The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue: What do we owe the future?

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

Most societies commemorate and revere distant ancestors, with portraits, statues, streets, buildings, and holidays. We are fascinated with the pyramids in Egypt, Stonehenge in England and the earliest origins of our species in the savannas of Africa.  Our interest in humankind’s deep past has created a collective blind spot about the prospects of our distant descendants thousand years into the future. For most of us, the deep future is a fantasy world, something you read about in science fiction novels.  But a growing number of thinkers are pushing back against the attitude that the future is a hypothetical we can discount in the favour of the here and now. Instead, they argue it's high time we start thinking seriously about the idea that humanity may only be in its infancy. That as a species we could potentially be around for thousands of years, with trillions of fellow humans to be born, each with vast potential to shape our future evolution, possibly even beyond Earth.  In sum, humankind urgently needs a thousand year plan or it risks losing millennia of human progress to the existential risks that stalk our all too dangerous present.  William MacAskill is a leading global thinker on how humanity could and should think about a common future for itself and the planet. He is an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford and co-founder of Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and 80,000 Hours, all philosophically inspired projects which together have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousand of life years to support charities working to preserve human kind's potential for the millenia to come. He is the author of the international bestseller, Doing Good Better and What We Owe The Future. QUOTE:  "The future could be very big, indeed, at least if we don't cause humanity's untimely demise in the next few centuries. We could have a very large future ahead of us. And that means that if there is anything that would impact the well-being of, not just the present generation, but all generations to come, that would be of enormous moral importance."  The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Producer: Marissa Ramnanan  Editor: Adam Karch  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Hello, Mug Debate. Listeners, Roger Griffiths here. chair of the monk debates. Well, we're back at it. Another episode of our monk dialogue series where we check in with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers to learn more about the issues and ideas that they're focusing on. Today, we are going to think big. We're going to think about how most societies that we know commemorate and revere everything from our distant ancestors

to the famous portraits and statues that adorn our public squares and museums. And, We are fascinated with our deep past and where we've come from. Despite our love of history, it seems that many times as a species, we're not able to wrap our minds around our future. The fact that humankind may, if we're lucky, be around not for centuries to come, but possibly for the next millennia or more. Usually in our popular culture, this kind of thinking and ideas is the, Stuff of fantasy, it's something you read about in a science fiction novel. But a growing number of

thinkers are pushing back against the attitude that the future is some hypothetical that we can simply discount in favor of the here and now. Instead, a growing body of experts are arguing it's time we start to think seriously about the notion, the proposition that humanity may only be in its infancy, that as a species we could potentially be around a that. thousand or more years from now, with billions, maybe trillions of fellow humans yet to be born, each with vast potential to shape the future trajectory of our evolution, possibly even beyond the terrestrial earth. In some, humanity urgently needs a thousand-year plan, and our guest today on the monk dialogues thinks he has one. William McCassel is an associate

professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. He's the co-founder of giving what we can, the Center for Effective Ultruism, and 80,000 hours, all philosophically inspired projects that together have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of life years of human effort to support charities working to preserve humankind's potential to thrive for the millennia to come. He's the author of the big international bestsellers, doing good better and what we owe the future. Will, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Thanks so much for having me on.

Looking forward to this conversation. I want to begin with, I guess, you know, the central kind of tenant or idea that you're challenging us to think about, which is to kind of reorient some of our ethics, what we believe is important about how we behave and why, from the present to the future. So open this conversation up for us, Will, but by talking about why you think the future

has a moral claim on us now in our day-to-day lives in this present that seems so all-consuming at this moment. I think the future has a moral claim on us because of three simple ideas. The first is that future people count, morally speaking, the interests of future generations are just morally important. The second is that the future could be very big indeed, at least if we don't cause humanity's untimely demise in the next few centuries, we could have a very large future ahead of us, and that means that if there is

anything that would impact the well-being of not just the present generation, but all generations to come, that would be of enormous moral importance. And then the final consideration is just that we really can impact future generations as well as the present generation. This is very familiar from the issue of climate change where carbon dioxide that we emit into the atmosphere, much of that will persist in the atmosphere for literally tens of thousands of years. It's also familiar from preservation, conservation of species or thinking about how we dispose of radioactive nuclear waste. But I actually think that the ways we're currently impacting the future are much more thoroughgoing than that. And in what we owe the future,

