The most annoying habit he's picked up recently is asking people to define words. It's never really interesting. For instance, during an interview with an economist, "let's start with what is economics"? He was interviewing CEO of Coinbase and Armstrong will try to give a normal answer and Lex will just interrupt "what is a wallet" or ask questions like "do you consider Coinbase layer 1, 2 or 3". They're just bad questions and interrupt a normal conversation.

On the other hand someone like Tyler Cowen doesn't ask for clarification unless he legitimately doesn't know what some is talking about. Some guests even said "maybe I should explain that", to which Cowen replies, "this conversation is for us, don't worry about the audience", and that leads to a much better natural and interesting conversation. If the listener doesn't understand anything they can always pause and look up what they don't understand

The "is Coinbase layer 1, 2, or 3" is a particularly dumb one and a good example of how eye-rollingly bad his questions can be. It's hard for the guest to get into the interesting details when interrupted with a question that's wrong in a bunch of ways that betray he has no idea what he's talking about. It just feels like he's full of shit.

If I were asked this question, I would actually consider this a good question, because:

- it probably is something people are wondering

- it's a good moment to talk about layers and where coinbase fits in the ecosystem

the answer for the curious: none of them. Coinbase is just a wallet using the layer 1 of most cryptocurrencies, and can also use apps and wallets from other layers (I'm not sure it does support any other layers at the moment though). A layer 2 can be seen like another cryptocurrency built on top of a cryptocurrency (layer 1), and a layer 3 is the same built on top of a layer 2, and so on.

It's a different kind of investigation into a subject. Perfectly valid. Any textbook on a subject, will often start with the most basic question. The Who/What/Where/Why/When of questions. Another way to describe First Principles Thinking. I find it extremely foundational to know the basics in developing higher knowledge in a field.

I've been doing podcasts and I'm often asked "what is cryptography?" as first question. I don't like it either :D