things that are such nasty problems that people are suffering from that need to be addressed, but the solutions are very controversial, and they’ve become politicized. And there’s a—there’s a big organizational question that we have—and anybody has—which is, do you get involved in those projects even though they’re messy and you can get tarred by them? And I want to do those projects because I think there’s nothing—you have to—it’s a brave—you have to be brave and do those things, and you can be hidden in certain ways. So I think the best answer to your question is, there’s a lot of those—we can get into some of my favorites—but there’s a lot of those.
Jess Mah: But then would you worry about how your members would feel, and then their loyalty to Helena would be compromised, and then they wouldn’t provide support for your other projects if you took that risk? And how do you evaluate that?
Henry Elkus: I mean, that is a—just to be honest, anybody has that concern. I think the question is, how do you mitigate it through your structure? So the way that our membership and that our organization is set up is, the members—we don’t tell the members what to do, they don’t tell us what to do. We don’t owe them anything contractually for them to be part of the organization—they don’t owe us that. They can come and leave. And my hope for the membership and the network and just anybody that is involved in Helena is that—and I’m not comparing us to Congress in any way, but I just think it’s an interesting example—is, if somebody says something in Congress that you disagree with, you don’t leave Congress—you stay in it, and you advocate for that position. And at its best, you have a nuanced and respectful debate about it. And if you feel like the project is so abhorrent that you don’t want to be involved in any organization that’s part of it, then I understand you would want to leave. Our job is to come up with the best possible first-principles defense of why we’re doing every project. And if there’s a member that says, I just fundamentally disagree with that, and I don’t want to be a part of it, then I would respect them to say that—it hasn’t happened yet, but I would respect that decision. That’s the best thing we can do. Now, what’s interesting, though, is there’s a lot of organizations—and this—goes back to starting the organization, starting Helena—where they don’t have that structure because their version of members is, well, you have to give us a million dollars a year to be part of the organization. Well, now they have huge leverage over you—what if you do something they don’t like? Well, the million dollars goes away.
Jess Mah: Just to be clear, your members don’t—
Henry Elkus: There’s no membership fee.
Jess Mah: —have to pay a fee. Some will donate, some will invest in the fund, and some will just contribute their—their connections and, you know, intelligence.
Henry Elkus: And it’s—and it’s structured to be completely on a case-by-case basis. So it’s—if we have a project and we think that you could like it, we’ll present it to you, and if you decide to donate to it, great—but you’re not obligated to. If there’s a business that we’re doing, and we think you’d be a great investor, we’ll pitch it to you. Of course, you could say—and it’s true—that’s going to create leverage, and it’s going to create that relationship. And we’re never going to mitigate that. But it is, I think, a substantially better or more pure model than making a de facto commitment where there’s leverage right away. And I also like that to myself because I think it’s a feedback mechanism of, if we start doing work that we have not defended—maybe it’s controversial, and we defend it, and we have just our hearts on the line, and we say, look, we really are doing this for this reason—that’s one thing. But if we do something, and we really can’t defend it on a first-principles basis that it’s the right thing to do, that’s a good feedback mechanism of, hey, without—it’s not that we’re incentivized to say this—we don’t like you doing this. I think that’s good feedback.
Noah Berkson: What are some examples of projects that you haven’t taken on or wouldn’t take on because they would be too controversial and be too partisan or political?
