My geeky experience was meeting Jared Diamond.

My geeky experience was meeting Jared Diamond. He's family friends with a close friend of mine, so we went to Diamond's house. I got very nervous and (among other things) looked at a japanese magnolia and said 'I call that a japanese maple'; he very politely said 'that's interesting, I call it a japanese magnolia'. Overall he was the sweetest, quaker-grandfather kind of man. We was working on Collapse at the time and when asked spent some time talking about what was motivating him to write it.