He is a smart and distinguished physicist, but he has some silly views. He brags about winning the Black Hole War, but he did not. In a recent survey, only 27% agreed with him that information falling into a black hole is preserved in Hawking radiation. Only 11% agreed with many-worlds theory, which he has favored in the past. Not sure if he still does.
The survey had some other curious opinions, such as whether matter falling into a black hole gets crushed into a singularity (29% say yes) and whether the big bang started time with a singularity (only 11% say yes). While you might have heard that the Copenhagen Interpretation is dead, only a minority subscribed to some non-Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The survey was given in Copenhagen, so maybe the home team had an advantage.
Information has no physical definition, and has no good reason to be conserved. Susskind would only say that it is conserved because quantum field theory is unitary. That is the same reason he gives for many-worlds. So wouldn't that mean that information could leak into parallel universes, not to be seen again?
He pushes a lot of other wacky ideas, such as anti-desitter space, black hole event horizon firewalls, string theory landscape, entangled wormholes, etc. It is all nonsense. All of it is theoretically dubious, and impossible to observe. Viewers must get a kooky view of Physics when the leading popularizers say such bizarre and unscientific things.
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