Henry Elkus: You know, I would hope that—and it goes to Jess’s question, which is—I want to get to the scale of organization—I mean, everybody says this—but I want to get to the scale where there isn’t an area that we de facto say we will never look at this area because we’re scared of it. I never want to do that. Yeah, I do think there’s honest questions about which areas to go into as we grow the organization. We’re not a huge multinational corporation that has infinite money—we’re not—we don’t have a $100 billion endowment—we don’t have all that yet. I mean, hopefully, we get to that scale—I mean, it’ll be a 50-, 60-year thing, and maybe we’ll never get there. I’ll give you just one example of something that I just find so intellectually interesting—maybe we’ll do something in this area, maybe we won’t—but it’s a great example of an area that people are, I think, deeply misunderstanding and is very controversial but has to be done. So I’ll just set the stage, which is, as a species and as a civilization, we’ve decided that we’re going to switch to electrify the world. We’ve also decided that we’re going to do AI at unprecedented scale. And we’re also, on a militaristic basis, arming ourselves to the teeth. I’m not going to provide a moral judgment of any of those three things—it is a reality that that’s happening. To do that, we need metals—we need cobalt, we need neodymium for magnets—we just need metals. The supply-demand curve is already screwed up on this, and if you look at the next 10, 20, 30 years, it’s going to get exponentially worse. How do we get metals now? In very unsustainable ways—often. If you look at the history of the Central African Republic, you look at Indonesian rainforests—mining has historically not been the most environmentally friendly thing to do. So where am I going with this? It turns out that there’s an area on the ocean floor—it’s one of the most arid regions in the world—called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, and something we’ve been looking at for a long time, and it’s been all over the news. And on the bottom of the seabed are trillions of individual nodules—golf-ball-sized rocks—that over millions and millions of years, pure metal—cobalt, you know, et cetera, et cetera—has formed around it. And it’s sitting there, and it is in an incredibly arid part of the world. There are organisms there, there is wildlife there—it’s not underground, though. So there’s plans, and there’s essentially an economic cold war happening between countries like the US and China on who has the rights to take a ship, throw a robot off the ship, and pick it up off the ground. And there’s American companies and Western companies that want to do this—there’s Chinese companies—there’s—and I’m going to try to steelman the arguments—but there’s environmental groups that make arguments, and I can see where they’re coming from—is, we should not touch the ocean, we should not do ocean mining—you could debate whether it’s mining or not—but we should not do it—it will kill species, there are unknown effects. What I think that’s missing, though, is, okay, how else are we going to address climate change? How else are we going to electrify the world? Because what if we run out of the metals to do it? But there’s also an argument that if we do ocean mining—or picking up on the ocean floor—we will just continue to do land mining. And so it’s a very controversial problem. But this is an area that I would hope we don’t shy away from being involved in and to actually really do a nuanced thing—a nuanced analysis of—we should have member meetings about this—we should actually do the diligence—we should see whether there’s projects—if there’s businesses or nonprofits or whatever—to get involved here. This is an area I feel really passionate about because it’s, like, an Achilles’ heel—by the way, China dominates it—China dominates 90% of metals refining—so there’s a whole geopolitical narrative here. That’s one example of a giant rabbit hole you could go down—there’s, like, 100 of these. So the question is, if you’re running an organization to solve societal problems, do you get involved in those or not? And there’s a lot of people that just would hear something like this and go, oh, that’s going to piss off my donors, or that’s going to piss off my constituency. And what we’re trying to build at Helena is an organization where we can have that debate, and it’s not controversial, and we’ll see if we can pull it off. All we can, I think, do, as leaders of the organization, is come at it with very pure intentions and a pure heart of, we’re doing this for the right reason—and check us—check our math, check our analysis.
Jess Mah: Wow, that’s really cool that you approach it that way. I guess if you have all of these problems collected on a spreadsheet—let’s say hundreds of problems you could solve—how do you decide what to rank-order, and how many can you actually handle at any given time? Because just this alone could be a full-time job for 100 people. So how do you manage it yourself?
Henry Elkus: Well, I don’t manage it myself—I have an amazing team. We have amazing investors that help us all the time—we have amazing donors, we have amazing board members. Besides the membership, there’s really thousands of people that we’ve kind of put in our network and worked with—so that’s number one. Number two, there is no way—there are people that will show you a quantitative checklist and say, this is my impact metric—and it makes me want to pull my hair out because there exist qualitative realities in the world—it’s, like, you can’t rank what is a more important project than others. If you just say, well, okay, it’s only about the metric tons of CO2 I’m going to prevent from coming into the atmosphere, then you can only compare it to other projects that have that metric system—and that is not a way to do it—so you can’t do it. So then the question is, how do we choose, and how do we rank?
