Dr Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009). In November 2021 his two-volume work The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World was published by Perspectiva Press.

Mattias Desmet PhD, is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University (Belgium). He has a Phd in psychology and a master degree in statistics. He also works as a psychotherapist in private practice. He published over 100 peer reviewed academic papers and he is the author of the international bestseller The psychology of totalitarianism. Since the onset of the coronacrisis in 2020 he became known as the world’s leading expert on the theory on mass formation. He was invited on numerous podcasts and talkshows, including Tucker Carlson Today.