The UIUC Talkshow

Oct 20, 2026 · 1h 33m

Bruce Reznick is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.He entered Caltech at 16, studied at Stanford, and spent over four decades at Illinois thinking about mathematics, teaching, and working on problems that sometimes stayed with him for decades.In this conversation, we talk about Richard Feynman, mathematical intuition, randomness, pattern recognition, unsolved problems, AI and theorem proving, whether mathematics is invented or discovered, and why some problems are worth spending a lifetime on.We also discuss love, luck, teaching, Caltech, Ramanujan, confirmation bias, the Champagne Problem, and Reznick’s advice for young people.Math is groovy.*EPISODE LINKS:*- Bruce Reznick's Website: https://reznick.web.illinois.edu/- Bruce Reznick's UIUC Website: https://math.illinois.edu/directory/profile/reznick*OUTLINE:*0:00 - Retirement, Horses, and the 30-Hour Workweek3:18 - Math Is Like Writing Jokes6:10 - Dating Advice for STEM Students10:14 - How Much of Life Is Luck?12:29 - Love14:37 - Can You Understand Love With Math?17:14 - Unfinished Work as a Gift to Your Future Self18:05 - Getting Into Caltech at 1619:22 - Why He Became a Teacher22:45 - Growing Up With a Mathematical Mind24:09 - A Culture That Made It Safe to Be a Nerd27:47 - Why Do Anything for Its Own Sake?29:40 - Were People Ever Really in College Just to Learn?32:35 - What Mathematicians Understand About the World33:43 - The Beautiful Things Math Can’t Explain35:32 - Meeting Richard Feynman at a Party39:04 - What Made Richard Feynman Different41:13 - Doing Quantum Mechanics Without Understanding Quantum Mechanics43:22 - Why Caltech Was “Safe to Want to Learn”45:17 - What Illinois Could Do Better46:18 - How UIUC Changed During His 44 Years Here47:37 - What COVID Did to Students52:19 - A Math Problem He’s Been Thinking About for 40 Years54:03 - What Makes a Problem Worth Solving?55:57 - Why Spend Your Life Studying Polynomials?57:00 - Ramanujan, 1729, and Why Some Numbers Feel Special1:00:21 - Why Humans Can’t Stop Looking for Patterns1:02:30 - The Greatest Unsolved Problems in Mathematics1:04:23 - How Smart People Convince Themselves They’re Right1:07:02 - Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered?1:09:44 - How a Mathematician Approaches a Problem He’s Never Seen Before1:12:34 - How a Math Problem Ended Up on a Beer Can1:14:10 - What We Lose When Math Becomes Too Algebraic1:17:20 - What Is Intuition?1:20:40 - Why Randomness Still Creates Patterns1:22:57 - Is Mathematics Objective?1:24:39 - Advice for Young People 🚥 Overrated or Underrated 🚥1:25:41 - 🧮 Ramanujan1:26:03 - 🏛️ Altgeld Hall1:26:27 - 📐 Euler1:26:46 - ♟️ Game Theory1:27:47 - 📈 The Fourier Transform 1:28:23 - Can AI Discover New Mathematics?1:29:47 - His Favorite Theorem1:30:56 - What It’s Like to Attend a Celebration of Your Own Life1:32:09 - Closing Words1:33:12 - “Math Is Groovy”*Consider Supporting Us*If you enjoy our talk show and videos, your support means the world to us! Your contributions help us keep the show running and focus on creating interesting conversations with interesting people. Every dollar goes towards our basic needs, allowing us to dedicate more time and energy to this project. Support us here: https://uiuctalkshow.substack.com/*SOCIAL:*- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uiuctalkshow- X: https://twitter.com/uiuctalkshow- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@uiuctalkshow- Patreon https://www.patreon.com/uiuctalkshow- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3ezoc4xJa4DrGq7N4lhqQn- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-uiuc-talkshow/id1611427075- Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1H9UJqXvJXr3qlx9c89Rv76c6IpnwGeC- Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UIUCTalkshowClips*What is the UIUC Talkshow?*Our goal with this show is to introduce you to the most interesting people with the most interesting ideas.

