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Source record · S-042

The Obama transition meeting, December 2008

The account as dictated, preserved verbatim. Everything elsewhere on this site that derives from it is a distillation — and where the two differ, this governs.

Recorded 2026-08-15Dictated in sessionAll sources
Provenance

Dictated by Jonathan Paul Hare in working sessions with Claude (Anthropic) and transcribed in-session. Lightly cleaned for typographic errors and false starts; wording, sequence and emphasis preserved. Not an audio transcript. Where the distilled page differs from the source, the source governs.

Primary source

As dictated

Please add an entry for a meeting I had with the Obama presidential transition team after he was elected in 2008. It was December of 2008, in a meeting with Reed Hundt, former FCC commissioner, and in charge of the transition team for the 'money agencies' — Treasury, SEC, FDIC, etc.

I was introduced to Reed Hundt by my friend John Clippinger, then the director of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the topic was 'Regulatory Infrastructure for the 21st Century.'

I was brought in to present to Reed and a whole team of people, mostly people from McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, to explain how my Trust Network could avoid a repeat of the epic financial meltdown the country was in the process of going through.

Processing

What was changed, and why

Corrections applied downstream are recorded here rather than made silently. The source above is unaltered.

Editorial record

Reed Hundt chaired the FCC under President Clinton; the entity page describes him as chairman rather than commissioner, which is the more precise title.

The characterisation of what the argument was — that 2008 was a verification failure rather than a regulatory one — is Hare's, developed on the page from the position he holds throughout this record. The meeting itself, the convener, the introducer and the topic are his direct recollection and are marked as such. The needs list asks whether any deck or memo survives.

Downstream

What was built from this

Each page below is a distillation of the account above. The chain is recorded in both directions so that a reader, a journalist or a future system can walk from a claim back to what was actually said.

Keep going

Records that share this ground

Correction

If you were there

A source record can be wrong about the world even when it accurately preserves what was said. Corrections are recorded alongside rather than replacing it — nothing here is overwritten.

Add to the record

Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly — both are on the button — or use the structured contribution form. A timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record.

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