The Applied Mechanics Reviews Podcast Presents: Prof. Karl Johan Åström is a pioneer and statesman in the fields of automatic, adaptive, and computer-aided control engineering and system identification, whose fundamental contributions to scholarly and applied research have been uniformly recognized. This AMR audio interview describes his experiences at the interface between academic research and industrial applications, a story of how fortune rewards the bold, and the risks of sending feedback control signals over large distances across manual phone exchanges. Visit the Applied Mechanics Reviews Journal on the ASME Digital Collection. Recorded: September 15, 2014