Oct 13, 2026 · 1h 59m

Deke Weaver is an artist, writer, performer, and professor whose work sits somewhere between theater, storytelling, science, environmentalism, and performance art.For years, Deke has been building The Unreliable Bestiary, an ambitious lifelong project: a performance for every letter of the alphabet, each centered on an endangered animal or threatened habitat. What begins with a whale, wolf, elephant, tiger, or monkey quickly becomes a way of talking about much bigger things—climate change, extinction, politics, culture, fear, and what it means to be human.But this conversation became about much more than animals.Deke talks about growing up without a clear career plan, moving through San Francisco and New York, treating cities almost like universities, and building an artistic life while keeping a day job. We talk about why the best work tells the truth, why people can sense when something is authentic, and why fear and controversy are easy shortcuts while truth takes much more work. And eventually, all of it comes back to the same question: what are you actually trying to make with your life?College can make it easy to confuse a career with a life. Deke argues for something bigger: stay curious, go toward things you barely understand, find people worth keeping around, take the opportunities that may not come twice, and keep making things that feel true.*EPISODE LINKS:*- The Unreliable Bestiary: https://www.unreliablebestiary.org/- Deke Weaver's Glorious Self-Promotion: https://www.dekeweaver.com/- Deke Weaver's UIUC Website: https://art.illinois.edu/people/profiles/deke-weaver/*OUTLINE:*0:00 - Building a Whale—and Finding the Money to Do It2:20 - Why College Prepares You for a Job, Not Your Own Projects3:22 - Choosing Cities and People Over Careers5:16 - Art as a Place to Tell the Truth8:15 - Why Most Artists Need a Day Job9:05 - Treating a City Like a University11:32 - “The Best Work Tells the Truth”12:35 - Can Art Actually Change the World?16:25 - When Your Own Art Scares You18:54 - Self-Censorship & the Fear of Getting Cancelled21:02 - Marriage, Collaboration & a Tattooed Wedding Ring23:26 - Why Spend a Lifetime Making Art About Endangered Animals?26:09 - How Wolves Literally Changed Yellowstone28:28 - The Stories We Believe Change the World We See30:26 - Elephants, Tourism & What Happens When a Way of Life Disappears36:55 - From Tiny New York Rooms to Making Art Across Illinois39:15 - How to Tell a Story People Actually Remember42:10 - Velocity, Momentum & Surprise45:25 - How Do You Tell the Story of Climate Change Without Fear?49:49 - Which Feedback Should You Actually Listen To?53:05 - Finding the Right People to Make Something With55:03 - Stop Waiting for Inspiration. Show Up and Make the Work.57:32 - When a Project Starts to Feel Like Magic59:10 - Where Good Ideas Actually Come From1:00:03 - Why Creativity Needs Silence1:03:30 - Trusting Yourself When You Don't Know What Comes Next1:04:32 - Can Art Restore Trust?1:10:20 - What Should Our Generation Believe In?1:11:16 - Sending Signals Into the World1:14:52 - Where Art and Science Meet1:17:19 - Fear Gets Attention. Truth Takes More Work.1:19:52 - Truth vs. Authenticity1:22:04 - Why People Can Tell When You're Being Fake1:24:09 - Art as a Way of Bringing Completely Different People Together1:25:51 - If You Had All the Time in the World, What Would You Make?1:30:10 - What Can a Professor Still Offer the Next Generation?1:32:34 - The Pressure to Turn College Into a Job Machine1:34:31 - Choosing Art When Everyone Tells You Not To1:37:18 - Advice for Young People: Go to Things You're Barely Curious About🚥 Overrated or Underrated 🚥1:39:36 - 🐋 Free Willy1:40:30 - 🌀 Cybernetics1:44:11 - 🦇 Batman1:47:55 - 🦁 Disney's Animal Kingdom1:50:20 - 🦬 Is Yellowstone Basically a Giant Zoo?1:52:43 - 🎭 Sleep No More1:53:20 - 🧔 Growing a Beard for 365 Days1:58:46 - Closing Words

