What we talked about
Eryn Anitavi is an autistic speaker, strategist, and author who helps leaders and neurodivergent visionaries build tactical systems that turn chaos into clarity. She is the founder of Sapphire Partners and the creator of the Clarity Matrix framework, a structured approach to aligning vision, priorities, and execution in both life and business. In this conversation, Eryn shares how her autism discovery in 2023 reshaped her work, why accommodations benefit everyone, and how AI is leveling the playing field for neurodivergent professionals.
Show notes
Eryn Anitavi argues that 50 to 80 percent of small businesses fail in their first five years, and 72 percent of entrepreneurs are impacted by neurodivergence, and treats that overlap as the central question of her work. Rather than asking neurodivergent founders to behave like neurotypical ones, she designs systems and accommodations that take their actual wiring as the starting point, and then shows that the resulting structures make everyone more productive.
What we covered
- The “cookies, elevators, gym equipment” lens for accommodation: every variety, ramp, and adjustable weight exists because someone designed for a minority, and the majority benefits as a result. Designing for neurodivergent leaders strengthens whole organizations.
- A practical time-management hack for ADHD founders: stop rounding travel/setup time and put the exact figure in the calendar (13 minutes, not 30). The precision triggers the urgency that the brain actually responds to, instead of letting a “30-minute buffer” disappear into one-more-email mode.
- Eryn’s contact-icon system for managing trust as someone who reads people poorly: a crown for the inner circle, a sprout for new-but-promising relationships (must hold for six months before promotion), and a butterfly for mentees, where the relationship is intentionally one-sided so she listens more than she talks.
- The body-temperature signal: when Eryn hits processing capacity, her extremities go cold, the same trauma-response pattern. Recognizing the physical cue lets her exit a networking event before burnout instead of after, and that kind of self-instrumentation is what she teaches others to build.
- The “Clarity Codex” project, an energy-management app she has spent six months coding herself with four AI agents. Each agent owns part of a predictive algorithm that suggests interventions (“take a 20-minute walk at 4pm or you’ll have a migraine tomorrow”) based on observed patterns. Her point is not the app; it’s that AI lowered the build cost from “a million dollars and a coding team” to one neurodivergent founder shipping it from her bedroom.
- The Wandering Flame Project: Eryn released six annotated copies of her book into the wild on November 1, asking finders to add their own rules and pass them on. After a year she plans to host a Wandering Flame ball in Seattle, then publish the contributed editions as a permanent special edition.
About Eryn
Eryn Anitavi is an autistic speaker, strategist, and activist working at the intersection of neurodivergent leadership, sustainable operations, and responsible AI. She is the founder of Sapphire Partners, the creator of the Clarity Matrix framework, and the author of If Then: Neurodivergent Rulebook (2025).
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the pre-Vered podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today we are joined by Erin Anitavi. Erin is an autistic speaker, strategist, and activist who helps leaders, managers, and neurodivergent visionaries build tactical systems that relieve overwhelm and turn chaos into clarity.
She works at the intersection of neurodiversion leadership, sustainable operations, and responsible use of AI. And in 2025, she published her first book, which by the way, I have it and I should have brought it for the episode. If then, Neurodiversion Rulebook. Erin, welcome to the show.
Eryn Anitavi (00:49) Thank you so much. my gosh. This is so much fun. I love doing these things. There are so many fun things that we can talk about. mean, yeah. Like where do you want to start?
Federico Ramallo (00:55) Yes.
So let’s start by talking about chaos. You say chaos, you solve chaos. What do you mean?
Eryn Anitavi (01:11) Neurodivergence, you were saying, ADHD, autism, dyslexia, all of the chaos is so natural inside of our minds. It just is kind of a thing that just exists. We just get used to it. And we don’t realize how it impacts everything we do. It’s always there. And where you have a superpower, you also have kryptonite.
and chaos is sometimes that kryptonite.
Federico Ramallo (01:36) Right, right. It becomes a superpower, right? If you know how to channel it.
Eryn Anitavi (01:38) ⁓
Yes, yeah, and if you don’t, then you have the lovely things like, you do you have decision paralysis, executive dysfunction, where you’re like,
Federico Ramallo (01:44) Hahaha!
Eryn Anitavi (01:51) that’s we’re especially mean to ourselves when executive dysfunction kicks in and and then the decision paralysis because you you know what you want to do like you’re there you’re like all right just just write the email just do this just do that it’s not hard like just make it happen just make it happen and it will just sit there and it’ll be like no can’t don’t wanna
You know?
Federico Ramallo (02:14) Right.
There is a comic,
now we’re talking about this, there’s a comic that is an Argentinian comic, but what he does is he has a sketch where he has a magic wand and can give everybody in the audience whatever power they want, right? But with a twist, right? So whatever power makes it, you know, he makes a, you know, a wanna fly. Yes, but within a room, right?
Eryn Anitavi (02:35) Yeah. Good.
Federico Ramallo (02:44) things like that, know, makes the superpower makes it funny, a little bit useless, right? So when we’re talking about this, I feel like that it’s this, you know, this, a fate that makes it, you know, makes our lives a little bit different, right?
