However, I am not sure if that is supposed to affect my opinion of his take on text vs other media? (I try not to let prejudices like "he's a really smart person" affect me when discussing a topic that is very approachable to a wider population)
It hopefully doesn't affect your opinion on his take, but it hopefully gives some context related to his background. He's got a bunch of experience in very low-level very back-end systems, involving a lot of abstract reasoning. I would guess people used to a lot of abstract reasoning would tend to be partial to plain text and/or mathematical notation.
Cool, that's a very interesting observation, so thanks for elaborating!
As originally worded, it only sounded like "hey, this dude is famous" (for HN value of famous :-), so I would appreciate the commentary you just shared right off the bat! Thanks again for the clarification!