Oct 6, 2026 · 1h 26m

Daniel Simons is a Psychology Professor at the University of Illinois whose work asks a deeply uncomfortable question: how much can you trust your own mind?Most of us think deception is something that happens to other people.But he argues that the mechanisms behind those failures are completely ordinary. - We trust people who feel familiar. - We scrutinize ideas we disagree with more than ideas we already believe. - We mistake confidence for accuracy. And once we commit strongly enough to an idea, we can become extremely good at explaining away evidence against it.Professor Simons has spent much of his career studying the ways perception, memory, and intuition can mislead us.We talk about scientific fraud, cults, replication, Theranos, tech hype, AGI, and why being wrong can sometimes be the most interesting outcome in science.Toward the end, the conversation turns to college and life. Simons argues that young people specialize too early. Try more things. Take the class outside your field. Get comfortable being pretty good at several things instead of needing to be the best at one.Because whether you’re choosing a major, evaluating a scientific claim, or deciding who to trust, the problem is often the same:You’re making a judgment from the small piece of the world you can see, while forgetting how much remains outside the frame.*EPISODE LINKS:*- Daniel Simons’s Website: https://www.dansimons.com/- Daniel Simons’s UIUC Website: https://psychology.illinois.edu/directory/profile/dsimons- Daniel Simons’s Wikipedia Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Simons*BOOKS*- Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It: https://amzn.to/3SDw55g- The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us: https://amzn.to/4gJ9Wvp*What is the UIUC Talkshow?*Our goal with this show is to introduce you to the most interesting people with the most interesting ideas.*Learn more about Juan David & Aaryaman:*Aaryaman- Website: https://www.aaryamanpatel.com/ Juan David- Website: https://www.juandavidcampolargo.com/

Sep 29, 2026 · 4h 57m

Eryn Van Wijk is an astrophysics and philosophy student at the University of Illinois. Eryn is also a Stamps Scholar, an artist, a violinist, and now vice president of the Illinois Astronomical Society.But most importantly, Eryn is one of our dear friends.What makes this episode different is that this was the first time we ever met Eryn.In April 2024, we had an idea.YouTube probably knows an absurd amount about you from what you watch. So what if instead of using that information to recommend another video, you could use it to recommend a person?We made a post on r/UIUC called “Can You Make Friends Based on Your YouTube?” We asked people to send us whatever weird combination of channels, topics, and videos appeared on their Recommended page. Then we tried matching people whose feeds looked eerily similar.Eryn filled out the form on a whim.Eryn’s YouTube page matched remarkably well with Aaryaman’s.And instead of simply introducing the two, we thought: why not bring Eryn into another experiment we were running—the UIUC Talkshow?So we sat down and started talking. And kept talking. For nearly five hours.This became the longest episode of the UIUC Talkshow we had ever recorded, but what makes it special is not the length. You are basically watching a friendship begin in real time.At the beginning, we barely know each other. At one point people at the table are literally asking each other’s names. From there, the conversation wanders through astronomy, philosophy, online friendships, Oppenheimer, music, art, uncertainty, failure, nihilism, college, science, whether reality could be a simulation, whether absolute truth exists, and how to live when you have absolutely no idea what you are doing.Eryn came to Illinois undeclared, interested in both the universe and the questions underneath it: What is real? What can we actually know? What makes a life meaningful? Why do we believe the things we believe?But another question keeps appearing throughout the conversation: What are you waiting for?Eryn talks openly about being risk-averse, overthinking decisions, revising emails too many times, wanting certainty before acting, and being afraid of failure.Then, more than four hours into the conversation, Sean Carroll comes up.Eryn had listened to Carroll for years. Doing graduate work with Sean Carroll was described as something close to “the dream.”So we said: email Sean Carroll.The immediate reaction was that this sounded intimidating.But why?His email exists. You can write to him. The worst outcome is basically the situation you are already in: you don't talk to Sean Carroll.Eventually Eryn arrives at one of my favorite realizations from the entire conversation: “You make certain people seem more inaccessible in your head than they actually are. Like people are just people.”We told Eryn to send the email that night. Eryn did.And not long afterward, Eryn actually had a conversation with Sean Carroll.Suddenly Sean Carroll was no longer just “Sean Carroll, famous physicist on the internet.” There had been an actual conversation. The imaginary wall had gotten a little smaller.That idea ended up extending far beyond Sean Carroll.Since this recording, there have been many more conversations. Eryn became a regular at our Coldplay nights, played violin during them, met more of our friends, and eventually even went skydiving together, something we first talked about barely five minutes into this conversation.The UIUC Talkshow usually records conversations with people after we already know why we find them interesting.This one accidentally recorded the moment we found a friend.A Reddit post led to a Google Form.A Google Form led to a YouTube match.A YouTube match led to a five-hour conversation.And the conversation led to everything that came afterward.Sometimes that is just how friendships start.

