“If your golf instructor were to insist that you shave your head, sleep no more than four hours each night, renounce sex, and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables, you would find a new golf instructor. However, when gurus make demands of this kind, many of their students simply do as directed.”

American neuroscientist, philosopher, author, and podcast host

Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American neuroscientist, philosopher, author, and podcast host. He became widely known for his criticism of religion and is often grouped with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism. His work ranges across rationality, ethics, free will, determinism, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Much of his public writing and speaking returns to questions about how people think, what they believe, and how reason should shape public life.