Jess Mah: Or at least you have, like, a top 50 or top 100, and they’re not ranked per se—it doesn’t work that way.
Henry Elkus: It doesn’t—because I hope to get to the point where we can think about it not in terms of our capacity and bandwidth to execute and our capital and our assets—but right now we have to do it that way, and I suspect it will never be like that. And so we really look at, is—does this project have an impact that is really meaningful at a really global scale—but most importantly, can we do it? Like, is it going to actually work? And is it going to work during a timeline that is meaningful? And that is really the determining factor the more we’ve gotten into this. Now, if you had asked me, like, seven or eight years ago, I would have probably given you a very flowery intellectual answer—but the more experience you actually get being in the field and doing this, you realize how hard execution is and why so many people fail at it.
Jess Mah: Would you be open to sharing what are the top projects you’re pursuing at this moment?
Henry Elkus: Sure. One endeavor we are really deep in is psychedelics—and specifically the use of psychedelics for addressing critical mental health issues. We have spent the last year and a half plus just on an odyssey to try to study and then, you know, work with the FDA to get approved and then roll out MDMA-assisted therapy. That has not gone as well as we would have liked to—we’re still kind of really heads-down in doing that. We’re very optimistic that—and I think a lot of people are—that this will get approved. There’s a long kind of road with a lot of complexity in getting that done—but it’s something I feel extremely passionate about.
Jess Mah: How did you get passionate about that? How did you identify this specific problem in the first place?
Henry Elkus: So, I mean, mental health has been something that Helena has been involved in a long, long time. I mean, one area we’ve been involved in very deeply is in social media reform, actually—with members like Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin—who’s not a member, but he should be a member—he’s amazing—Daniel Schmachtenberger—and I don’t take any credit for the work they’ve done—we’ve supported them as much as we can, and I really love that. And they’ve studied kind of the effects of social media on the human brain and young people—suicidality—all of that. On the other side, we’ve looked at issues like PTSD—where PTSD has an unfortunate lack of approved ways to address it. And just looking at the data of the amount of people that have done MDMA-assisted therapy in its various forms that have lost their PTSD diagnosis when they were very close to suicide or there was no other option—and then looking at the toll, especially in the military community that the VA, for example, has—that was something that was a known entity to us. And we kind of then got acquainted with the idea that we could actually do a project in it through an investment. And so we did that investment, and we’re still working very heavily on that.
Noah Berkson: And you did clinical trials for this—the results were very good.
Henry Elkus: Yes.
Noah Berkson: You expected to get approved, and you were rejected.
Jess Mah: What happened—very publicly too, everywhere.
Henry Elkus: We didn’t do the trials—I mean, I don’t want to take any credit, good or bad—I mean, these were amazing people that have worked on this far before we got involved. We invested as the lead investor in Lykos, which was formerly MAPS Public Benefit Corporation. But yes, they did do phase three and phase three confirmatory study—if I have the numbers correct in my head—71%, I think, of—of the trial participants lost their PTSD diagnosis. The numbers were incredible.
Jess Mah: After three sessions.
Henry Elkus: After three sessions. And we deeply believe in it. There was a lot of politics involved in this, guys—I mean, it’s—it—there was—if you look at the—what happened with the FDA AdCom, which I won’t really be able to get into—
Jess Mah: Yeah.