Sep 22, 2026 · 30m

Alex Epstein is a philosopher, author of Fossil Future, and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress. *EPISODE LINKS:*- Alex Epstein's Website: https://alexepstein.com/- Alex Epstein's X: https://x.com/alexepstein- Alex Epstein's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexepsteinenergy/*OUTLINE:*0:00 - Introduction0:39 - Climate mastery5:48 - Hope about the future10:14 - Change culture with stories12:45 - Personal mastery17:51 - Policy19:29 - Being wrong21:43 - Advice for young people🚥Overrated or Underrated Section 🚥27:16 - 📊 Tyler Cowen29:06 - 💡 The Fountainhead29:26 - 📐 Human Ingenuity29:44 - 👀 Maryland29:52 - 🤝 Yaron Brook*Consider Supporting Us*If you enjoy our talk show and videos, your support means the world to us! Your contributions help us keep the show running and focus on creating interesting conversations with interesting people. Every dollar goes towards our basic needs, allowing us to dedicate more time and energy to this project.Support us here: https://uiuctalkshow.substack.com/*SOCIAL:*- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uiuctalkshow- X: https://twitter.com/uiuctalkshow- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@uiuctalkshow- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3ezoc4xJa4DrGq7N4lhqQn- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-uiuc-talkshow/id1611427075- Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1H9UJqXvJXr3qlx9c89Rv76c6IpnwGeC- Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UIUCTalkshowClips*What is the UIUC Talkshow?*Our goal with this show is to introduce you to the most interesting people with the most interesting ideas.*Learn more about Juan David & Aaryaman:*Aaryaman- Website: https://www.aaryamanpatel.com/- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaryamanpatel/- X: https://x.com/aaryamanpatelJuan David- Website: https://www.juandavidcampolargo.com/- X: https://x.com/jdcampolargo- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdcampolargo- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jdcampolargo/

