I also reject in more essential terms the line of thinking around "actually implemented anything revolutionary as opposed to talks/ideas". Don't underestimate the power of well-argued ideas. See re: horse carriages above. You need to start somewhere, and that somewhere is ideas, sketches, equations, talks. If it doesn't make sense to you, fine. If it makes sense to some people, they'll go and use, reuse, some of the ideas in a hundred different projects and implementations. The turing machine was a mathematical device invented to solve a rather abstract mathematical / logical problem. It took some time to get to the iPhone from there. You need free space for the next Turing Machine to come from. Those types of ideas are very rare.
Side note - It is curious to me that some of the most interesting projects start out as "side projects" of PhD students, since they have the free time (the true quantity of which rarely admitted), usually not directly related to narrow research focus of whatever P.I. they work below minimum wage for asked them to work on.