I'm starting to think there's no possible question for which Will can't come up with an answer that's true, useful, and crowd-pleasing. We're lucky to have him!

While we're nitpicking, I think "above a certain threshold, money doesn't make a difference to your life" is probably false. My best sense of the literature is that there are sharply diminishing returns but I don't think additional money gets you zero or negative utility^[1]. 

But overall I thought the interview was quite good. I got the impression people really liked him. Intuitively it must be really hard to be honest for 10+ minutes without saying something that goes against leftist dogma, and of course doing it live adds a lot of pressure.

1. ^{^}

   Now of course we don't have accurate data/studies on billionaires, so basically we're back at intuition/priors.

I guess it didn't occur to him. You can see he's nervous and speaking succinctly and winsomely in front of a crowd and tv cameras is really hard. I was impressed how many relevant facts he had at his immediate disposal.

Ok, I'm really confused about the downvotes here. If someone cares to explain, I'd be grateful.

UK version

I understand this is a question in good faith that is concerned about comprehensibility. Nonetheless, I downvoted because I think this form of discussion is generally bad. I don't think it's okay for us to tell people - even community leaders like Will - how they should sound, no more than we should opine on how they look. The New Yorker profile has examples of how weird this can get, with Will asking his friends if he should get dental surgery to be a more appealing public figure. Discussing how to engineer a person into the perfect PR machine has limits.

I understand that comprehensibility is important. But the overlap with accent is not that large - comprehensibility is also about diction, pace, modulation, command over language, etc.

American, find it easy to understand. Evidence that this isn't a large problem: the movie Shrek chose to use a Scottish accent for it's main character.

I think his accent might actually have the effect of being a draw due to the novelty for Americans. Plus it then additionally forces a listener to listen more closely if they cant follow as easily - and it is hardly a bad thing for your audience to be paying more close attention to you if you're making nuanced arguments.

But I'm just projecting my own experience here, probably.

Apart from a few things (rs) I actually think his accent might be phonetically closer to an American accent than most UK accents. It didn't seem hard to understand.

I am much less confident this is a comment worth making given people have voted as much. I, therefore, retract it. Oops/sorry.

I'm not a native speaker and found his accent very easy to understand. But yeah, info on Americans might be valuable.

I have some difficulty in understanding Will's accent (as an American who grew up in the northeast--New Hampshire), though notably less difficulty than plenty of Americans who aren't as articulate. Specfically, I listened to WWOTF at 2x speed and I struggled to hear everything. I know I can easily comprehend other voices at the same wpm, but with Will I was missing occasional words and it took until the second half of the book before I felt I was really hearing everything. I wished they had gone with a professional narrator for selfish reasons, though I understood the motivation behind Will narrating it himself. (At 1x speed I have the same issues with Will's voice, except my brain has more time to process and figure out what word he said based on context, so it's not an issue.).