Sep 15, 2026 · 2h 12m

Steve LaValle is a roboticist, professor, and former Chief Scientist at Oculus whose work helped shape the mathematics behind modern virtual reality.This conversation is about figuring out what kind of life you actually want, and then having the nerve to choose it.LaValle grew up in Missouri without an obvious path into academia. When Illinois said it did not accept out-of-state transfer students into computer engineering, he wrote a petition arguing that the university shouldn't decide someone's future based on which side of the Mississippi River they grew up on.He got in.Years later, while on sabbatical, LaValle received a random email from Jack McCauley, who had found his free online book while searching for the mathematics behind 3D rotations.LaValle flew to California, put on an early Oculus headset, looked straight up—and broke the tracking.His robotics background gave him exactly the mathematics Oculus needed. Soon, code written by LaValle and his wife was appearing in Oculus demos on Jimmy Fallon. He became Chief Scientist, worked alongside Palmer Luckey and John Carmack, and was there for Oculus's rise and acquisition by Facebook.Then he walked away.LaValle says leaving meant giving up roughly half the wealth he could have received by staying. He could have remained in Silicon Valley, advised startups, invested, and made considerably more money.Instead, he returned to academia. Why? Because he liked universities more.He wanted to publish openly, admit what he didn't know, follow his curiosity, spend time around interesting people, and have a life with his family. Eventually, that same thinking led him to Finland, where he found a culture closer to the values he wanted his children to grow up with.From arguing his way into Illinois, to pursuing robotics when few people cared about it, to joining Oculus and then walking away from Silicon Valley, LaValle has made plenty of decisions that looked strange from the outside.But they make sense once you understand what he was choosing for: the freedom to stay curious, keep learning, and keep choosing the life he actually wanted.*EPISODE LINKS:*- Steven LaValle's Website: https://lavalle.pl/*OUTLINE:*0:00 - Introduction1:42 - Think for Yourself 4:27 - Programming7:17 - What Would He Study in College Today?13:09 - Why He Moved to Finland20:03 - Why Finland Works24:07 - The Decision to Join Oculus27:13 - The Random Email That Changed His Life29:20 - Breaking the Oculus Headset on Day One34:35 - Failing in Front of Bill Gates36:00 - Why He Walked Away From Half His Oculus Money41:14 - “I Don’t Know”42:12 - Was VR Really the Future?48:11 - VR is “Perception Engineering”50:45 - How VR Hacks the Human Visual System53:10 - Why Universities Need “Undisciplined” People57:51 - How He Would Redesign Education58:22 - ChatGPT and the Collapse of Authority1:01:41 - What Happens When You Can Reinvent Your Life at Any Age1:04:54 - What Would Make Him Move Back to America?1:06:57 - The Finnish Fear of Winning Awards1:07:40 - Raising Four Kids Across Countries1:12:01 - Surround Yourself With Interesting People1:13:16 - What Happened After Oculus Opened Every Door1:18:24 - Inside the Early Oculus Team1:19:16 - Palmer Luckey Told Him About Bitcoin at $81:21:06 - Why He Didn’t Join Anduril1:23:57 - Do Robots Need to Look Human?1:26:17 - How 2001 and TRON Shaped His Life1:29:48 - The Company He Would Start Today1:33:19 - The Greatest Discovery He Can Imagine1:43:58 - Advice for Young People1:47:30 - Love1:49:56 - Having Children🚥 Overrated or Underrated 🚥1:51:25 - 🎬 TRON1:54:09 - 📖 Snow Crash1:54:29 - 🤖 Tesla Optimus1:54:57 - 💻 John Carmack1:56:04 - 🦿 Boston Dynamics1:56:38 - 🇫🇮 Finland1:59:35 - 🚀 2001: A Space Odyssey2:00:18 - 🌐 The Metaverse

