Much as I love a good lecture on physics, Leonard Susskind always leaves me feeling less informed than before I watched the video.

I still try to watch his lectures from time to time. He is among the most lauded physicists alive AND he's got YouTube videos, so that's ostensibly exciting for me.

However, I feel like he's too abrasive with his students. I watched a video where he was teaching a night class to adults. Right at the start of the series, he gets into a disagreement with one of the students about whether or not there is a net charge on a capacitor. The student is a man who works in electronics and knows the danger of a charged capacitor (it was a 1 F capacitor, so worthy of immense respect as a potential explosive). Susskind made the guy look stupid in front of the class and the guy knew it.

It was all a bullshit dialogue where the student says something like, "I know that I can put 1 Coulomb of charge onto that 1 Farad capacitor." Susskind says, "This capacitor will always have 0 charge." They argue and Susskind is a bit condescending. He never bothers to say, well, ONE plate of the capacitor will have a charge disparity from the other plate, but the those charges cancel out, leaving a net charge of 0 Coulomb. He never offers the student the dignity of having a valid viewpoint, but a misunderstanding of Susskind's statement.

It's like Susskind is so wrapped up in his own world that he failed to see the practicality of the electrician's view. Maybe that's part of what makes him great. Sounds like making an excuse for someone being a bit - not really being an ass, just not a great communicator.

This seems nitpicky, but I mean it as an example of how Susskind fails to empathize with his audience, which makes his presentations incredibly dense and hard to follow.

Also, Jibbers, he can be hard to follow just because he uses the jargon of QM so fluently and without pause. I mean... I know what a Hamiltonian is, and I know what a Hermitian matrix is, and a singular matrix... but calling to mind all of the properties and implications of those things takes my brain a hard pause to recollect. He just powers right through them so quickly that I'm quickly missing his lecture due to me falling behind in my listening and understanding skills.