Batchelor is not very compelling for the most part of this hour, and between the tedious first segment and the subsequent flat readings, it felt to me like watching paint dry, I'm sorry to say. This comes from someone who followed a similar trajectory (on a much more modest scale), dropping out of academics to immerse in a quest for truth and the self that led me to Buddhism, then struggling with some of the orthodoxy's aspects (I also have a problem with reincarnation), and eventually deciding to put aside pointless dogma to focus on engaging life and the world.
Having just caught Batchelor in Buddha Realms (on Hulu), and hearing him describe himself there as an 'agnostic buddhist', I had to check this program out. The last two segments, when Batchelor finally stops reading his book to engage his audience in a dialogue, thankfully take off. We're treated then to an explanation for his rejection of what he calls the consolatory aspect of religions, and his focus on Buddha's actual teachings rather than the faith his followers created. This gives Batchelor's position a more solid footing than the mere dismissal of eastern belief in abandon of the self by another pragmatic, ironic, and individualistic westerner (like myself). For a good 45 minutes I had been fearing that having been unable to silence his own self, or to experience satori, during study had turned this man into a closed-minded doubting Thomas. Instead, while agnostic, he rejects the atheists with a hate for those "stupid enough to believe in God".