Yea he is obviously smart getting his doctorate at a young age and the prestigious MacArthur grant, as well as making some important contributions to the CA field, but his best attribute might be being a businessman making millions selling a good product. Part of that involves self promotion, but it does make me uncomfortable how extreme he can get with it (I'm thinking his NKS book). Cellular automata are cool, but I'm not seeing the explosion in the field and how they're being used for everything like he keeps saying (hopefully someone on here can confirm/deny this who is active in that area).