Henry Elkus: But it was not rejected—the FDA—and we’re still in dialogue with them—has essentially requested a further study—which is bad—I mean, it’s very challenging for any company, especially a startup. And one of the reminders that you have to make is that in the pharmaceutical industry, startups have a very tough job—there’s very few successful startups in the pharmaceutical industry because of how expensive it is to take a drug through, you know, phase one, phase two, phase three, phase three confirmatory—to go through the new drug—the NDA—et cetera, et cetera. So there’s a big kind of question of how—what the path forward is to do an additional phase three study that fits—fits all the metrics necessary. I remain very optimistic this will happen—I think it is an inevitability that psychedelics—the correct use of regulated psychedelics in the right way, with compassion, with the right modalities—I have to put all those things on it—this will be a critical solution set for mental health. Beyond that, there’s incredible benefits that we can explore. There’s also other projects in the psychedelic space we’re getting involved in—one of them is an ibogaine, which I can talk a little bit about—which is massive for traumatic brain injury, for opioid addiction. But that’s one area that we’re very, very involved in and are working hard at.
Noah Berkson: How detrimental would that be to pharmaceutical companies that—that sell SSRIs, for instance—if MDMA-assisted therapy were to become a big player in that space?
Henry Elkus: Look, I think that when they’re—I’ll say this—when there’s a new modality of care that you don’t need to be on the rest of your life—we’re all in business—we know what ARR is—ARR is really great—annualized recurring revenue is really great—
Jess Mah: Whereas here it’s just, like, three sessions, and then you’re done.
Henry Elkus: So yes—now, how beautiful—what I will also say—what I will also say is that take esketamine—so this is the first—people debate whether esketamine is a psychedelic or not—but it was certainly one of the first kind of quasi-psychedelics to—to come onto the main stage—is the first FDA approval in the space—it is a nasal ketamine spray for depression. And Janssen—which is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson—put this through. And Lykos actually just hired as their chief medical officer the guy that oversaw that—he’s an amazing guy—we’ve spent a lot of time with him. This is actually one of the most profitable drugs for J&J right now. And it was actually—if I recall correctly—it was not a sure thing that they were going to support this and do—it was a big debate—they did it—and I think it’s actually one of the best year-over-year revenue recurring drugs that they have. So my belief is that the big pharma companies will get involved in this—but there’s a whole debate, and I think the right—you have to apply the right nuance about how do you roll out psychedelics? And there’s all these tangential issues—there’s a therapy component that has to be kind of put in—I think there’s a tremendous amount of good that the pharmaceutical industry does, but there’s a tremendous amount of bad—and that has to be factored in—it’s a really nuanced—it’s kind of a very nuanced project—I mean, it’s hard.
Jess Mah: Like, kudos for working on it.
Henry Elkus: First of all, we have to be humble and say, like, we’re not the ones that are suffering from this, and that wouldn’t—but it’s—when you start to meet people that so desperately want to bring this to the world—and people that have had their—I mean, it’s not an exaggeration to say that they really feel that their lives have been saved by this—you develop a very special kind of connection to this project, and you really want to get it over the line—but you also need to do it right, and you need to do it—and it’s a—it’s a big challenge, and it is the most emotional project we’ve ever done. And it was so—I mean, it was just ups and downs—I mean, I was just telling you before the podcast—there was this—you know, I was—I had food poisoning in Brazil, and I was in a hotel room watching the FDA advisory committee talk about—so brutal—and I mean—but, you know, it was just watching and just going, oh, like, this—this sucks—like, this really sucks—and—and that every side—and I trust that every side of this debate wants what is best for patients and will just have to work in the most good-faith way to get this over the line. And I think we have to listen to every critique, and we have to incorporate that—there’s no easy way here—so that’s—that’s one—I wish this—
Jess Mah: Was available years ago—I talked to Rick Doblin—who’s a founder of the MAPS project—about a week after my last boyfriend died—he served as a Marine, frontline combat in Iraq, and committed suicide.
Henry Elkus: I’m sorry, Jess.
Jess Mah: Thank you. And, you know, I found out about this—got to this obviously a little too late—but I really believe in that work—so it’s cool that you’re working on it.
