You know, one of the most interesting people I met was your father, Freeman, and I remember Freeman. I actually met Freeman at the same conference I met Richard Feynman at. That was a conference that Ed Fredkin had about digital physics. And I gave a talk about the idea that the underlying physics might be a cellular automaton, and it wasn't unique for that conference, that was sort of what the conference was about, but it was a way that it might happen and a way that gravity might emerge as an emergent phenomenon from the cells of space. And Freeman Dyson himself came up afterwards and said something very nice to me about my talk, and I was just blown away. I was so shy I never would have talked to him, but he came up and explicitly said something nice to me. And then the next speaker got up and he had a completely incomprehensible talk, but he enunciated everything very clearly, and then I noticed Freeman went up to him afterwards and said, 'You spoke so clearly.' And then I thought, 'Oh, what did he say to me?' And I couldn't remember what he had said to me. But then I was still too shy to talk to Freeman. But I had... I had with me a paper that Bill Gosper had given me on something called 'Q factorials'. And so at some point on the... we took a bus ride someplace and I sat down next to Freeman, but I was too shy to actually start a conversation with him, so I took out my paper and I opened up and I started to read it, and Freeman sort of looked over my shoulder and he said, 'Are those Q factorials?' And I said, 'Why, yes.' That was how I started talking with Freeman. He was quite wonderful.

And then, that was also when Dick Feynman came up and talked to me about my paper and that's when Dick and I started becoming friends. And so that was just... actually it was an amazing conference all around in terms of the people that showed up to it, but that was the thing about MIT, is you could run into people like that. And both of those are people that I've... you know, have really made a lot of difference to my life.