I point in particular to certain sorts of risks of global catastrophe, such as from pandemics, from engineered pathogens, from nuclear war, and from the development of extremely advanced artificial intelligence. I'm interested in helping you help us kind of reorient ourselves. As you know, and it's a lot of what you're kind of, in some ways, writing to challenge is the presentism of our society, our culture, this moment that we're in. You've come up with this interesting idea, kind of thought experiment, to think of ourselves not as the kind of vanguard of the future, but in fact,

the word you use, and it connects with me because of my love of classical history, to think of ourselves as ancients. Explain that to us. So the thought experiment I open what we are the future with is to imagine yourself living through all lives ever. So when you come into existence as the first human being ever born, you live through that life, and then you're reincarnated, traveling back in time a little bit as the second ever person, then the third person, so on, so that you live all approximately 100 billion lives that have ever been lived. And imagine now that you weren't merely living through all lives to date, but you are also going to live through all future lives too. And then ask yourself, well, how would you, given

this, how would you want society to be structured today? How much time and attention and resources would be focused on things that only impact the next few months or even the next few years. Well, and how much time would we be spending thinking about the potentially vast future ahead of us? And it would be a lot. When we're thinking about less provocally and we're thinking about all human lives, well, it's really the future. That's where almost all lives will be lived. It's where almost all accomplishments, all joy, all potential.

potential suffering, or justice and injustice. That's where almost all of it lies. And it really is the case that we in the present generation can affect the course of civilization. We can ensure we get a better future rather than a dystopian one or even no future at all. And so I think if we're really putting ourselves into the shoes of other people, treating all human interests as worthy of model consideration, then I think we should appreciate that the impacts we have upon future generations are of enormous model importance. Give us a sense, well, just the scale of that future, because you have an idea here, not simply of, you know, and I think we all respect this, in some ways our First Nations people, our aboriginals were ahead of us in terms of thinking

of seven generations, you know, a sense of care or trust for the environment that would last beyond our own generation. But you're going well beyond seven generations. You're going kind of into the deep future to understand just the scale, the scope, the massive moral weight of the future on the present. Yeah. And you're absolutely right that these ideas have their roots in indigenous philosophy in, yeah, the thought of the Iroquois people, where the original constitution of the Erecoignation, it actually didn't have this limitation of seven generations. It was looking all generations into the future.

And it was a later thinker, Orlon's, that formulated this seventh generation principle. And we can see it in Indigenous African thought as well. But you're absolutely right that my view is a little distinctive in that I think we shouldn't merely limit our horizons to the next few generations. or even the next few centuries, we should just take seriously on a scientific basis how long-lasting humanity might be, where a typical mammal species lasts for about a million years. If humanity were a typical mammal species,

then we would have 700,000 years still to go. But I think an honest accounting means that, you know, that future might be much shorter. We might completely destroy ourselves within this century or the next. But it also might be much longer. again, where the Earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions of years, the stars will keep shining for hundreds of billions of years, even longer. And there's no reason in principle at all why, if humanity did not, if humanity got its act together, there's no reason at all why

we couldn't have such a long-lived and flourishing future. And that's just this mind-boggling thing. And so when I, you mentioned, I said, like, we are the ancients. We live. We live. in the very beginning of human history, that's the sort of thing I'm thinking about, where if humanity plays its card site, then we could be, you know, like an infant toddler, taking its first steps with almost all our future ahead of ourselves. Fascinating. Let's just think of a few probably counterarguments that our listeners may have come up with tuning into our conversation. The first might simply be that there's not much of a history of us thinking this way. Is there a will? I mean, generally it seems that we're a

species were wired. We have a lot of cultural biases to privilege the moment that we're in. You know, what is that ubiquitous feature of much of modern life? You know, this is the most important moment of, you know, the human race. We are living at, you know, the culmination of thousands of years of human history and intervention into our natural world. So why are you optimistic maybe that that type of thinking, which seems very embedded in all of us, could be expanded to a consciousness of this kind of deep future? Well, I think a couple of things. One is, you know, as you've mentioned, there are at least some traditions of thought,

in particular indigenous philosophy, in which this, you know, was actually quite common sense. A second thought is just that even though we've maybe not had a long tradition, at least in Western Europe and its offshoots, that of thinking under such long time scales, well, I think one reason for that is just that, firstly, the idea that the future might be so vast and yet continuation of the human species might be contingent. I actually think that's quite a recent idea. We only really had a good understanding of how long lived even the Earth would be, the Earth would be, only a little over 100 years ago.

