Sam Harris

Sam Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, neuroscientist, and podcaster who came to prominence as one of the "Four Horsemen" of the New Atheism movement and built a large following through his Making Sense podcast. He appears as a registrant of Dialog, the invitation-only society cofounded by Peter Thiel, in the membership records leaked in June 2026, and his 2017 podcast episode "Forbidden Knowledge" gave a sympathetic platform to the race-and-IQ claims of Charles Murray, provoking a prolonged public dispute with the journalist Ezra Klein.¹²

New Atheism

Harris was born in Los Angeles, the son of the actor Berkeley Harris and the television producer Susan Harris. He took a BA in philosophy from Stanford University in 2000 and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2009, using functional MRI to study the neural basis of belief. His first book, The End of Faith (2004), written after the September 11 attacks, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and spent thirty-three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. With Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett, Harris became one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, the polemical anti-religion current of the mid-2000s. He followed with Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), The Moral Landscape (2010), and Waking Up (2014).³⁴

The "Four Horsemen" label came from a two-hour conversation the four men filmed in Hitchens's Washington apartment in September 2007, released on video and later transcribed as a 2018 book with an introduction by Stephen Fry. Within the movement Harris became its most contested figure for his statements on Islam, including his argument that the faith was uniquely dangerous and his defense of ethnic profiling at airports, which drew a charged 2014 exchange with the actor Ben Affleck on Real Time with Bill Maher who called the framing "gross" and "racist." Harris also feuded with the linguist Noam Chomsky in a 2015 email exchange that Harris published, over the morality of American foreign policy.⁴⁸

Making Sense

Harris launched the Waking Up podcast in 2013, later renamed Making Sense, which became one of the more widely listened-to long-form interview shows and a fixture of the loose network of commentators labeled the "intellectual dark web." The show paired a meditation-and-secularism brand with conversations on politics, science, and free speech, and it placed Harris among the public intellectuals who circulate through Thiel-adjacent and rationalist circles.⁴

The "intellectual dark web" label was coined by the mathematician Eric Weinstein and popularized by Bari Weiss in a May 2018 New York Times feature that grouped Harris with Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, and the Weinstein brothers. Harris built an independent media business around the podcast and the Waking Up meditation app: in December 2018 he closed his Patreon account in protest after the platform banned the YouTuber Sargon of Akkad, moving his funding to a direct subscription model, and in November 2022 he deleted his account on Twitter, saying he had blocked roughly 50,000 accounts in his final week over what he described as a flood of conspiracy content after Elon Musk's takeover.⁶⁷

Forbidden Knowledge and the Klein Dispute

On April 23, 2017, Harris published episode 73, "Forbidden Knowledge: A Conversation with Charles Murray," presenting Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve, as the victim of a taboo and treating his hereditarian claims about racial IQ differences as suppressed science. The site Vox published a critique by the researchers Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard Nisbett calling the conversation "pseudoscientific racialist speculation," which triggered a months-long Twitter argument and a two-hour 2018 podcast confrontation between Harris and Vox editor Klein. Klein argued that the framing repackaged "America's most ancient justification for bigotry," while Harris maintained he was defending open inquiry. The episode became a touchstone of the human-biodiversity discourse that runs through the rationalist and tech-right milieus.¹²⁵

The Turkheimer-Harden-Nisbett essay, titled "Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ," ran in May 2017 and argued that the heritability of IQ within a group says nothing about the cause of differences between groups. The recorded Klein debate aired in April 2018 as a joint episode on both men's podcasts; Harris accused Klein of running a "politically correct moral panic," and Klein countered that Harris mistook his own racial and political priors for pure objectivity. The dispute solidified the line between Harris's "intellectual dark web" defense of open inquiry and the mainstream scientific position that the genetic-difference claim was unsupported.⁵⁹

Dialog

Harris appears in the leaked records of Dialog, the secret society cofounded in 2006 by Thiel and Auren Hoffman that convenes officials, executives, and public figures at off-the-record annual retreats. In June 2026 the hacktivist crimew and the magazine WIRED disclosed a registration list of 222 names for Dialog's 2026 retreat, naming Harris alongside Elon Musk, sitting U.S. senators, and a four-star military commander. His listing places him among the cultural figures convened by the same Thiel network that funded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Hereticon conference.¹

WIRED reported on June 16, 2026 that crimew had extracted the directory directly from hidden code on Dialog's own website. The 2026 retreat was scheduled for August 12 to 16 at the Powerscourt Hotel outside Dublin, and the disclosed list named the senators Ted Cruz and Cory Booker and the most senior NATO commander in Europe among the registrants, with a program of off-the-record sessions including "Navigating WWIII" and "Bring Back Nuclear." Harris had long been a public ally of the New Atheism and free-speech causes that overlap with the Thiel-funded rationalist orbit, though his presence on the list did not indicate a stated political alignment with Thiel.¹