Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently

by Berns, Gregory

  How does such a society deal with bad apples? It punishes them. But punishment is costly, and it calls upon individual members of the society to perform essentially altruistic acts for the benefit of the common good. Recent neuroeconomic experiments have demonstrated why the mere possibility of punishment is both necessary and desirable to form cooperative relationships in a society. It is important for the iconoclast to be aware of the biological mechanisms that exist in our brains that monitor socially acceptable and unacceptable behavior, because they act as filters for potential deception.

  Bettina Rockenbach, an economist at the London School of Economics, performed a critical experiment on what determines whether people trust each other. She had individuals play a public goods game. This game required each participant to contribute money to a common pool. The money in the pool accrued earnings and was then redistributed to all the participants. The more money in the pool, the more money that everyone made. But there was a selfish incentive to take a free ride. Even if a person didn’t contribute anything, they still reaped the benefits of the distribution of the common pool of money. In each round of Rockenbach’s experiment, participants had the choice of playing the game with, or without, the possibility of punishing free riders. Initially, most participants chose to play the game without the possibility of punishment—a sort of utopian view of the world. But after just a few rounds, more than 70 percent of the participants were playing the game that allowed punishment, whether the punishment was actually exercised or not. On closer examination, Rockenbach found that only a few individuals formed the glue of the society and punished people, but they established and enforced a cooperative culture that attracted even previously noncooperative individuals.29 Rockenbach’s experiment takes Buffett’s remark about reputation one step further. The experiment demonstrates on yet another level the importance of knowing who makes up the “shadow network”—which people form the glue of the community. Initial efforts should be targeted to these people or the people immediately connected to them. This is where Armstrong ultimately failed. His onetime friend, David Sarnoff, was president of RCA and probably the single most important person in the radio community. When Armstrong had a falling out with Sarnoff, Armstrong lost his connection and damaged his reputation with the one person who could have made the difference for him.

  Building Networks

  As we have seen in this chapter, the transition from solitary iconoclast to a successful one requires the masses of noniconoclasts to buy into an idea. Iconoclasts such as Ray Kroc and Arnold Schwarzenegger were successful as much for their novel ideas as their ability to connect to other people. The successful iconoclast cannot wait for the world to see things the way he does. He must reach out and connect with people who initially will not share his views. Every iconoclast encounters resistance, but it is only the successful ones who are able, through social intelligence, to persuade other people.

  Persuasion is perhaps too strong a word, because it implies a conscious, rational process. But as we’ve seen in this chapter, selling an idea appeals only partly to rational thought. The successful iconoclasts have an uncommon ability to connect on a social level that transcends the idea itself. The key to doing this is through social networks. In order to be successful, the iconoclast builds a network through two fundamental approaches: familiarity and reputation.

  Drawing on recent advances in network science, the iconoclast can shrink the six degrees of separation between any two individuals. The goal of the iconoclast is to decrease the number of jumps between himself and connectors in the community that he is selling to. There are no shortcuts. The biggest impediment to creating new connections is the anonymity of electronic communications. E-mail is so cheap that it might as well be worthless as a medium for creating new contacts. Although e-mail is valuable for maintaining existing networks, the iconoclast must use more expensive means of communications to create meaningful social connections.

  The goal is keep people’s amygdalae from firing. In addition to responding to fearful situations, the amygdala has a hair trigger for anything unfamiliar. Iconoclasts, by definition, are foreign to most people, and anything that seems new or different will tend to set off the amygdala in most people. This is not a good situation. When the amygdala fires, it activates the arousal system of the body. The end result is that people will avoid the unfamiliar.

  The key to taming other people’s amygdalae lies in familiarity. The successful iconoclast creates an aura of familiarity to keep the amygdalae of his target audience in check. When Ray Kroc created Ronald McDonald as a connector to children, he banked on the familiarity of clowns to kids. Without this familiarity, it would have been absurd to market hamburgers to children with no disposable income. Arnold Schwarzenegger accomplished the same feat. Having already created connections with millions of people through movie roles, he banked on his familiarity to become governor of California.

  In building social networks, the iconoclast strives to achieve a sense of familiarity, but he also must pay attention to the second key element of social intelligence by maintaining a positive reputation. The human brain has evolved over the last million years in small-world environments. The iconoclast must realize that even though we live in a global economy, our brains evolved for social interactions on much smaller scales. The human brain is wired under the assumption of reciprocity. Every social interaction is undertaken under the assumption of tit for tat. This biological golden rule means that the iconoclast must approach every interaction as if the roles will be reversed someday. Burn no bridges (at least while you’re an anonymous iconoclast). As Warren Buffett remarked, a reputation, which can take years to establish, can be destroyed in minutes.

