Smartest Guy in the Room

So I'm at the sweatshop today, and HB's logged into a box. He's doing some 8-key sequence and I think he's trying to move to a previous command.

"What was that," I ask, perplexed.
"I was trying to repeat a command," he answers.
"But how?  You were doing an odd key combination there."
"That was an Escape-K combination I did.  Once or twice."

And it struck me.  That's the old korn-and-vi way of doing things, and I'd just not noticed it.

"Why didn't you just hit Up-Arrow?" I ask
"Oh, I'm so used to the old way"
"Ahh, you're a vi guy, then?"

It was a bit of a leap, but I think that's how vi people go up a line (because it's just intuitive to hit ESC-K for 'up').  He admitted that he was, but here's the money-byte:

"No matter where I go, the smartest guy in the room uses Emacs.  I need to learn emacs one day because there's got to be something to it."
(over my protests) "No, really:  everywhere I go, there's like 10 people in a hack lab, and the genius people, the smartest guys there, have all been emacs guys.  It's weird, but it's true."

And thus my plan - to approach genius by emulating it and copying their habits - has been revealed.  Like those 1980s guys who said you should act rich if you wanted to be rich,  could I really resemble a smart guy just by doing what smart guys do?

Nah.

I only use emacs because I had a choice between it and vi in the beginning.  I like to think that's all I needed, since I like to hit the up-arrow to, well, go up.  I guess I can't work with something as intuitive as [ESC][K], that marvel of efficiency and intuitive design.