Noah Levine started his journey of recovering from addiction through the practice of Buddhism in 1988. At the time he was sitting in a jail cell, so hopeless and demoralized that he found the willingness to try his fathers “hippy meditation bullshit”. Much to his surprise and great relief he found in Buddhist meditation a sense of well-being that nothing else had ever provided. Noah was eventually trained and empowered to teach by Jack Kornfield. He went on to create the Against The Stream Buddhist Meditation Society and now offers the Refuge Recovery program.

You can learn more about Noah here.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang writes about people, technology, and the worlds they make. He has spent more than two decades exploring this relationship, first as an historian of science and technology, and as a futurist and technology forecaster. Alex received a Ph.D. in the history of science from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a senior consultant at Strategic Business Insights, a Menlo Park, California consulting and research firm. He has also recently recently held academic appointments at Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University’s Saïd Business School.

Alex began his latest book, The Distraction Addiction (Little Brown, 2013) while serving as a Visiting Fellow in the Socio-Digital Systems Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. The Distraction Addiction explores our deep, intense, and easy to misunderstand relationships with technology. It explains how they help define who we are, and they they sometimes seem to drive us. Finally, it shows how even in today’s high-tech tsunami of new products and tweets and likes, we can learn to make choices that don’t just help us better “manage” technology, but expand our minds, become wiser and more creative, and help us become better people.

You can learn more about Alex here.