And the thought that actually the things that we're doing might really impact not just the pleasant moment, but actually a very, very long time into the future, that idea really only came to the fall with the development of nuclear weapons, where suddenly we had the destructive power that it really looked like we could threaten the whole future of civilization.

And so I think the fact that there isn't this long track record of thinking ahead doesn't really tell us that much. You know, this is based on what in historical terms are relatively recent developments. And I think we have cause for hope, cause to think that actually people really can take a longer-term perspective, which often in fact means prioritizing the reduction of risks that really are happening now, such as extreme climate change, risk of war, pandemics potentially worse than COVID-19. And I think we've already seen evidence to this.

One is just the growth of long-termism as an idea, where there are now thousands of people who are, switching where they donate or switching their career decisions in order to try to make the world better for future generations as well as this one. And we can also see it with the rise of the climate and environmentalist movements where those movements were very firmly based on this idea that future generations matter and some of the things we're doing now are imperiling future generations. And from my perspective, they've just been enormously successful and impactful in terms of of steering civilization onto a better path. One other argument, I'm sure you've heard this, is that this whole conversation is very

anthropocentric, you know, morality, ethics, why is it about us? Why is it about our future? I mean, some would say, you know, there should be all kinds of different moral claims on us that, frankly, have nothing to do with us. And is it right? wrong to think that your theory here is really making an appeal to our fellow humanity. It's power, its push, its pull is that this is about in a sense of the survival of humankind. But to what extent does that matter? Or to what extent does that this future survival of humankind, in fact, align with

all kinds of other ethical interests out there, the interests of the environment? the interests of the other species that we share this planet with. Yeah, thanks so much for bringing that up, because I think that's a really fair critique often of the language I find myself falling into, where I'm a male opponent of speciesism, of the idea that simply in virtue of our membership and homo sapiens, that gives us a greater claim to moral status. And indeed, I think that the harm, that we are inflicting on non-human animals is just honestly an utter abomination.

I also think that one of the ways in which we can positively impact the long term is species preservation, not just of the human species, but of other species too. This was again, one of the insights of the environmentalist movement is that species loss, that's an irrevocable loss. That's a loss that will still be felt indefinitely far into the world. future. And that, however, there is something that's important about humans, which is that ultimately, I think that it's human beings that are, that now, the decisive kind of influences over the future, where that can be good or bad. I mean, it can be bad insofar as the future might be extremely

dystopian, but it can be good in other ways. So even just taking the example of, you know, the environment and Earth's biosphere, well, that has a time limit, that has a life expectancy where the Earth will just not be habitable for any form of life in about billion years. However, that is a contingent fact. There's actually no reason at all why sensible, enlightened technology couldn't extend that much further. And this feels kind of wacky, it feels sci-fi, but if some future much more advanced civilization were to extract hydrogen up from the sun, it would be smaller, it would burn cooler and more efficiently, and you could then return that hydrogen at a later date. That actually means you could extend Earth's habitable lifespan,

not merely by billions of years, but potentially much longer again, actually. And so if you really care about the Earth's biosphere, then in the very long run, actually it's going to need a kind of technologically advanced civilization in order to be able to protect that. And so I know that's kind of wacky, but it's just an indication of a more general fact that, of all the animals in the world, it's human beings that have kind of advanced technological power. And the focus should be on humans insofar as that power can be. be used for great good or for quality. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator.

I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member. Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts. You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world. and you get a specially curated Friday weekly monk members-only podcast that focuses on the big international events and trends shaping our world. All of that, again, free at www.w.com.

