TYB
edge.org
All corporate connections to John Brockman can be found on the website. Searching Epstein on the site yields 112 results. Don't know if this has been dug before. But there is a LOT here.
2004 Billionaires Dinner
Ariane de Bonvoisin - Daniel Gilbert - Eva Wisten?(En route to The Billionaires' Dinner - 2004)
This year, a downsized (or, if you like, more exclusive) Edge dinner was convened in Monterey at the Indian Summer Restaurant.
The dinner, which for the past few years has been held during the annual TED Conference, always has a name attached to it. It began in 1984 as "The Millionaires' Dinner" (thanks to a page one article in The Wall Street Journal) in a Las Vegas Mexican restaurant during COMDEX Eventually it evolved to "The Digerati Dinner"; to "The World Domination, Corporate Cubism, and Alien Mind Control Dinner", to "The Billionaires' Dinner". Last year we tried "The Science Dinner". Everyone yawned. So this year, it's back to the money-sex-power thing with "The Billionaires' Dinner". I realize that "Billionaire" is tired and very '90s, but the name worked for this year's dinner. It was a coincidence that during the dinner, Google cofounder Larry Page received a message on his pager informing him that he and cofounder Sergey Brin had made the ForbesMagazine list of 157 billionaires.
And a number of people who showed up for the dinner are really cooking: Jeff Bezos of Amazon; Google's CEO Eric Schmidt, Larry, Sergey, Lori Park, and Megan Smith; Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay; Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway; Steve Case, former Chairman of AOL Time-Warner who is now on to new adventures; and Jeffrey Epstein, who recently endowed The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University which is involved in researching applications of mathematics and computer science to biology
At this point Jeffrey Epstein joined the conversation and demanded to know whether weird quantum effects had played a significant role in the origins of life. That question pushed me way out of the sumo ring into the deep unknown. We tried to construct a version of the question that could be answered. I was pushing my own personal theory of everything (the universe is a giant quantum computer, and to understand how things like life came into existence, we have to understand how atoms, molecules, and photons process information). Jeffrey was pushing back with his own theory (we need to understand what problem was being solved at the moment life came into being). By pushing from both sides, we managed to assemble a metaphor in which molecules divert the flow of free energy to their own recreational purposes (i.e., literally recreating themselves) somewhat in the way Jeffrey manages to divert the flow of money as it moves from time-zone to time-zone, using that money for his own recreational purposes (i.e., to create more money). I'm not saying it was the right way to describe the origins of life: I'm just saying that it was fun…
Attendees: Pam Alexander, Alexander Ogilvy; Chris Anderson, TED; Chris Anderson, Wired; Jeff Bezos, Jackie Bezos, Adam Bly, Seed; Stewart Brand, Long Now Foundation; Sergey Brin, Google; Patti Brown, New York Times; Steve Case; Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Claremont; Steffi Czerny, Burda Media; Susan Dawson, Sapling Foundation; Ariane De Bonvoisin; Dan Dubno, CBS News;Jeffrey Epstein, Epstein Assoc.; Nancy Etcoff, Harvard Medical School; Daniel Gilbert, Harvard; Alan Guth, MIT; Katrina Heron; Kevin Kelly, Wired; Seth Lloyd. MIT; Pam Omidyar, Omidyar Foundation; Pierre Omidyar, eBay ; Larry Page, Google; Steve Petranek,Discover; Ryan Phelan, DNA Direct; Tom Rielly, TED; Forrest Sawyer, MSNBC; Eric Schmidt, Google; Martin Seligman, UPenn; Megan Smith, Google; Paul Steinhardt, Princeton; Cyndi Stivers, Time Out New York ; Linda Stone; Steven Strogatz, Cornell; Leonard Susskind, Stanford; Kara Swisher, Wall Street Journal; Yossi Vardi, ICQ; Alisa Volkman, Nerve; Eva Wisten, Bon Magazine; Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair
o7 anon. Hopefully some good will come from it.