Henry Elkus: I mean, we’re not giving up—I mean, please don’t—yeah—and there’s a lot of amazing people—I mean—so that’s one—I mean, I’ll give you another one that we just announced today that we’re really excited by—it was completely different—it shows you the diversity of the project—but we became the lead investor in a company called Matter—which is going to be the first mass-market electric motorcycle in India. And why this? Well, there hasn’t really been a kind of Tesla-type story in India—one of the main reasons is that in India, you travel on two wheels primarily rather than four. And so there’s been electrified rickshaws and scooters—but there hasn’t really been that motorcycle—and it is also going to be the first kind of startup OEM in India—they’re really producing the motorcycle in India.
Jess Mah: And the founders are based in India—they understand—
Henry Elkus: Yes—my team is actually in India right now—the deal team that’s leading this is in India right now at the factory—they’re launching in a couple of weeks and actually delivering the bikes—they sold out all 40,000 pretty quickly—in the launch video—it’s amazing—we’re really psyched about that—so that’s another one we’re working very deeply on.
Jess Mah: Did you identify the problem and search for a company, or did they pitch you, and you’re, like, wow, this is actually right in line with what we’d want to—
Henry Elkus: In this particular case, we absolutely will not take credit—I mean, there’s a—I mean, there’s a great thesis about the growth of the Indian economy—there’s a great thesis about—I think the fact that electrification probably will happen—but we did not think about that from a first principle—we saw the company, and on the investing side—what I will say is, oftentimes, we get a lot of great deal flow of great opportunities that come in, and it’s very hard to kind of—we do have areas that we look at—but it’s really about the team—we’re very concentrated in our investing—so we’ll do 10- to $30-million checks to take large portions of a company, and we’ll do Series A–type investing—so we’re not doing that many projects at a time. And so we’ll spend a lot of time with the team—we’ll really go into DD and try to help the company as much as humanly possible. And so it’s hard to kind of pre-select—we’re only going to do stuff in that space—we want to be very kind of wide-open with which teams we’re going to work with.
Jess Mah: And how many deals will you do per year? Or you don’t think about it that way?
Henry Elkus: And I would like to not think about the question—I mean, it’s—it’s—no, it’s—it’s capital-constrained—so, you know, we—we—you know, we—before we had a fund, we had to do what are called SPVs, in which you find a deal, you raise money from investors, and then you try to do it at the same time while the deal is still there—which is really challenging—we did a lot of those—then we raised a fund—first one was $105 million—and there’s a certain amount of work that you can do with that money—so right now, it’s about two or three a year—my hope is that next year we do a lot more, and we grow our capital base.
Jess Mah: Yeah.
Noah Berkson: You talked about reading as something that is a very big part of your life but was also really transformative to you.
Henry Elkus: Yeah.
Noah Berkson: Where did that come from? You mentioned as a kid not feeling like an intellectual—where did that change?
Henry Elkus: Great question—so I—yeah—
Jess Mah: And 100 bucks a year? That’s insane—it’s, like, two bucks a week.
Henry Elkus: I love reading—I mean, reading has completely and fundamentally changed my life—I love talking about it, too, because I feel like it’s, like, you can take the best ideas that humans have ever come up with and then put them into your brain and then make decisions with that knowledge—and it’s, like, why people don’t spend their lives just doing that—there’s a great—I’m going to completely mispronounce it—but there’s this—this, I think, Aristotelian term called phronesis—I know I’m mispronouncing it—but it’s—if I best understand it—it’s the act of spending about half of your life just intaking information, and then the other half just being an idiot in the field and actually trying to use that information—and that if you can actually spend those two kind of 50-50 slivers well for the rest of your life—it’s, like, the most complete way to live—and I think it’s—
Jess Mah: Do you actually operate like that where you’ll block off half the day for information consumption and half for operations?