I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. Daniel Dennett was a past guest on the Monk Dialogues and he made, you know, that fascinating observation that we now have a species that has created an asteroid detection system for the rest of the planet and all the other species on it. Like that's that's kind of cool. It's a great example. Yeah. Let's talk about risk because I think what's interesting about your book and the way you're thinking through these issues is that you believe these risks in a sense extend well beyond maybe our usual list of suspects, most notably climate change. You

You think there are other very specific existential risks that have evolved primarily through our use and development of dual use technologies. And that those risks this century are not insignificant. They are serious to the extent that they threaten the future existence of, as you've said, literally trillions of humans and also potentially trillions of other. iterations of the other species that we share this planet with? Yeah. So technology in general brings advantages and harms and risks. So I personally am still terrified by the prospect of a nuclear war in my lifetime. The development of fission had major benefits. We now had access to nuclear power, which could provide abundant clean energy, but also allowed us to create the atom and hydrogen bonds, and which we then scaled up dramatically, and we now live

under a constant threat of nuclear war. I think that future technology could be even more powerful again, again, both for good or bad. The clearest case, in my view, is the risk from engineered viruses. So scientists already today have the capability to take a virus and upgrade it in the sense of increasing its destructive power. That means making it more infectious or more deadly. Our ability to do that via gene vibes, gene editing, is only increasing over time. It's really, it's not a long-term worry, in fact.

It's a near-term worry that more and more people, as this technology becomes cheaper and more democratized, are able to develop more and more powerful new viruses. that could be used as an instrument of terrorism, also could be developed as kind of next generation weapons of mass destruction. And indeed, we've already seen many countries around the world have very large scale biological weapons programs. And this is frankly terrifying,

where the utter destruction and harm that COVID-19 are reaped upon the world, well, we could be looking at something 10 times, 100 times worse again. So that's one aspect is risk from engineered pathogens. And then a second of risks from artificial intelligence, where again, artificial intelligence has the potential for enormous benefits to the world, but it also comes with a large number of risks. That can include increasing ability for political leadership to entrench power,

to use AI as a tool for social control, where if the workforce gets automated, that really undercuts much of a reason that they have to, you know, potentially authoritarian leaders have to appease and treat their populace well. It also is possible that we could build artificial systems that are much more capable than we are ourselves, when we get to the point of developing AI systems that are human level or even beyond. And machine learning experts estimate that this is likely to happen within the next few decades. Well, then we might be in a situation where human beings are no longer the smartest creatures on the planet. And the future might be driven by the goals and interests of artificially

intelligent systems. And those goals might be really quite alien and valueless from our perspective. So there's just enormous number of challenges here. And it really got the choirs kind of humble, carefully minded and altruistically motivated people to be working on development of these technologies so that we can steer the technology and steer the regulation around them in a positive direction. Your words make me think about two other presenters

we've had on the Monk Dialogues. Nick Bostrom at Oxford and Ian Morris, the historian at Stanford, both, what your kind of view on this will, this idea that humanity is in a kind of high-stakes race, in a sense, to contain and direct these technologies you've just outlined a few of them, to manage the existential risks that they represent. Yet at the same time, if you were to zoom out, I know it's just a small slice of history for the last two to three years, one could see an argument that those existential risks are seeming to outpace our capacity, our ability to contain them. I'm so glad that you brought up the existential risk

of nuclear weapons. We're now seeing, I think, you know, unprecedented rhetoric out of, out and around the Ukraine war, specifically from Vladimir Putin about the potential use of nuclear weapons, breaking a 75-year taboo on this technology, were bombarded with stories of the continuing acceleration of artificial intelligence, advances that are being made largely unregulated by corporations and most likely foreign governments. I mean, to what sense, Will, are you optimistic that we can manage the risks of these technologies when at least our recent history, the recent experience of the last half decade or so seems again to suggest that they are overwhelming us. So ultimately I am optimistic that we can

manage these threats. And one reason is just getting acquainted with the movements of people who are trying to reduce these risks. So take the case of pandemics, there are amazingly impressive scientists and engineers and activists and policymakers who are working to ensure that we are prepared for the next pandemic and ensuring that actually we didn't even need to be prepared because there never will be another one. And so some of the things we can do there. One example is early detection. So monitoring wastewater all in the world to find out, Okay, are there some proteins that are some kind of DNA sequences that are exponentially increasing? So suggestive of a new virus, kind of a new outbreak, such that we could respond to another

