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.
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.
I met Marie Charles originally via my friend John Clippinger, who probably met her at Davos or someplace like that, or some save-the-world symposium at the Aspen Institute, maybe through our mutual friend Charlie Firestone who was the identity expert at the Aspen Institute. John didn't tell me exactly, just that she was beautiful, a medical doctor, dedicated to saving the world, and much younger than him.
He was shocked when she agreed to join him for a weekend trip up the coast from San Francisco to Sea Ranch, the first planned ecologically sustainable resort community, and one of my favourite weekend escape destinations. He asked me for recommendations of where to stay, restaurants to eat at, hiking spots — this was my territory. John Clippinger split his time between Cambridge Massachusetts and a country farm in New Hampshire where he liked to hunt wild turkeys with a bow and arrow. His way of prepping for the apocalypse or pandemic that might happen some day.
My place at 3040 Steiner was the staging ground — he crashed in my spare bedroom, and she arrived a day later, probably from Asia, since that was where she was saving lives at the time. She was everything he had described, and more. She looked a lot like a full-sized version of Tinker Bell. Blonde hair in the same short haircut Audrey Hepburn wore when she was doing relief work — very practical in a jungle or a desert with no running water or sanitation. Beautiful, and also exuberantly happy. She gave me a hug when she first arrived, and thanked me for hosting them the first night. She's been my friend ever since.
We all stayed in touch — she became part of our complexity crowd: John Sviokla, John Clippinger, Michael Kleeman, Paul Saffo, John Holland, Brian Arthur, Chris Langton, Tera Lemey, Esther Dyson, Tim Andrews.
I was also visiting Aspen quite a lot to visit my friend Pam Alexander, who was my friend and my patron, allowing me to share her luxurious lifestyle even though I was totally broke. All I had to do was use frequent flyer miles to get to one of her houses — in Tucson, in Atlanta, in Aspen — and she would take care of everything else. I was her plus-one at the coolest parties, charitable events, hot tub think tanks. That's how I got to know Dianne Feinstein personally the first time, at her modest country cabin overlooking Aspen, which sold for $32m in 2023 after her passing.
Remind me to tell you about Dianne Feinstein — she was my favourite politician since she became mayor of San Francisco, when Harvey Milk was assassinated. I read all about it in the Chronicle the day after. I also got to know Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi reasonably well, and met with their staffs and presented to their committees on the Hill dozens of times. But I always thought of Dianne as a family friend, because we have history.
I tried to explain this to Pat Toomey once, after he lost his seat in the House and was biding his time running the Club for Growth, a premier spot for the purist wing of the fiscally responsible Reagan Republicans, which is what I was when that breed still existed. Actually, that really describes my friend Paul Ryan, the future Speaker of the House, at that time the Chairman of the Budget Committee. He was a true fiscal conservative. Pat Toomey was more of a supply-sider, but evidence-based, and not just about cutting taxes. He was in favour of cutting taxes, to be sure, but doing so in a way that actually increased growth and revenues — as opposed to just cutting them to line the pockets of donors who inherited their money, or by exploiting the capitalist system in various ways.
Corrections applied downstream are recorded here rather than made silently. The source above is unaltered.
The nomination letter is reproduced verbatim on Marie Charles's page at Hare's request, as its subject. Marie Charles wrote it and holds the copyright; she is living and reachable, and the page says it would be removed at her request. An outstanding item asks Hare to confirm she is content for it to remain published.
Two small corrections applied. Dianne Feinstein's name is spelled with two Ns. Sea Ranch was begun in the mid-1960s rather than the 1970s.
Feinstein became mayor of San Francisco in November 1978 following the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, and served as senator from 1992 until her death in 2023 — that context is added rather than asserted by Hare.
Assessments of Pat Toomey and Paul Ryan are Hare's opinions and are marked as such. The spelling of one name in the complexity crowd list — Tera Lemey — is unconfirmed and flagged.
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.
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