Jacob Bear is interviewed by Alex Cheng and a group of colleagues and students from the Universities of Mississippi and Memphis. Jacob Bear reflects upon his distinguished career and emphasizes the important need for connections to be made between fundamental understanding and real-world applications. The video shows us how Jacob Bear started to write his first book “Physical Principle of Water Percolation and Seepage” for UNESCO (co-authors: S. Irmay and D. Zaslavsky, 1968), his motivations, the people that influenced him, combining theory and practice) and how teaching is an important part of his work.