Sep 8, 2026 · 1h 47m

Michael Lembeck is an aerospace engineer who has worked across JPL, NASA, Boeing, and academia. He currently leads CEPStone, LLC and has taught aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois.In this conversation, we talk about what decades in aerospace taught him about engineering, why space is still so expensive, NASA vs. commercial spaceflight, SpaceX, national security, building an economy on the Moon, and why sometimes the most important thing an engineer can say is, “I don’t know.”One of the best stories comes from a meeting Dr. Lembeck had with Elon Musk at the LAX Marriott, back when Musk was still trying to figure out how to get to Mars cheaply. Dr. Lembeck and the other engineers basically told him the math didn’t work. Rockets were too expensive, and reusability wasn’t even part of the conversation yet. Musk left looking for a different answer. We now know what happened next. Then we get into UAPs.Dr. Lembeck is skeptical of extraordinary claims, but thinks the phenomena deserve serious scientific investigation. He talks about unexplained lights he personally saw over Houston with an astronaut, why military sensors can detect things ordinary cameras miss, the importance of multiple independent sources of data, and what it would actually take to understand something that appears to violate what we currently know.And after the interview technically ends, the conversation goes somewhere completely different: death, consciousness, immortality, and whether you would still be you if your mind could be uploaded to a computer.*EPISODE LINKS:*- Michael Lembeck's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaellembeck*OUTLINE:*0:00 - Introduction2:06 - Anything Is Possible4:49 - College Friends10:00 - National Security12:12 - Drinking Vodka With Russian Engineers at NASA16:00 - How Defense Changed His Worldview19:59 - What Would You Tell a 10-Year-Old About the World?22:04 - Leaving America26:53 - Can Space Bring Humanity Together?29:44 - Why He Became a Professor35:18 - NASA46:07 - Moon Economy49:04 - Why We Never Went From Apollo Straight to Mars55:10 - Does the World Need Another SpaceX?57:28 - The Day He Met Elon Musk1:01:08 - UAPs1:07:44 - Why Haven’t Our Cameras Solved the UFO Mystery?1:13:44 - He Built a UAP Detector in His Backyard1:18:23 - Warp Drives & New Physics1:28:38 - Advice for Young People🚥 Overrated or Underrated 🚥1:32:29 - 🪐 Galileo1:33:37 - 🚀 Science Fiction1:34:45 - 👽 Arrival1:35:27 - 🕺 Paul Kwiat’s Dancing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJboh3aUhzc)1:37:16 - 🍺 A Pub on the Moon🎬 After the interview🎬 1:39:00 - What Happens When We Die?1:40:35 - Why He Wants to Live Forever1:44:19 - Are You Still You If You Replace Your Brain?1:44:40 - Can We Upload Consciousness?1:46:27 - “When My Brain’s Dead, I’m Gone”*Consider Supporting Us*If you enjoy our talk show and videos, your support means the world to us! Your contributions help us keep the show running and focus on creating interesting conversations with interesting people. Every dollar goes towards our basic needs, allowing us to dedicate more time and energy to this project.Support us here: https://uiuctalkshow.substack.com/*What is the UIUC Talkshow?*Our goal with this show is to introduce you to the most interesting people with the most interesting ideas.*Learn more about Juan David & Aaryaman:*Aaryaman- Website: https://www.aaryamanpatel.com/- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaryamanpatel/- X: https://x.com/aaryamanpatelJuan David- Website: https://www.juandavidcampolargo.com/- X: https://x.com/jdcampolargo- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdcampolargo- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jdcampolargo/

Sep 1, 2026 · 2h 27m

Klara Nahrstedt is a Computer Science Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whose research has spent decades asking a deceptively simple question: how can technology make communication between people feel more real?Long before that became her career, Klara grew up in a world where communication itself was restricted.Her mother left Czechoslovakia for Stanford in the late 1960s, expecting the rest of the family would eventually follow. Then the political situation changed and the borders closed. Klara stayed behind and later studied and worked in East Germany.She remembers living in East Berlin, seeing the Berlin Wall, and knowing she could not cross it. When her mother visited, they eventually had to say goodbye at Friedrichstraße. Her mother could leave. Klara could not.Even access to scientific information had limits. Klara recalls Western journals that were available only to Communist Party members. If you were outside that system, certain knowledge could remain out of reach.Then, in January 1990, she left East Germany for the United States. She calls it the best decision she ever made.America felt almost surreal. After growing up with shortages, she saw aisle after aisle of choices in a Philadelphia grocery store. At the University of Pennsylvania, she encountered computers, networks, and robotics systems far beyond what she had previously used.That transition led to a career working on high-speed networks, real-time video, tele-immersion, 3D video, virtual reality, augmented reality, and distributed computing.The challenge is often the same: moving increasingly rich information across networks fast enough that humans do not notice the delay.Later, Klara helped develop tele-immersion systems where dancers at Illinois and Berkeley could appear in the same virtual 3D environment and perform together thousands of miles apart.Today, she is thinking about what comes next.What if a remote student could appear to sit in an empty chair inside a classroom? What if people physically present could meet alongside others rendered into the room through augmented reality? What if the internet could transmit not only video and audio, but touch and even smell?A digitally generated smell still has to travel through the air to your nose. Haptic systems may require responses faster than ordinary operating systems can provide. Virtual reality must update quickly enough that differences between what your eyes see and your body feels do not make you sick.At the center of it all is one of multimedia’s hardest questions: what information does a person actually need?If you are looking at one part of a virtual room, why transmit every pixel in the rest of it at full resolution?That is where machine learning becomes useful.But when asked why she has not spent the entire conversation talking about AI, Klara gives a simple answer: AI is a tool.For her, the mistake is starting with whatever technology is fashionable and then searching for a problem to attach it to. She starts with the problem. If machine learning helps, use it. If the problem requires networking, optimization, computer vision, or distributed systems, use those instead.She gives similar advice to students: knowing AI alone is not enough. Become useful across several domains. Study outside your major. Read beyond engineering. Travel. Meet people from different cultures. Learn how other people think.Scientific knowledge matters, but understanding people and knowing how to communicate with them may matter just as much.Klara grew up in a system where borders separated families and access to information could depend on politics. She came to America and found a world overflowing with information, technology, people, and possibility.She has spent much of her career trying to remove another kind of distance.Not the Berlin Wall this time, but the technological distance between one human being and another.