pandemic much, much sooner than we otherwise would. A second is just simply much better personal protective equipment where, you know, the difference in mask quality, it really could be a difference of a hundredfold in terms of your chance of getting COVID. And we could just have much better masks that would be much less, you know, make you much less likely to get infected sick, vital if you're an essential worker

in the case of a future pandemic. But we could also, I think, dramatically the juice the risk of their being of any future pandemics. One technology I'm particularly excited about is called low wavelength lighting. And essentially it's just a modification you can make to household lighting that is perfectly safe, but yet sterilizes a room.

And that is something that with sufficient research and development, we could, and with sufficient testing of it and so on, we could potentially get the cost down low enough that that gets installed basically via building codes essentially everywhere in the world. Then we could potentially just eliminate the spirit of the infections. while also guarding against the next pandemic. These are things we really can do. And I'm seeing philanthropists, activists, scientists all push in on this. And yes, there are major hurdles.

It's certainly extremely disappointing how utterly limp the United States government response has been to protect against future pandemics, even despite the horrific impact of the United States. COVID-19. But yet, I think that with this, these bright minds that are pushing on these issues, I think ultimately we can navigate the risks. Well, I'm glad you brought up solutions because that's where I want to spend my remaining time with you. We've had a high-level discussion, but you're not just a high-level philosopher. You're someone who, in their own life, and kind of practically leading your own movement, is trying to get people to think about things

that they can do to assert some kind of agency and control and to assume some moral responsibility for this kind of vast future and the human potential, the untold human potential that lies within it. So give us a sense of how we can be practical in our response to the issues and challenges that you've raised so far in this conversation. On an individual level, I think the two best things that individuals can do are, donations and career choice. On the donations side of things, I co-founded an organisation called Giving What We Can, which encourages people to give at least 10% of their income to the organisations that they think will do the most to make the world better. And if you're convinced by some of the

arguments I've made and are worried about some of these global catastrophic risks, well, there's actually now a fund, the long-termism fund that's part of giving what we can. You can donate there, then experts can reallocate the money to things like pandemic prevention or track to that 1.5 diplomacy to reduce the risk of nuclear war or technical machine learning or governance work to ensure that AI systems are safe and well managed. So donations are one way, I think, that anyone can have an enormous impact because you can help support the very best people in the world working on these topics. The second way of having an impact as an individual, I think, is if you're able to, via career choice and another organization I helped set up is 80,000 hours named after the number

of hours you typically work in the course of your life. And that provides a wealth of advice online through its podcast, the 80,000 hours podcast, and also via one-on-one advising on what are career paths where you can potentially have the biggest impact, where, again, that will mean working perhaps for non-profits, perhaps can be for companies too, or in research, in policy, in politics, or in campaigning, that mean that we can really move the needle on some of the big threats that are facing us and help guide civilization into a safer and better place. Yeah, and it's interesting, you're not against people. Let's say, for example, adopting an all-vegan diet, but maybe your point here will, and again, I want you to

you to state it, I don't want to misconstrue, but that there are other actions you, one could take if you were compelled to act with a kind of moral impetus towards this, this vast future, this summit of human potential that we've only just beginning to climb. we need to understand how certain actions are just demonstrably more effective than others. Absolutely. So for socially concerned people, at the moment, there's this huge focus on changes to personal consumption decisions. And now that can be great. So in my own case, I've been vegetarian for 17 years.

It was literally the first thing I did when I left home. And I see that as part of living a good model life. However, I think that in terms of impact, the amount of good you can do through your donations or through your career decision vastly exceeds the amount of good you can do by changing personal consumption. And I think you can see this most clearly if you think about your climate impact. So as a member of a rich country, you know, the amount of CO2, my consumption produces is in the range of kind of ten. to 20 tons per year. So if I were to go to a carbon zero, like literally I was just living in a kind of craft, I wasn't really doing engaging with the modern world at all, I could reduce my carbon footprint by at most 10 to 20 tons of CO2. However, supposing I donate 10% of my income, you know, that would be about