Henry Elkus: I try—but I’m addicted to social media just like everybody else is—I have all of these issues just like everybody else does—so I’m not a superhuman in any way—but I’ll tell the story about reading—so I have to admit—just to be honest—is that when I was in high school and college, I did not read—I never sat down and was, like, I’m gonna read a book front to back—I just never did—I would just—I would just not do it—and I kind of BSed a lot of—of—BS is the wrong term—I mean, I really did care about the courses and the education I was getting—I deeply cared about it—but I just never committed myself to reading—and it was an attention span thing—all that—I then started Helena and actually started to get members into the organization—and I’ll never forget this—I went to Burning Man—I mean, I went to Burning Man, and I went with a friend of mine, and we had an amazing, kind of crazy time—we—we kind of were driving home, and he’s very close with me, and his dad is a history professor—I respect him to death—David Nielsen is his dad—and I was on the phone with his dad and talking to my friend Thomas, and Thomas kind of turned to me, and he basically said, look, dude, you have, like, a couple people that have now joined this thing you’re doing, and one of them is a Nobel Prize winner—the other guy’s a four-star general—you don’t read—if you think that you’re going to actually sit with these people and then have a—a high-level conversation that could turn into something, and you haven’t respected them and respected yourself by actually spending years, like, focusing on what do they do—like, at a deep level that isn’t cursory—you can’t just regurgitate a Wikipedia page—then you’re never going to succeed—like, what you’re doing is never going to actually turn into anything besides, like, a cute little networking group—and you probably won’t even pull that off because you won’t have good conversations with them—and my ego, of course, responded very negatively to that—and the way that I responded to it was, well, I’ll just—I’ll just do it—like, you know—and—and his—his dad was a Great Books professor—so there’s these amazing programs in college where you read a preset—and it was a St. John’s Great Books professor—I understand correctly—and so I just actually printed out the St. John’s kind of curriculum—I didn’t read the entire thing—but I just started churning out the books and then five—five or six of those books, and I was completely hooked—and there’s this magic to sitting down with no phone—your phone’s in another room, and it’s just the physical book, and just you get through a—like, book about human history or about civilizational history or big history or a book about physics or chemistry, and it’s—it’s just completely hooked me—and I started to just read because I loved it—not because it was this kind of weaponized operational thing that would be good for business or good for my company—and I have an Instagram where I post all the books—I’m a complete book nerd—and I just can’t speak enough about the benefit it has provided me—and it’s not that I can, like, be cool at parties—or be cool at very nerdy parties—it’s more that when I’m thinking about a project or thinking about making a decision, you can—you can actually recall the other human beings that had been through similar experiences and what their results were—and it’s an incredibly profound thing to go through—I don’t know—I mean, I can talk about it for hours.
Noah Berkson: Are there any books that were very transformative to you or—
Henry Elkus: Yeah—I’m asked this question all the time—so I’ll give you, like, the—there’s so many—but I’ll give you a couple that are not necessarily, like, a hierarchy—but just are just amazing—and I apologize because some of them are book series—there’s a book series called The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant—which is a husband-and-wife team that I believe spent 50 years doing this—and I think there’s, like, eight or nine—or maybe nine or 10—10 of them—each of them is over a thousand pages—and it’s just hardcore civilizational history—and it’s not bibliographic, meaning—it’s not, like, this happened, and this happened, and this happened—these people traveled to Egypt and then said, we’re really going to do Egyptian history—and they write prose about what happened over a thousand-year period—what the art was like, what people were like—that makes you cry—like, I’ve cried reading—and it’s—so there’s an entire set—and if all you do is just read these the rest of your life—even though they’re very—I would—and if you want to cheat—they wrote a summary at the end—I think at the end of it—called The Lessons of History—which is, like, 150 pages that is just breathtaking—and so if you just read that—you get a sense of, like, what has