Having said that, there is a lot to think about in his irritation. For example: the mysteries of magnets are no more mysterious than lots of other things that we take for granted and treat as entirely unmysterious. To priviledge magnets with an almost magical respect when we haven't spotted that gravity is at least as mysterious is a failure of imagination.
There's also the question 'what kind of answer would you accept'? When we can only express bafflement about a phenomenon, we're still in the prescientific myths and magic world. You can't really get to the scientific world until you can formulate some kind of question. The passage from Hitchikers about the Ultimate Question touches on something pretty profound.
Still, I think an honest expression of bafflement is an excellent beginning (or at least it's where I often find myself), and I think there may have been more sympathetic ways Feynmann could have expressed his thoughts on the topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22816968
Hint, the questions were:
"Now, what is it, the feeling between those two magnets?"
"There's something there, isn't there?"
"what's going on between these two bits of metal"
"What does that mean, or why are they doing that, or how are they doing that?"
I don't know what phenomena you study, but I assure you that "magnets" aren't the only topic for which the "feeling" and "what does that mean" and "why" questions would warrant the same answer.
And where answering "how" would be cheating if the answer would use some false analogy.
You come up to him. "Hey, so magnets, these trivial things that children play with, can you explain it to me?"
His real answer would be "no. not to my satisfaction, I can't"
I think that his leadup is an attempt to get a couple points across:
1) That we typically can explain things in terms of more basic or more 'fundamental' concepts. This does not work with magnetism since magnetism itself is a fundamental force. Attempts to explain via analogy should be avoided.
2) Even the spin explanation probably does more harm than good. A non-physicist will think of atoms spinning like a top, which is wrong and misleading.
One has to carefully to listen to the question he was asked and he then answers.
I wrote about that before and I link to that this time too in my other answer.
Socrates, as we receive him, opened peoples' eyes about causation, too. If anyone did it like a jerk it was him. Leading you down the path of your own ideas into a contradiction, just to show you what you don't know? That's embarrassing and unhelpful. I'd rather be lectured.
Is he the friendliest explainer? Surely not. Who cares? His gifts in communicating deep ideas in science to lay people were beyond compare.
I don't think smiling and being condescending are mutually exclusive are they?
Feynman's detour is to explain to the interviewer that he can't give any satisfactory explanation beyond "the magnetic force exists and behaves like that" given that the interviewer has no advanced knowledge of physics. Trying to do so would invariably involve Feynman cheating the interviewer, causing the interviewer to believe he understood it better until he comes across the flaw in the reasoning.
It's a simple, relatively satisfactory explanation a layperson should understand, that provides a hook for finding more in-depth knowledge if the asker wants to.
The whole rest of it was unnecessary.
The idea that atoms are mostly empty space is a great analog to his rubber band example. Our attempts to explain atoms in terms of electrons cleanly orbiting a nucleus gives people the wrong picture. Atoms are not mostly empty space, electrons become standing waves when part of an atom and it's not just that we cannot measure their position with accuracy, their position does not exist. The solar system metaphor for the atom has probably caused more harm than good.
His roundabout analogy about the seemingly infinite rabbit holes of "why"s makes an important point that some phenomena are not explainable in a satisfactory way without a considerable theoretical framework, and any layman-friendly analogy is ultimately going to be inaccurate.
Edit: I guess my point is just that being willing and able to communicate simply and effectively is not necessarily at odds with being a condescending prick.
“What you feel in the magnet is the same force that keeps my hand from going through the chair, so the question is why does it work at a human-scale distance? The answer is that in an iron magnet all the magnetic forces in each atom are aligned. An individual atoms‘ force is too small to be felt at distance, but the combined effect of all the atoms in a magnet is large enough.”
That wasn’t so hard.
Also if it's the same force and it is much stronger when aligned, why don't magnets pass through each other? The much stronger aligned magnetic force should easy overwhelm the weaker force that keeps my hand from going through the chair.
As for why two magnets don't pass through each other, as they come closer eventually the alignment breaks down because both poles exist for each atom and end up repelling each other.
Of course, Paul's exclusion principle does play a role, but as long as the two objects are rigid enough you can model this mostly well enough with a magnetic dipole at each atom.