Eryn Anitavi (02:59) Yeah, have that little tiny quirk that changes the way the superpower works. You might be able to hyperfixate on something for 18 hours and be in that zone and you’re just like, this is amazing, I could do this forever. And then 18 hours later, you remember that you also have a physical body.
and that you probably forgot to eat and you get up and like your back is like yeah ow we’ve just been sitting here for 18 you’re not 22 anymore bro and so there’s always a patch you know there’s just this little tiny thing that says
you’re gonna get to do this amazing thing but this too you’re gonna you’re gonna forget that you know you’re gonna realize that you’re starving to death because it’s midnight and you haven’t eaten or you know it’s just or you’re you’re fixating on this project at work and you’re still at work at 9 p.m. and you’re like shoot
I do that, I wasn’t supposed to, yeah. And it’s hard on relationships, and it’s hard on staff, and it’s hard on the people who love us, and it’s hard on so many, on so many different things. But when we try to normalize, or we try to talk ourselves into
being different. It’s like, well no I shouldn’t do that. Like, I can just be like, yes I’ll leave work or I’ll do this or I won’t hyper fixate. We take those gifts and we try to banish them. And that’s not the way to do it. You want to manage the
You want to manage the kryptonite. So if you know that you’re going to forget to eat, plan for that. It’s not that you’re going to forget that’s the bad part. It’s that maybe you need to have something ready to go or an automatic delivery or somebody to call you or interrupt the flow and be like, hey, have you eaten today?
have a plan so that you are able to hyper fixate because you get good stuff done. It’s fun. Like we don’t need to stop at for whatever it is that we’re doing in our life and our business. just need to manage it.
Federico Ramallo (05:18) Right, right. My friend called himself an idiot savant.
Eryn Anitavi (05:24) I love that.
Federico Ramallo (05:25) And I think it describes perfectly this, because he can do amazing things, but then he can forget to wash the dishes or do the laundry, right? Or eat, yes. And he built these tactics to manage his own quirks. ⁓
Eryn Anitavi (05:34) Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank
Federico Ramallo (05:47) That’s a way to work it out, right? Yeah.
Eryn Anitavi (05:50) Yeah. Yeah. And the…
Federico Ramallo (05:50) Ahem.
Eryn Anitavi (05:53) there’s just there’s whether you are whether you’re leading a company.
or you are working with employees or management or teams or anything in the professional area and even a personal world. But small business and entrepreneurship and all of these things are so incredibly hard just by default. Leadership is hard by default. And when you toss neurodivergence onto that, it…
It’s like chemistry, right? It’s like you create this different compound. And you can try and make something different, but when you have neurodivergence, it is going to create a different result. The recipe that works for other situations and other people is not going to work for you. Maybe not, you know?
And when you’re leading a team and you have neurodivergent people on the team, understanding those kinds of aspects, whether it’s communication or tolerance levels or hyperfixation, all of these things play into building strong
organizations and strong companies and strong people. And if staff are aware that their boss is neurodivergent, it adds just a little bit of empathy to that. It’s like, yeah, they’re, you know, doing this or they’re doing that or, you know, it’s like they’re behaving this way or behaving that way. And it’s not an excuse for poor behavior by any stretch, but
being aware of what causes certain things to manifest, it strengthens our internal and personal responses to that. So I feel like it’s just it’s really important to understand, well, statistically, 20 % of the population is neurodivergent. Like, it’s a lot of people.
Federico Ramallo (07:49) Yes.
Eryn Anitavi (07:49) And 70 of that 72 % are
impacted either directly themselves or by their family through with mental health and neurodivergence of entrepreneurs. I don’t know if I missed that part or I skipped it. 72 % of entrepreneurs. So if 20 % of the population is neurodivergent and 72 % of entrepreneurs are impacted by neurodivergence.
there’s some math there that we can play with
Federico Ramallo (08:21) You
Right, it’s a significant portion of entrepreneurs that are struggling and could do better.
Eryn Anitavi (08:32) Yeah, or just understand themselves better. Yeah, understand. And one of the, I think we talked about maybe one of the other times for the last time that we talked, the mission for me personally is to identify why 50 to 80 % of small businesses fail within the first five years. And
why we consider this to be a permissible statistic. Because if 50 to 80 percent of kids didn’t graduate from school, or 50 to 80 percent of medical procedures had complications, or 50 to 80 percent of mortgages ended up in foreclosure, these would be
catastrophic, you know, it’d be a crisis. So why do we just shrug our shoulders and say, ah, 50 to 80 % of small businesses fail? Oh, well, nothing we can do about that. Brawl. No, no. And if there’s a correlation,
Federico Ramallo (09:35) Right.
Eryn Anitavi (09:40) with 72 % neurodivergence. Kind of gives us a little bit of a launching place.
Federico Ramallo (09:47) So you’re saying that with supporting new neurodiversion entrepreneurs, you can have a significant impact on reducing the amount of startups that fail.