happened—and it’s extremely biased—it’s Western—it’s, like, white people writing about Western—you can attack it from every angle—I understand—but it’s—it’s unbelievable—so that’s one—there’s a—another book series about Lyndon Johnson—LBJ—written by Robert Caro—and it is, to me, the greatest biography writing in history—I won’t go into a rabbit hole on that—but I would read those—that changes your life because you can see somebody go from extreme poverty—Johnson City, Texas—to being the most powerful person in the world—and exactly what was done in this extraordinarily Machiavellian way—and it helps you understand ego and human nature—so that’s another one—a third one that I always recommend is called Finite and Infinite Games—and I believe it’s written by somebody named James P. Carse—it’s an amazing book, and it’s so simple, and it stuck out to me as just extraordinarily helpful—and so I’ll just explain it really quickly—if me and you are playing chess—it’s a finite game—I either beat you, or we draw, or I lose—if you’re in a marriage—you don’t win a marriage—if you’re in a nuclear war—you don’t win the nuclear war—right?—so a game of chess is a finite game—but a marriage or a relationship is an infinite game—in an infinite game—the object of the game is not to win or lose—it’s actually to perpetuate the game—to keep the game going—so, like, nuclear politics—the goal is to not end the world or to win—nuclear politics is to not have a nuclear war—so you don’t want to beat China in nuclear war—you don’t want to participate with China in nuclear war—you want to work with China to perpetuate the game of human civilization—you don’t want to win a marriage—you want to continue the marriage—so it’s healthy in a relationship—right—so what the book does—in this extraordinarily eloquent and kind of shocking way that makes you realize the mistakes you’re making in your life—is it tells you how to understand whether you’re playing a finite or an infinite game—and you really want to play infinite games—you don’t want to play finite games—and this goes back to the point on people using capitalism to create mental models of beating the finite game of capitalism to then play the infinite game of philanthropy—which is very different—so that was—I could go on for another hour—but those—those are three kind of cheater—because two of them are series—but those are three really great ones.
Noah Berkson: Could you tell us a bit about America in One Room? I know that we—we glazed over it.
Henry Elkus: It’s an amazing project—it’s one of the most meaningful things we’ve done, and I want to do it for a long time—I’ll try to explain it really simply—there is a poll that was done, and they asked people about what they thought of the 1965 Civic Affairs Act—and they asked, like, a million people—and people had very strong opinions—I hate this—or I really like it—or I really don’t like this—and there is no 1965 Civic Affairs Act—and so it tells you a little bit about polling—and another issue is polarization in America—which I don’t need to summarize—there’s an incredible team at Stanford led by Jim Fishkin and Larry Diamond—who are both Helena members—that do something called deliberative polling or deliberative democracy—it is a scientific process of selecting a group of people that is representative of a country or of a larger populace—and they’ve been doing this for 30 years before we got involved in any way—we worked with them and took that and did a project called America in One Room—this was in 2019—we got 535 people that were as accurate a representation of the US voting electorate as possible—and we had a control group that was similar size—we raised the money and then bought out the Gaylord Texan Hotel in Texas—we’re the largest hotel in Texas—we kicked everybody out of the hotel, and we flew the 535 people—like, we flew America to one room—before they arrived—we polled them on what they thought of the—what their political views were in the 2020—heading up to the 2020 general election—what do you think about immigration?—what do you think about this?—very detailed polls before they arrived—so we got the starting value—which looked very much like what a Pew poll or a regular poll would say—they then spent three magical days together—which I don’t have enough time to explain in detail—but they debated for nine hours a day—and then they talked to the presidential candidates and other experts at night—and then they did it again—and then they did it again—and if you just google America in One Room—an incredibly transformational thing occurred in which instead of fighting each other—instead of disagreeing—they all converged, and the extremes actually fell away—people converged to the center, and up to 50% changes in opinion occurred on these issues—because we had a poll