He speaks slowly (listen on 2x for regular person speed) and he’s trite, but he interviews people and lets them talk.
That’s good enough. And it’s especially good enough in that he gets big names to come talk.
He doesn’t need to be a genius or to ask clever questions. Merely letting Chris Lattner geek out for 2 hours on audio about his project is a win.
He had John Carmack on his show which piqued my interest, but he was asking questions like "what's the best programming language" and "what's the best IDE." Such a blown opportunity to be asking useless first year CS student questions like that when interviewing a great mind like Carmack.
It makes sense to get touchy-feely with Bert Kreischer, who’s basically an alcoholic gigantic third grader. Or with Michael Malice because they’re goofy best buds.
Still it’s nice when a serious guest kind of shrugs and sticks to the topic.
I can’t listen to Neil Degrasse Tyson talk because of that same kind of “the wonder of the poetry of the cosmic ballet” nonsense.
His podcast is alright for people who aren't in any of the domains and therefore just want overviews. Anything else, and it's about as useful as listening to an actor repeat the summary for the movie they're promoting for the millionth time.
It's pretty clear he's playing up some kind of "rainman autistic AI savant" persona, and also, he exaggerates his credentials. On his website he describes himself as:
>AI researcher working on autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction, and machine learning at MIT and beyond
Which could lead one to erroneously assume that he attended MIT, or even has a degree from MIT, when neither of which are true.