The Intellectual Anarchy Podcast

We’re doing the grinding, sometimes frustrating work of delivering change—inch by inch, day by day.

– Barack Obama

In 2012, the Eastman Kodak Company, the firm that dominated still and motion photography for over a century, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The rise of digital imaging had eaten away at their business until they were forced to sell off their legacy photographic film business. Yet, it was Kodak itself that ha...

Innovation in the sciences is always linked in some way, either directly or indirectly, to a human experience.

– John Maeda

Deep science wrestles with the principles and fundamental concepts of the universe. It is inherently disruptive and results in disruptive innovation. However, the first market inclination of scientists or researchers – their ideas for taking the deep science to commercial use – is almost always wrong. As special...

Play lies at the core of creativity and innovation

– Stuart Brown

Play excites. In motivates. It encourages creative problem solving. But play is much more than an antidote to despair, it produces higher performance in knowledge workers of all types. A problem in our country is the current method of pushing STEM curriculum in education… School systems believe that if they mandate STEM classes then their students will be better prepar...

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” – Peter Drucker


Most companies are built to manage, which can come at the expense of innovation. Conversely, companies that are built to innovate are often challenging to manage. In this episode, Patrick K. Sullivan and Catherine Cruz discuss how vertical, command-and-control management styles can make sense for some businesses, such as a manufacturing plant, but also how today’s...

“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.” – Nikola Tesla


A former DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) program manager once called Oceanit staff, “the Special Forces of tech”. Since then, Oceanit adopted the term “...

“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...