Sam Harris

Sam Harris is an author and neuroscientist who hosts the long-form podcast Making Sense and created the Waking Up meditation app. He holds a philosophy degree from Stanford University and a doctorate in neuroscience from UCLA.

Books and Academic Work

Harris’s first book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, was published by W. W. Norton in August 2004; his own site records it as winner of the 2005 PEN award for nonfiction. The Library of Congress name authority record that identifies this Sam Harris — distinguishing him from others of the same name — is itself anchored to that book, and carries a birth year of 1967. He went on to publish Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance, a dialogue co-authored with Maajid Nawaz and published by Harvard University Press in 2015.

His neuroscience work is on the public record independently of his popular writing. In October 2009 he was first author on “The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief” in PLoS ONE, an fMRI study of fifteen Christians and fifteen nonbelievers evaluating religious and nonreligious statements for truth. The paper prints his affiliations as the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, the UCLA Brain Research Institute, and The Reason Project. Its reported finding was that belief judgments, as against disbelief judgments, were associated with greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

New Atheism and the “Four Horsemen”

In 2007 Harris took part in a filmed discussion with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. The four became known as “the four horsemen,” and the transcript of that conversation was published as a book in October 2019 with new essays by the three surviving participants and an introduction by Stephen Fry. In June 2026 Dawkins presented Harris with the Richard Dawkins Award at a Center for Inquiry event, which Harris released as episode 481 of his podcast.

The Podcast

The podcast feed Harris operates begins with two meditation recordings dated 26 September 2013 and a talk, “How to talk to a Christian,” from November 2013. The numbered series starts on 5 June 2014 with “#1 — Drugs And The Meaning Of Life.” The show was originally Waking Up with Sam Harris — the feed’s iTunes owner field still carries that name — and now runs as Making Sense. As of 1 September 2026 the feed held 508 items and the most recent numbered episode was #491.

Episode subjects have ranged across meditation, moral philosophy, artificial intelligence and current events; the numbered back catalogue includes episodes on the 2016 election, the Trump presidencies, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July 2024, and a recurring “More From Sam” listener-question format. Full-length episodes are gated behind a subscription, with the feed’s show notes directing non-subscribers to samharris.org/subscribe.

Harris also publishes a Substack under his own name that mirrors podcast episodes and carries written posts, and a YouTube channel, @samharrisorg, which listed 30.6 thousand subscribers in September 2026.

Waking Up

Waking Up is a subscription meditation app Harris created. It offers guided practices, lessons on the theory of meditation, and recorded conversations with other teachers. The company states that it grants free membership to anyone who cannot afford a subscription.

The “Intellectual Dark Web” Characterization

Harris was one of the figures Bari Weiss wrote about in “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” published by The New York Times on 8 May 2018 — the article that popularised the label. Weiss described meeting “Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin; and their spouses in a Los Angeles restaurant.” The label is Weiss’s framing, not a self-description or an organisation.

In the same article Harris gave his own account of what changed his critics. He located it at a 2006 conference at the Salk Institute, where he argued that not all cultures are equally conducive to human flourishing: “Until that time I had been criticizing religion, so the people who hated what I had to say were mostly on the right.” He added, of an exchange about multiculturalism, “The moral confusion that operates under the banner of ‘multiculturalism’ can blind even well-educated people to the problems of intolerance and cruelty in other communities. This had never fully crystallized for me until that moment.” Weiss also reported that “Sam Harris estimates that his ‘Waking Up’ podcast gets one million listeners an episode” — an estimate of his, reported in 2018, not a verified or current figure.

Leaving Twitter

Harris deleted his Twitter account and explained the decision in episode #304 of the podcast, “Why I Left Twitter,” released on 28 November 2022. He returned to the subject a month later in “#307 — Twitter, Elon, & Free Speech,” which the show notes describe as a discussion of Elon Musk’s conduct on the platform and “the illusion of ‘free-speech absolutism.’” A Making Sense organisational account remains linked from his website, but he has no personal presence there.

What Is Not Established Here

This page previously carried a followerCount of “1+ million podcast subscribers.” No current figure for the podcast’s audience could be sourced; the only number found is Harris’s own 2018 estimate of a million listeners an episode, reported by Bari Weiss, which is now stated in the body with that attribution rather than as a frontmatter fact.

primaryPlatforms previously listed podcasting and twitter-x. podcasting is a technology entry in this repository, not a platform, and has been left as a connection rather than a platform. twitter-x was removed because Harris deleted his account in November 2022 and said so on his own show; the page had described him as “active in political discourse and debates” there, which the record contradicts.

Also removed for want of a source: the date-range headings “2004-2010,” “2010-2016,” “2013-Present” and “2016-Present” and the narrative attached to them, which asserted a trajectory of “expanded his digital footprint through speaking engagements, debates, and early podcast appearances” with nothing behind it; the claim that the podcast “became a forum” whose guests are “political figures, journalists, and intellectuals” as a general characterization; and the “Digital Political Impact” and “Content Strategy” bullet lists, which summarised his positions in the project’s own voice (“advocating for free speech principles and rational debate,” “emphasis on logical argumentation and evidence-based reasoning”). Where his views matter they are now quoted and attributed to him.

The claim that he is associated with the Intellectual Dark Web “alongside figures like Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, and Dave Rubin” is retained only in the form the source supports: Weiss’s 2018 article names Harris, Eric Weinstein and Dave Rubin as her dinner companions and discusses Peterson and Bret Weinstein separately in the same piece. No membership, organisation or joint venture is established. The former affiliation entry “Four Horsemen of Atheism” was rewritten as a body section, since it is a label for a single 2007 conversation rather than a body Harris belongs to.

The site’s claims of an Apple “iTunes Best” selection and a Webby Award for the podcast are recorded in the sources as his own site’s assertions; neither Apple nor the Webby Awards was reached to confirm them, so neither is stated in the body. PEN America’s own award listing returned HTTP 403 to every client tried, so the 2005 PEN award is likewise reported as his site reports it.