Modernism / Anne Van Itallie
Greetings, ladies and gentlemen (the term is to be prudently applied),
Welcome to those new to Serendipity. If you are reading this for the first time, the premises of these musings can be found in the provenance email. (In short, it’s a politely intended monthly interruption that hopefully acts as a reminder that there are still wonderful people on this planet worth conversing with beyond your LLM, pet, social media audience, and Alexa.)
Has anyone seen January? I seem to have lost it. One minute, I was wishing everyone a happy New Year, and the next minute I was behind on plans for Valentine's Day. As the apex of organization, premier husband, and father of a gaggle of ladies, I had flowers ordered and dinner reservations booked well before Christmas - for Valentine’s Day 2026, of course. Sorry, I can't even write that with a straight face. Nevermind. Better get back to hacking into Steph’s LLM to ask it to help me plan something that she would like, thus prolonging my existence another year.
Is anyone else at this place with AI somewhere between “Oh my god, this is revolutionary technology that I can no longer live without” and “Dear Lord, I need to find the OpenAI server farm and shut Skynet down?” It’s funny - as one of Neuralink’s first test subjects, whilst I am now graced with super intelligence, I often find my feelings and emotions correlate to Mr Musk’s corporate and political allegiances. It is probably a coincidence.
To finish this nonsensical rant, I used to pride myself on writing this letter with purely natural (albeit low) intelligence; however, although this doesn't go through my LLM and I reject every suggestion Grammarly makes, I can't help but feel that my holistic integration with these tools influences it. As you can tell, I can't quite work out if I am happy with the convergence yet. If anyone has any guidance or thoughts on this, please send me a note - I would love to hear what other humanoids think about this.
Moving on.
This month’s ‘Serendipitous moment’:
November’s feature, John Dinkel, received lots of interest in his metric-driven business development strategies. As a result, he has been on more podcasts than I have time to listen to! Don’t forget to connect with robot John here or real John here.
Moving on, on.
This month, I would like to introduce you to a superstar who sits right on the edge of the future. Anne Van Itallie is a fascinating woman who either teleported forward in time to bring her classical sensibilities to salvage modern fools or came back from the future to show us the truly bright possibilities of progress.
Anne Van Itallie
Anne is the Director of Business Development for arguably one of the most influential industrial design firms in the world - WHIPSAW. For all the cools kids reading this, there is a good chance that if your headphones, water bottle, or anything else look like it is from the year 2096, they had a hand in building it.
Based in San Francisco, Anne works with the who’s who of innovation on the products that shape the world we will one day live in. For example, they just finished working on the IONQ Forte Enterprise Quantum Computer. It’s bonkers!
Beyond the cool, shiny things that everyone loves to nerd out on, Anne is one of those people who always brings the best people together. She does this so many ways but most recently with her podcast - Designing Connections. I think of Anne as my fairy god mother; whenever I need a resource, she waves her secret wand and my ideal connection appears. It’s spooky.
The best way to follow and connect with Anne is here.
Finally, I can’t thank you enough for reading these stories of people who are important to me. I hope by sharing their stories that they can help you in some way too.