At the beginning, he reminds you that you have already heard that the Higgs boson – called the Weinberg toilet by Sheldon Glashow – is the best thing since the invention of the flush toilet.
Instead, he discusses the quantization of spin and he shows you his hat and semitechnical properties of the Higgs potential, the relationship between fields and particles, the impact of the vacuum condensate (compared to dipoles) on other particles, the role of the uncertainty principle for the finite i.e. short range of the weak force.
So as you can check, Susskind focused on different issues than toilets.
Incidentally, because the Higgs boson seems to behave in the single a priori most likely way – the plain vanilla, Standard Model way (its deviations from the SM behavior have apparently faded away and shrank to an undetectably modest level) – journalists are saying that maybe, it was just a summer romance.
Clearly, we will have to wait for quite some time before some hypothetical exotic qualities of the Higgs boson become visible. Some other discoveries may be done earlier than that, independently of the Higgs sector. I find the English term "plain vanilla" for "boring common things" somewhat bizarre because vanilla is a flavor extracted from orchids in the exotic country of Mexico. :-) Moreover, the extract of vanilla costs about $30 per kilogram – buy via amazon.com – which is as expensive as the best type of South Indian coconut oil that I consider the "fanciest part of my food" now.
Nima on the Higgs
Concerning the Higgs boson talks, you should also watch this IAS talk by the Milner Prize winner Nima Arkani-Hamed:¨
The Inevitability of Physical Laws: Why the Higgs Has to Exist (live or download)
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