  Finally, would-be iconoclasts should take notice about the black book of who knows whom. Even if you don’t know Donald Trump, you need to have a playbook of the routes to him. Given the high attrition rate of messages, the shorter the route, the more likely you will be able to get a message through. But distance is not always the most important factor. Messages sometimes can take a more circuitous route if they have a greater chance of reaching the intended recipient. Here is where it is helpful to have a sense of the shadow network of who knows whom.

  The ultimate goal, through familiarity and reputation, is for the iconoclast to shrink his world like Picasso. Don’t be a Van Gogh.

  SEVEN

  Private Spaceflight—

  A Case Study of Iconoclasts

  Working Together

  Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the

  moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge

  and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask

  God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and

  greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

  —John F. Kennedy Jr., September 12, 1962

  THE SPACESHIPS—MORE AIRPLANE THAN rocket really—sit majestically on the New Mexico tarmac. Diminutive by NASA standards and constructed of carbon composites to save weight, these craft look nothing like what the astronauts of yore rode into space and beyond. You can walk up to these babies and run your hand over their bodies. You have no trouble standing on tiptoes and stroking the top of the fuselage, but duck down to inspect the wings because they hover about four feet from the ground. No massive wingspan here. These spaceships are as light and compact as a Cessna. But they possess a great deal more power than a light aircraft, and they do, of course, have a somewhat higher altitude rating—something beyond 300,000 feet. That’s 100 kilometers. Sixty-two miles. The edge of space.

  The spacecraft, however, are not yet fully functional. They are on display at the second annual exposition of the X PRIZE Cup. A modern version of the space exposition, the X PRIZE Cup has evolved into a strange mix of participants. It is a place where venture capitalists and angel investors mingle with the engineers of hybrid air/spacecraft. The presidents of these companies hunt for infusions of cash to fuel t
heir nascent enterprises. Hopeful passengers browse the mockups, while the spokespeople hype their craft as the safest and most efficient means to get into space. The passengers run the spectrum from middle-aged Trekkies to successful businessmen. Most are old enough to have watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon, but a few were born well after the golden era of spaceflight. Everyone from the average guy checking out propulsion systems up to the CEO of the biggest company at the expo shares the dream of someday reaching outer space. The creation of private manned space travel is a case study in iconoclasm.

  Putting ordinary citizens into space strikes most people as crazy. The notion of flying on a privately built rocket ship tends to elicit polar responses. Some say, “When can I sign up?” and others think, “Not a chance.” Most people are in the latter category. Which makes the first group (the iconoclasts) all the more interesting. And the people who are building these spaceships are iconoclasts in the most rugged sense. They share a vision of pushing into a new frontier. It is a frontier that the vast majority of humanity currently has no access to, no interest in, and wonders why anyone should spend exorbitant sums of money to go into space when there are so many vexing problems here on Earth. It is a question as old as the space program itself. To even consider such a venture flies in the face of conventional wisdom.

  Apart from being interesting in its own right, the privatization of spaceflight represents a unique case study in iconoclasm. The key players are all iconoclasts, but in different ways. Each of them, however, exemplifies at least one of the three characteristics that have already been described: (1) seeing differently, (2) dealing with fear, and (3) social intelligence.

  The Challenge

  The big boys and girls want to get into orbit. And with the market price currently set at $20 million, you need a big bank account to go along with the cojones to ride that candle. Robert Bigelow, an iconoclast who made his fortune through Budget Suites, formed Bigelow Aerospace in 1999 to promote the commercialization of low-Earth-orbit businesses. In part of its mission statement, Bigelow summarizes a sentiment that Henry Ford voiced a century earlier, that only by conquering fear of failure is success possible: “Our goal is to get humanity into space so we can experiment, toy with ideas, try new and different things, and eventually make that miraculous mistake leading to a discovery that will change life forever.”1 But getting there is not going to be easy.

  Why is it so difficult to get into orbit? In a word, energy. The force of gravity pulls all objects toward the center of the Earth. If you are standing on the surface, then the ground gets in the way and pushes back, but in space there is nothing to prevent you from falling inward. The way around the problem is to circle the planet at a high speed. To maintain this speed, the object must be outside the atmosphere, or else the air friction would slow the craft down or burn it up. The atmosphere thins out enough at an altitude of about 150 km (93 miles). In order to counteract the pull of gravity at that height, an object must be moving at 17,500 miles per hour. To get an object moving from a standstill up to that velocity requires a large amount of energy. The heavier the object, the more energy it takes.

