Long bio
Ryan Perez is a Black, autistic keynote speaker, disability justice advocate, and the founder of Bow Tie Kreative, a Calgary digital agency he started in 2013. Diagnosed autistic and ADHD at 40 — eleven days before his forty-first birthday — he had spent four decades being read as defiant instead of distressed. He built his work on one argument: every system has someone it fails first, and that person is holding the specification for the version nobody has built yet.
He has been homeless twice. In between, he built the Second Brain — a personal knowledge graph now 446,628 nodes deep — and used it to turn twenty years of lived experience into a body of published work: two books, a novel, and a manual. Social Media Uncensored and I'm Autistic, Bich! are the books — raw and unapologetic, written the way he actually talks; Frozen by Light is the novel; Turn Your Pain Into Projects, 234 pages released in 2026, is the manual — a build guide for converting recurring pain into shippable work, not a resilience memoir.
On stage, Ryan runs two tracks. Track one is lived experience: neurodivergence, disability justice, and what a room owes the people it was never built for — talks like Pain into Projects and Disability Justice, Beyond Accommodation. Track two is systems and intelligence: the Second Brain, the Digital Stem Cell Process, and what a small team can automate this quarter — talks like Invisible Constraints and The Connected Brain. He opens with the joke before he opens the wound — "Does it look like I have autism? Because people say — oh no, you don't have autism" — then spends the next forty minutes proving the room wrong about both.
His content has reached 89.6 million impressions across 300,000+ followers on four platforms, peaking at 17.92% engagement on a single post. He has spoken for CAMH, Empire Life, Saskatchewan Blue Cross, the Community Now! Mental Health Summit, and briefed Alberta's Premier through the Alberta Enterprise Group. One event organizer called him "the most authentic speaker we have ever booked."
Ryan hosts the Hustle Zone podcast, runs Bow Tie Kreative's client work from Calgary, and speaks anywhere a room is ready to be honest — and laugh — about who it's failing.
Short bio
Ryan Perez is a Black, autistic keynote speaker, disability justice advocate, and the founder of Bow Tie Kreative, a Calgary digital agency he started in 2013. Diagnosed autistic and ADHD at 40, after twice experiencing homelessness, he built a 446,628-node personal knowledge graph — the Second Brain — and turned it into two books, a novel, and a manual, including 2026's Turn Your Pain Into Projects. He speaks on neurodivergence, disability justice, and the systems that fail people first — raw, funny, and unwilling to soften either — reaching 89.6 million impressions across 300,000+ followers on four platforms.
Speaker introduction
Written in the third person, sized to read aloud in well under a minute.
Our next speaker was diagnosed autistic and ADHD at 40 — after four decades of being read as defiant instead of distressed, and twice experiencing homelessness along the way.
Instead of asking to be accommodated, he built infrastructure: a personal knowledge graph with over four hundred thousand nodes, now the engine behind two published books, a novel, and a manual on turning pain into projects. He's a disability justice advocate and the founder of Bow Tie Kreative, a Calgary digital agency, and his work has reached over 300,000 followers and 89 million impressions across four platforms.
He doesn't speak about how any of this felt. He speaks about what it exposed — with the same rawness and humor he's known for — that every system has someone it fails first, and that person is holding the blueprint for what you haven't built yet.
Please welcome Ryan Perez.