Aug 25, 2026 · 2h 7m

Peter Abbamonte is a Physics Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the founder of Inprentus, which manufactures precision diffraction gratings.For years, Abbamonte had one plan: work at Bell Labs and never leave.Bell Labs was one of the engines of twentieth-century science, where discoveries like the transistor and Unix emerged. Abbamonte did his PhD research there and imagined spending his career between basic science, industrial R&D, and turning discoveries into useful technology.Then Bell Labs disappeared.With that future gone, Abbamonte moved to the Netherlands, worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory, then returned to Illinois. Years later, he started Inprentus partly to recreate what fascinated him about Bell Labs: fundamental science close enough to industry that ideas could become things.But this conversation is about what happens behind the clean image we have of science.Abbamonte talks openly about status, competition, rejection, luck, and the uncomfortable fact that scientists are still human. Early in his career, he says status motivated almost everything. Over time, his priorities shifted from proving himself to leaving something useful behind.One of the most revealing stories is about graphene. At the height of the excitement around it, Abbamonte published a paper arguing against the idea that ordinary graphene was the exotic strongly correlated system many researchers hoped it would be. He says he became “persona non grata” in parts of the graphene community and lost invitations and friends.His explanation is the idea of a silent majority.Imagine a room where a handful of people are shouting about beautiful elves that nobody else can see. Hundreds of others think the same thing, but nobody speaks up. Then one person raises his hand and says, “There are no elves.”He also tells the story of a research technique that drew heavy criticism, including from a prominent scientist who challenged his work to his Department of Energy program manager and put his funding at risk.The experience taught him that science is a pursuit of truth, but also a human enterprise. Researchers have grants, careers, reputations, friendships, and years invested in ideas. Being correct does not guarantee people will be happy to hear what you discovered.We also discuss scientific fraud and the limits of peer review. Reviewers can judge the evidence they are given, but they cannot always know whether it was fabricated. One of science’s strongest safeguards is replication: if a result is real, others should be able to reproduce it and build on it.Abbamonte also explains why strange metals may require a new framework for understanding matter. In ordinary metals, electrons behave according to principles physicists understand reasonably well. Strange metals violate some of those expectations so badly that the electron itself may no longer be the right object for describing what is happening.The same lesson appears throughout the conversation: don’t overplan your life, don’t assume the fashionable idea is correct, don’t expect your first attempt to work, and don’t confuse being exceptional with being superhuman.His advice to young people is simple: at 18 or 22, prove to yourself that you can do something. Build skills, credibility, relationships, and the ability to recover when things go wrong.Fall down. Get up. Do it again.And perhaps most importantly: deal with the world as it actually is, not as you wish it were. That does not mean accepting it. It means understanding reality clearly enough that you might actually be able to change it.EPISODE LINKS:Peter Abbamonte's UIUC Website: https://physics.illinois.edu/people/directory/profile/abbamontPeter Abbamonte's Research Group: https://abbamonte.physics.illinois.edu/Peter Abbamonte's Company: https://inprentus.com/Peter Abbamonte's Vision For The University: https://www.juandavidcampolargo.com/peter-abbamonte-vision-talk