On the technical depth point, I agree. A lot of folks tell me they love the "meaning of life" questions. I love both the technical and the philosophical. My hope is to more and more try to go deep technically with the ML, CS, math, physics folks on the topic of their expertise, and find productive points of passionate disagreement or insight. This isn't easy, and I fail often, but I'm working hard to improve.
The problem with being way too philosophical is that it restricts discussion to sharing opinions, which is totally ok, but the problem with opinions is that every single person on the planet has an opinion, but it's way more rare thing to have some knowledge. So, it may be really interesting to hear somebody's opinion about something, but as far as learning goes, I don't really gain anything from them: the more abstract and complicated the question, the less difference from asking a random person on the street. But when you have somebody in front of you, who has some knowledge that your audience (or you) doesn't have (be it technical, or an experience of making a wildly successful infotainment youtube channel, or anything else), you can learn so much more from every single conversation.
Joe Rogan got so popular because he lets his guests drive the conversation and allows them to talk about themselves and whatever it is that they're interested in. He seems to really follow Dale Carnegie's advice from How to Win Friends and Influence People (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...).
People watch JRE, because it's fun and he has a lot of very influential people as guests nowadays. It doesn't mean that more interviewers should be like him, God forbid...
This clearly is a podcast for quite technical people. His guests most of the time (like, almost always, except the cases he invites somebody because he was on a JRE) are people notable for their technical contributions. They discuss some very technical stuff the guest is known for and is literally the best possible person to teach us about. Instead he skips technical questions almost completely and opts for "what's the meaning of life"?! Come on!
When the discussion happens to be pretty technical (mostly, because the guest himself is more of a no-nonsense type of guy) it sometimes feels like some basic background necessary to understand the further explanation was skipped. I assume that it's my fault, since this is supposed to be common knowledge and host doesn't want to interrupt the guests to clarify such nonsense. And later on I understand, that Lex didn't understand that part either, but didn't make any attempts to clarify. Isn't that the point of an interview?..
I wouldn't want to offend him, but often I think "oh, such a waste!" listening to his podcasts. So much stuff is left unanswered.
So, yeah. Nice guy, but no so good interviewer. And way too romantic.