The Intellectual Anarchy Podcast

“It is better to create than to learn. Creating is the essence of life.” – Julius Caesar

When we’re young, we learn by doing, by making things. Unfortunately, this “making stuff” mindset is largely stamped out by high school in the name of efficiency and classroom control. A contributing factor is the class distinction attached to “making” instead of “thinking.” Making, e.g. building or manufacturing, are considered lower-class occu...

“I have never let schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain

Education is one of the most important innovations the world has ever produced. The ability of individuals to pass on their hard-won knowledge and experience to another, in a fraction of the time it took to acquire, is a feat of incredible intellectual leverage. Today, we mine more than 50,000 new PhDs per year in the U.S. alone. Yet, with democratization of educ...

“Geography is destiny.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

Technology development in the United States has recently been concentrated in a handful of regions, like Silicon Valley or the Northeast Corridor. Oceanit was founded in Hawaii; not just outside this traditional “loop,” but remote from it: 2,500 miles from the U.S. Mainland and 4,000 miles from Japan. Yet, Honolulu is the 11th largest city in the US and is a major hub for military and tra...

“We all have a blind spot, and it’s shaped exactly like us.” – Junot Diaz

In Games for the Super-Intelligent, James Fixx tells the anecdote of a high school physics teacher who challenges his students to determine the height of a building using only a barometer. He believes the “right” method is to read the barometer at ground level, climb to the top of the building for another reading, and calculate the height via the measured pres...

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain

Groupthink is a cognitive bias that impairs decision making by groups of otherwise highly qualified individuals. That is, a group of smart people in a room will sometimes make a worse decision than any of them would make on their own. Group social pressure can lead to a deterioration of, “mental efficiency, reality testing, and mo...

“If an expert tells you it can’t be done, get another expert.” – David Ben-Gurion

Experts are essential to innovation. They know the tools and methods of the field, enabling a rapid start. No time is wasted covering well-trod ground. They know the conventions and terminology of the field and are able to communicate with other experts. But these advantages come at a price… Because experts are so knowledgeable in their own field, they...

“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.” – Richard Branson. Clayton Christensen first coined the term “disruptive innovation” 20 years ago in his landmark book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, to explain, very narrowly, the destruction of existing markets by low-end entrants, but it has come to mean any sweeping innovation that disrupts an industry. In this episode, Oceanit’s Patrick Sullivan ...

Dr. Patrick K. Sullivan, author of Intellectual Anarchy: The Art of Disruptive Innovation, joins journalist Catherine Cruz for a deep dive into the mindsets, methods, and moments that spark true innovation. In the coming episodes, they’ll unpack how questioning convention, defeating groupthink, and embracing “principled anarchy” can lead to breakthroughs across science, design, technology, and education.

From the lab to the real wor...