$4,000 or $5,000, well, depending on how you count it, but let's say I'm donating $5,000 a year. Well, it turns out, if I'm donating that to the very most effective non-profits, like an organization called Clean Air Task Force that tries to move the world onto renewable technology, every dollar donated to that organization mitigates about one ton of carbon dioxide equivalent. So that means I'm doing 100, maybe 5,000. hundred times as much good through those targeted donations as I would be if I entirely reduced my own carbon footprint because through my donations I can focus on those very most effective things and that's why I think that we should in general be focusing on these ways of doing good

rather than what end up being like relatively small impacts via our changes to personal consumption Yeah, absolutely great insight that there are people out there who are being incredibly innovative and creative and have developed, you know, high impact, scalable solutions to achieve the kind of social, environmental, technological change that you may like it to have as an individual reflected in the society you live in and supporting those groups could be the most advantageous way to bring about those outcomes. I just want to end, Will, on a final note. You've been, as per usual, very modest in this interview about your own role and contribution to this kind of public discussion about kind of long-term altruism. It's no exaggeration to say that you've managed through your writing and your philosophy to create a global movement of sorts that's involving tens and hundreds of thousands of people around the world in common enterprise. one, does that surprise you as a philosopher? It's not often what we associate as an outcome of kind of, I assume, sitting in a bookline study, writing big thoughts and ideas. And what does it maybe say to you will about philosophy itself and how we should be practicing philosophy in these, the opening decades of the 21st century? Great. Well, it's certainly a surprise to me. Certainly when I set out on this journal, back in 2009, setting up giving what we can.

You know, honestly, I was actually pretty pessimistic, or I didn't really think we were going to have this enormous impact, but I just thought, look, every person I can convince to donate 10%, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetime. You know, that's potentially dozens of lives saved. Even if I can just get a few people to do that, that is well, well worth it. And so I think if you told me then that we'd now have well over 7,000 people who've taken that 10% pledge, and thousands more people who are, you know, not pledging, but are switching the careers instead,

and if you told me that collectively we've now, we are now moving hundreds of millions of dollars to the most effective causes every single year, I would have been utterly blown away. I just wouldn't have believed it at all. And what does this say about philosophy? Well, I think it just shows the power of the kind of fusion between clear philosophical thinking and yet kind of practical engagement with the world, where philosophers, you know, I know that people normally don't think of philosophers in this way, but they can be kind of heading the clouds. You know, they can be a little bit divorced from reality.

And that's a shame because very clear, rigorous philosophical thinking and the tradition of Marbley. philosophy, especially over the last 100, 200 years, has produced enormous insights that can do an enormous amount to make the world better. At the same time, when I look at people, you know, campaigners, activists, scientists, they are, you know, often doing really important things. But I think with like careful thinking about what the real problems in the world, what the little problems we're facing in the world, could often be having an impact that's, you know, 10 times greater, or even 100 times greater. And so I think the growth of effect of altruism

over the last 10, 15 years has been in significant part because this combination of sort of insight that you might get from academic philosophy directed at issues that are really facing the world, you know, real challenges that real people are facing today, that's just a very powerful combination, I think. Thank you, Will, for spending time with us today.

congratulations on all your work. We'll have those different websites that you're involved with, those groups listed in the show notes of today's program, along with your latest book, and just in the spirit of the monk dialogues, thank you for joining us in our efforts to promote civil and substantive conversation discussion on the big issues of our time. I've really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much, me too. Well, that wraps up today's dialogue. I want to thank our guest, William McHastle, for a fascinating conversation. We'd love your feedback and reflections on what you've just heard. Please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com.

That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com. And just a reminder that you can register while you're on our website, triple w monkdebates.com for our other great podcast offering, our Friday Focus podcast that digs into the big issues. ideas in our news, shaping our world. Register right now for membership and we'll tell you how to listen to Friday Focus as part of your offering of Monk Debate Audio. Also, a reminder that on that same website, you can find all kinds of great debates and dialogues and podcasts, literally hundreds of them on topics ranging from climate change to more content on the future of humanity to the British monarchy to the Me Too movement. we've got it all at triple w monk debates.com. I want to thank you for lending your time and attention

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