Sam Harris

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, New York Times best-selling author, host of the Making Sense podcast, and creator of the Waking Up app.

Best of Sam Harris Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks Part 1

Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, and his work has been published in over twenty languages. His writing and public lectures cover topics such as neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, and rationality. His body of work tends to focus on how a growing understanding of one's self and the world is changing how people believe they should live. His work has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and The Annals of Neurology.

His books include the following:

• The End of Faith (winner of the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction)
• Letter to a Christian Nation
• The Moral Landscape
• Free Will
• Lying
• Waking Up
• Making Sense
• Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz)
• The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

Sam Harris is the host of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast explores questions about the mind, society, current events, moral philosophy, religion, and rationality, focusing on understanding one's self, the world, and how people should live. The podcast was selected by Apple as one of the “iTunes Best” list and has won a Webby Award for best podcast in the science and education category.

Sam Harris created the Waking Up app for people to learn to meditate in a modern, scientific context. He has called it a "new operating system for your mind." The Waking Up app allows users to learn to live a more examined, fulfilling life and practice mindfulness. Waking Up offers free subscriptions to anyone who cannot afford one and donates a minimum of 10 percent of profits to charities globally.

Sam Harris won the PEN America Literary Award for nonfiction in 2005 for his book The End of Faith. His Making Sense Podcast was the Webby Awards People's Voice Winner in 2017 for science and education.

Sam Harris earned a philosophy degree from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has also practiced meditation for more than thirty years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers in the United States and abroad. He has stated that he first experimented with MDMA while at Stanford University and experienced a spiritual epiphany. After that, he left Stanford to study mysticism and Eastern religions in Asia, returning to get his degree in philosophy in 2000.

Sam Harris was born Samuel Benjamin Harris in Los Angeles, California, on April 9, 1967. He lives in Los Angeles, is married to Annaka Harris, and they have two daughters. His mother was Susan Harris, a non-practicing Jewish TV producer known for The Golden Girls, and his father was actor Berkeley Harris, who appeared mainly in Western films. His father was born in North Carolina and came from a Quaker background. His parents divorced when he was two years old, and his mother raised him. He stated that he was not raised an atheist but he was also not raised with any religion.