What You Can Expect
A New Community: Since leaving social media, I’ve missed being able to quickly share my thoughts on current events and recommend the work of others. Substack allows me to do these things again, for a select audience. For years, many of us have lamented the toxicity of online discourse. I want to change this (at least for my readers). I hope to build a community here that engages with my work, and with each other, in meaningful ways.
Essays and other writing: Substack has built an outstanding platform for writers. For those of you who want to see more of me in print, you will find my latest work here. Perhaps I’ll write a book on this page and solicit feedback from readers. I might eventually commission work from other writers and scholars. Substack is also building the capacity to stream live video, which I’m eager to experiment with. Whatever happens, I’ll do my best to create something interesting here.
My Digital Business Model
No one knows what the best business model is for digital media—and what seems right today, might prove disastrous in the future. As consumers, each of us now limps and lurches across the information landscape, tethered to dozens of competing apps and platforms. Some media companies charge subscriptions. Some extract and sell our data. Some assail us with ads. Some do all these things at once and damage their brands in the process. (Even the most prestigious publications aren’t immune. If you’ve ever been reading The Atlantic, for which you happily pay, only to be enticed by a banner ad promising to reveal how ugly some celebrity has become—and then found yourself directed to a website whose business model requires a mastery of string theory to understand—you know what I’m talking about.)
No one has figured this out, even if some are succeeding financially. And yet, I believe I’ve found the best business model available to me.
I never want anyone doing math to figure out whether they can afford a subscription to my digital work. If paying for a subscription to the Making Sense podcast, the Waking Up app, or this Substack causes you actual stress, please ask for it for free. You need only send an email to support@samharris.org. No request has ever been denied. And no questions have ever been asked.
I know that not everyone fits neatly into the space provided. For instance, if you have an active account on one or more of my existing platforms, and you feel that your subscription to this Substack should be included or discounted, just reach out to customer support. I’d much rather you be here on your own terms than not be here at all.
This has been my business model from the very beginning.
My Terms of Service
Having abandoned the digital killing fields of Twitter/X, I know what I don’t want in an online community. This Substack should be a place for honest and useful conversation, on more or less any topic. But intentions matter.
There will be an ironclad no-assholes policy, enforced with the apparent capriciousness of a bolt of lightning. If you ever find yourself wondering whether to say something vicious to another subscriber here, please take a moment to wonder some more. Just like in life, once you’re gone, you’re gone for good.
So don’t think of this page as another town square, where decent people can cross the street to avoid your ranting or frottage. Think of it as a dinner party, where your host seems to know more than you expected about the arms trade, how people sometimes disappear without a trace in the developing world, and where Vladimir Putin keeps his money.
Enjoy!
Sam Harris
Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times best sellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, and Waking Up. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.
Sam’s work has been published in more than 20 languages and 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), The Annals of Neurology, among others. He also hosts the Making Sense podcast, which was selected by Apple as one of the “iTunes Best” and has won a Webby Award for best podcast in the Science & Education category.
Sam received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has also practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. Sam has created the Waking Up app for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern, scientific context.
