There were a few interesting takeaways:

1) When people started realizing that these dieoffs happened there was a belief that there was probably a common cause like impactors, but end-Permian almost certainly wasn't an impactor like K-T was. There are several things that can kick-off an extinction

2) One thing that is true is that the extinctions seem to follow the same script. Lots of things can kick them off, but once they start going it's a rock rolling down a hill very quicky. End-Permian seems tied to the Siberian Traps basaltic eruption, but that eruption had been going for thousands of years before the dieoff started.

K-T definitely happened within years following the impact, but end-Permian seemed to be a "first gradually, then suddenly" as pollution from the traps put more and more stress on the biosphere until suddenly...

3) He posed the question: are we currently in an great extinction. He wrote that we are not because they look at the fossil record of really fundamental creatures (stuff like krill in the ocean) upon which the whole biosphere relies, and we're not yet seeing them collapse. But once such a collapse begins, it will be something that is unstoppable.

4) He thought that there is a big gap in our knowledge of survival and recovery. Why have none of these massive events just turned the planet into a dead world? How does life come back? Historically the early-Terrsic was seen as a really boring thing to study because there's not much evidence of life in it, but understanding how life soldiers on through these "wasteland Earth" episodes is potentially a fertile ground for research.

Though I have extreme reservations about the current state of conservation science (on questions of nature and it's own agency), this is precisely why conservation is extremely important. We must protect what we have left to let nature adjust to what we become and want to be: https://eos.org/features/critical-zone-science-comes-of-age

Source: I work in palaeoecology.