at the very end when they left—the New York Times put it on the cover—Obama endorsed it—it was this amazing project—we’ve now turned into multiple other efforts—which I can talk about—what’s interesting is people go—okay—that was cute—you did this once—and it was in a vacuum—it’s true—we have to scale it—there’s a lot of ways we can do that—but the other critique that we get is, it’s not sticky—it’s, like—okay—you took these people—they had this amazing experience—but then they go back to their hometowns, and they’re just going to revert back to their opinion—the New York Times actually surprised us by revisiting a year at the year anniversary—and they went back to the 535 people, and they repolled them—and they—and they did another study—and we did not—we’re not involved in the study—and they showed that it was sticky—and so we deeply believe that this is actually a social technology—ironically—if you remove social media—you remove tech from this—that you can actually have a way to organize human beings in a more democratic process that makes democracy not just work—but shine and scale and be very, very effective—and so this is an effort that we’ve now turned into multiple different projects—we just did one a couple months ago that just came in—it’s got a lot of coverage—it’s on Good Morning America and NBC Nightly News—on first-time voters—it was the first time ever that people that were voting for the first time—we did a representative sample—and the next one we’re going to do is on AI—it’ll be on AI policy, and I’m very excited for it—we’ll get a representative sample of the United States in one room, and we’re just going to focus on the critical decisions that need to be made about regulating or understanding or making decisions based upon this thing that we’re dealing with—AI—and that’ll be a massive effort, and I hope we pull it off—but that’ll be the next one.
Jess Mah: Wow.
Noah Berkson: Henry, you are an extremely interesting person—I think we could sit and listen to you talk about this all day—where can people find you?
Henry Elkus: Helena.org—you can see all the projects—you can email me—[email protected]—I would also go to Instagram—LKUSLIST—that’s a way you can engage me—that’s where I post the books—and one of my favorite communities that’s been built is this book Instagram—because people will—unbelievable—people will just message me and say—hey—have you read this?—and it’s a great way actually to engage with me and talk to me on an intellectual level—so I love when people reach out that way as well.
Jess Mah: Final question I have for you is the question you ask Helena members when you onboard them—what else do you need help with—aside from obviously infinite capital resources—what else are you spending so much of your time on that you would really like more assistance with that your members are, for whatever reason, unable to fully assist you with at this moment?
Henry Elkus: Besides capital?
Jess Mah: Besides capital—I’ll help you with that—by the way—I have an IR team, and we work with a lot of ultra-high-net-worth—so I’ll deploy that for you.
Henry Elkus: But yeah—I think—
Jess Mah: How else?
Henry Elkus: Really simple—which is the—when I look at the really—the big successes we’ve had—it’s been because there was somebody special on our team that—like, we didn’t talk about one project we’re doing—it’s in biosecurity—it’s in the intersection of AI and biosecurity—and we have someone on our team named Evan—for example—just shout him out—that is just unbelievable—and if you ask Sam—my business partner—this project would not be where it is—not without Sam and without Evan—and so if there’s somebody that really connects with this, and you really feel like it would be great to work with us—I think that’s one area—and we have a small team—I try to hire as few people as humanly possible for a lot of reasons—but really exceptional people that really, deeply care about this—and the type of person that we like is often to say somebody who is in the Goldman Sachs position but is really miserable—somebody who’s, like, a killer—like, they’re very good—they’re great at finance—or they’re great at VC—or they’re in the nonprofit world, and they can execute, and they’ve done very well—but they want something that’s more meaningful—and they wake up in the morning—and the asset that they don’t have—to answer your question—is, like, happiness and, like, contentment—and I think our job is extraordinarily hard at Helena—but we—we sleep really well at night because I think the projects we’re doing are very interesting—and so there’s a lot of people that are attracted to that—and if you—if you’re one of those people—then to reach out to us would be great.
Jess Mah: Amazing—awesome—thank you.
Noah Berkson: Thanks again.
Jess Mah: This is such a good pod.