  A rocket is nothing more than a tube that shoots something out one end, and because of Newton’s third law, the rocket moves in the opposite direction. In 1887, exactly two hundred years after Newton published his famous laws, a Russian teacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, figured out how to use them to get into space. Starting with the third law, Tsiolkovsky reasoned that in order to achieve the critical velocity, you had to carry a propellant that could be expelled from the rocket in the direction opposite to which you wanted to go. The propellant would not have to weigh very much as long as it was shot out at a very high speed. Tsiolkovsky showed that there are only three elements of rocket design that determine how fast it goes: (1) the speed at which fuel is ejected, (2) how much the fuel weighs, and (3) how much the rocket weighs. The first two, which address the nature of fuel, are dealt with by basic chemistry that hasn’t changed since Tsiolkovsky’s time. It is the third factor, rocket weight, where the iconoclast comes in.

  The holy grail of orbital spaceflight has been the single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) vehicle. But as the Tsiolkovsky equation shows, you need an exceptionally light vehicle that can hold roughly ten times its weight in fuel. The added acceleration and g-forces during launch, however, mean that the vehicle actually has to withstand twice that much force, if not more. Although the space shuttle is constructed primarily from aluminum and titanium alloys, it still has a launch weight ratio of six, which is too low for an SSTO, so its engineers adopted a multistage propulsion system. The two solid rocket boosters strapped to the sides of the shuttle, each developing 2.5 million pounds of thrust, provide most of the power to get the shuttle going. The complexity of the shuttle propulsion system makes it vulnerable to failure from a number of causes, and such an approach is not commercially feasible for the private sector. The key is to make the rockets as simple as possible, and for the propulsion system, that means a single-stage vehicle.

  Burt Rutan: The Iconoclast Engineer Who Sees Differently

  You need a different approach to rocketry. You need someone who can approach the design from a different perspective and see rockets differently than NASA. His name is Burt Rutan. Rutan has revolutionized the aerospace industry more than any other person. For forty years, Rutan has known that the key to more efficient aircraft and, ultimately, spacecraft is through materials engineering. Build them strong but light, and you can do a lot. This is a very different perception of the problem that NASA struggled with for decades. The conventional—NASA’s—approach was to build bigger and more powerful engines. But Rutan has taken rocket design in the other direction, and this is what makes him an iconoclast.

  Keeping it simple is an understatement for Rutan. Rutan is a hero in the aerospace industry and has achieved what no engineer since perhaps Thomas Edison has done: celebrity status. First, there are the sideburns—Elvis style, circa 1970. Retro, yes, but they seem to fit with Rutan’s unusual approach to aircraft design. But then there are the accomplishments. His company, Scaled Composites, has posted a profit in over ninety consecutive quarters, which is an achievement unheard of in the aerospace industry. It has rolled out thirty-four new types of aircraft in thirty years, and in the process of testing them, has never suffered a fatal crash.2 In the 1980s Rutan designed and built Voyager, the first aircraft to fly around the world without stopping or refueling on a trip that took nine days.

  Within the aerospace community, Rutan is known as an iconoclast because of his unconventional aircraft designs. It was with characteristic flair that Rutan unveiled his secret spaceship in 2003. The project, known only as “Tier One” within the company, was so secret that almost nobody outside Scaled knew of its existence, even though Rutan had started conceptual designs in 1997. Considering that Rutan had never built a supersonic aircraft, and that he then began contemplating a vehicle that would need to reach Mach 3 in under a minute, even those within Scaled thought he might have gone too far. But for Rutan, space represented a stepping-stone to even more exciting possibilities, such as the moon or even other planets. He perceived an opportunity where others were afraid.

  Rutan grew up in the sleepy farming town of Dinuba, California, a community in the Central Valley known primarily for its raisin production. The son of a dentist, Rutan was obsessed with airplanes and flying, and even soloed before getting his driver’s license. He studied aeronautical engineering in college and then cut his teeth as a test engineer at Edwards Air Force Base in Mojave. After seven years, he left to design his own aircraft, mainly small two-seater kits for airplane hobbyists. He sold these plans under the auspices of the Rutan Aircraft Factory, or RAF. Too poor to test his designs in a wind tunnel, Rutan developed what would become a lifelong philosophy to field-testing his designs. He could be seen barreling down desert roads in his station wagon with a fuselage strapped to its roof. Echoing Henry Ford’s philosophy, Rutan once sai
d, “Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.”3 His big breakthrough came in the late ’70s, when Rutan figured out an easy way to make structural components out of fiberglass strips. In a classic example of how one thing changes the perception of another, Rutan’s inspiration came from the most unlikely of places: surfing. Surfboard makers of the ’60s abandoned wood for fiberglass-covered foam, and Rutan adopted the same techniques for airplanes. He carved smoother, more aerodynamic shapes out of foam than could be manufactured with wood or aluminum. By laying fiberglass over the foam blanks, Rutan created wings and fuselages that were light, yet strong. In 1982, he founded Scaled Composites to design and build prototypes for the air force and NASA.