He's a mildly-odd high-end AI researcher with a somewhat cynical Russian outlook, I neither expect nor want highly polished interviews from him. In fact, it's exactly because he's somewhat idiosyncratic that he's fascinating to watch have a conversation.

I agree. He interviews a lot of fascinating people with highly-specialized backgrounds. To research their work and understand it enough to have great conversational flow and remain highly insightful would take a lot of time.

But since this isn't his full-time job, I think trading-off asking very good questions for the flow of the dialogue is worth it.

I think Lex is a great interviewer. Eric definitely threw him off a number of times, but I can't fault him.

That was intentional on some level, an embodied metaphor to underscore one of the unifying messages Eric was trying to convey -- be wary of your fixed frames of reference, that's not from where radical leaps come.