At 1.5x speed it took less than an hour – a podcast length summary of one of the most influential thinkers in the past three millennia.
Having been on a Confucius kick for the past couple of years, I can’t say if it would be comprehensible for a pure first encounter with the sage, but the summary was inline with consensus opinion and my own impressions from reading the Analects.
The author takes a cheeky irreverent tone, which could be off putting but is in the spirit of such a quick summary. Such a tone might wear out its welcome, but again, this is third of the length of your typical Joe Rogan episode.
I’ve become a fan of Strathern’s “In 90 Minutes” series. Though short like a podcast, they have the benefit of a unified voice and have cleared a (minimal) bar for repeated publishing for profit.
As such, I suspect will make more efficient introductions to the various subjects over crawling the internet. They aren’t anything deep, but fill the niche of semi-intellectual breaks when the mind has tired of ponderous multi-hour tomes on tape.