I think my favorite part about AES's approach here is that he asks questions back to Tommy that could easily be taken as rhetorical but he explicitly asks for a verbal response. It's a very teacher-y tactic (laudatory) and I think it works to build credibility rather than simply display dominance.

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I didn’t know much about about Abdul El-Sayed before watching this but I knew as soon as I’d seen it that he’d worked as a teacher — and sure enough he was an assistant professor in epidemiology. This is how you walk a student through a dumb take.

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yet again, I am asking, just how long ago people think the Second World War actually was

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yesterday musk said that companies that "overstate claims about their product" will be banned from advertising on X, today he says that his cars are alive

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That was not punching down. It was taking Tommy’s words at face value and refusing to do anything other than grapple with their meaning. It was treating Tommy as an adult, and that was very clearly something that had seldom happened in his experience.

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