John Brockman (born February 16, 1941) is an American literary agent and author specializing in scientific literature. He established the Edge Foundation, an online magazine exploring scientific and intellectual ideas. He was also closely connected to Jeffrey Epstein.
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Early life
Brockman, born to Austrian immigrants of Jewish descent, grew up in Dorchester, which was a poor Irish Catholic enclave in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a broker in the wholesale flower market in Boston, to hustle sales. Expanding on C. P. Snow's "two cultures", he introduced the "third culture" consisting of "those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are." Brockman attended Babson Institute (now Babson College) and earned an MBA from the Columbia Business School in 1963.
Career
In 1968, Brockman organized an advertising campaign for the Monkees' film Head. Brockman's visage appeared on posters which did not mention the group, as well as in the film itself. Brockman later made a cameo appearance in the group's 1997 TV special, Hey, Hey, It's the Monkees.
Brockman led a scientific salon for 20 years, asking an annual question to a host of renowned scientists and publishing their answers in book form, which he decided to symbolically close down in 2018.
He is an editor of Edge.org. He represented many famous scientists, including Daniel Kahneman, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins.
Association with Jeffrey Epstein
In an interview with Prince Andrew on November 17, 2019, BBC reporter Emily Maitlis mentioned that both Andrew and John Brockman attended a dinner at child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion to celebrate Epstein’s release from prison for charges which stemmed from at least one decade of child sex trafficking. Brockman's name was also found in Epstein's private jet log.
Andrew’s presence at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion was corroborated by Brockman himself, in emails published in an October 2019 New Republic report. The story suggested that Brockman was closely connected to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who died in August 2019 while again awaiting trial on charges related to sex trafficking.
Brockman's literary dinners, held during the TED Conference, were, for a number of years after Epstein's conviction, almost entirely funded by Epstein as documented in his annual tax filings. This allowed Epstein to mingle with scientists, startup icons and tech billionaires.
Brockman, through dinners and salons hosted by the Edge Foundation, was also responsible for making the first introductions between Epstein and various scientists, including Seth Lloyd and Lisa Randall. Steven Pinker stated that he was convinced to fly on Epstein's private jet by Brockman.
Following the 2026 release of the expanded Epstein files, social media posts highlighted a 2018 email authored by Brockman in which he referenced "a dozen one-year-olds." According to Brockman's family, the email was referring to his granddaughter's first birthday party.