Jim Garrison is the Founder and President of Ubiquity University, a next-generation global learning platform blending academic rigor with consciousness development, social innovation, and transformative education. Born in 1951 in Szechuan Province, China, to Baptist missionary parents, Garrison holds a PhD in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge and has spent five decades at the intersection of education, diplomacy, and civilizational transformation - co-founding the Gorbachev Foundation/USA with Mikhail Gorbachev after the Cold War, launching the State of the World Forum, and more recently convening Humanity Rising, a global summit initiative launched in 2020 that has engaged hundreds of thousands of activists worldwide.
Erik Hoel is an American neuroscientist, novelist, and philosopher who turned the hardest problem in science - consciousness - into a literary career. Holding a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison under consciousness pioneer Giulio Tononi, Hoel developed 'causal emergence' theory and the 'overfitted brain hypothesis' before trading academic tenure for a Substack with 69,000+ subscribers. His newsletter The Intrinsic Perspective blends rigorous science with razor-sharp cultural commentary, while his books - the debut mystery novel The Revelations (2021) and the nonfiction The World Behind the World (2023) - bring consciousness science to general readers. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he grew up in his mother's independent bookstore in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and was mentored by novelist Andre Dubus III at age 13.