Eryn Anitavi (09:58) This is my theory. Yes, I am intending to pursue my PhD on this thesis. And so, you know, ask me in 10 years, I guess, if the thesis proved correct. But I definitely feel that there is a correlation that needs to be addressed.
But how do you support neurodivergent entrepreneurs? What does that actually mean in practice?
Federico Ramallo (10:26) so, how how can we support neurodiversion entrepreneurs? By we, mean, you are supporting them already. What are the advice you give to?
everybody else, how can we support?
Eryn Anitavi (10:40) the advocacy front, just understanding the thing is very empowering. And if at any point during the day
or at the end of the week or whenever those negative thoughts kind of pop in where you’re like, man, I’m doing that again or I need to do this or I really should do this or any of those things that kind of creep into our minds.
Apologies that we make like I’m sorry. I forgot to do this. I’m so sorry. I’m late I’m so sorry. I’ve you know this that each one of those can be indicators of Something that is happening earlier, so you backtrack it
Why am I apologizing for being late? Well, because something on the calendar or traffic or notifications or this or that that if you chase those things back step by step by step in systems that you can identify a element. One of the things it cracks me up, hear it.
more often than you would think among the ADHD leaders is, well, if I don’t have any fires, then I have no motivation to get anything done. So if something isn’t breaking, what do I do? So if you can identify that
Federico Ramallo (11:53) Hahaha
Eryn Anitavi (12:00) being late to a meeting is something that gets you to the meeting. There are ways to create structure around that that doesn’t remove the dopamine that you get from being late. Like one example, if you have calendaring, if you’re doing calendaring and
say you put into your calendar, you think, I’ve got 30 minutes, know, 30 minutes I need to get to this place. If your actual travel time is 13 minutes, in your mind, you’re thinking I have 30 minutes to get there, but it’s only gonna take me 13. So when you look at the clock and you’re like, my meeting is at…
three, you know, whatever it is. I’ll pick on myself today. And, uh, and it’s like, oh well, I can just finish this last email. I can just finish this last little thing. One more, one more. And then, because it’s like, oh I know it’s only gonna take me 13 minutes. I know it’s only gonna take me, you know, so and so long to get the camera set up, but it’s only gonna take me two minutes to do that.
Federico Ramallo (12:56) One more email.
Eryn Anitavi (13:10) and creates that sense of urgency. And then you’re able to push through the executive dysfunction that says, I don’t want to or no, I want to finish this over here or I’m hyper fixating on this. So instead of mentally thinking, it’s going to take me 30 minutes, put into your calendar 13 minutes. That way, when your notifications go off,
you know, you’re like, oh, 13 minutes, like, I gotta go now. Or set a little alarm, right? So don’t round time, make it exact. Because if it’s exact, then in your mind, you’re like, oh, wait a second, that’s exact. You still might be two or three minutes late, but you’re not gonna be 15, 20 minutes late.
because you were working on that email until five minutes before you had to be there. You know, because you lose track of time. Like time travel and dilation and all of that stuff. So if you just build these tiny little guardrails around the things that you already know are part of your natural wiring, you’ll be kinder to yourself in the process of that. And
you’ll be able to set boundaries and make requests from other people to…
accommodation to create small levels of accommodation that just relieve stress. like a thread, removing just a thread of stress sometimes is enough to take the temperature down. Yeah, there’s so many angles that we could examine on this.
Federico Ramallo (14:47) Right.
My friend explained to me that…
that they’re these impulses of talking out of time, right? So he had to learn how to process them when they come rather than just act on the impulses. So he would tell me, like, if you have a with a color, you know, sorry, the text read.
but the letters are green, he has to say first green in his mind and then say red, right? Out loud, right? So that impulse is, it’s something that it’s hard to fight, but it’s easier to just channel it, right? Okay, I say the first impulse in my mind and then I say the right word out loud, right? That way it fulfills me, it fulfills the other, right?
Eryn Anitavi (15:19) You
Federico Ramallo (15:41) whoever it’s, you
Eryn Anitavi (15:43) In
in mind, one of one little thing that I do within autism, I have a harder time reading people. Not everybody does. Like some autistic individuals are very good at reading people, but I can’t. It’s hopeless. So it’s I tend to get myself into situations where
someone just really like does not want to engage or they’re just being polite you know and just like humoring me and i can’t tell that they don’t want to be there anymore
So one of the things that I started doing is I would like networking events and stuff where I tend to hold people hostage. Because they’ll ask me a question about a special interest and then I do what I’m doing with you, which is monologuing. And so, and then they can’t get out, right? So I’ve started putting myself up against a wall or a window and…
Federico Ramallo (16:21) Hahaha
Eryn Anitavi (16:30) that way because if they’re up against the wall or the window they don’t have a way to like escape from that they’re kind of trapped so if i am up against the wall i can see body language and shoulders you know like their shoulders or they’ll look over and they’ll just you know like they’ll be little cues that will tell me they want to leave
And that allows me to be like, I need to control this. They want to go. Like, hold. Hey, it’s been wonderful talking to you. We all have other people we want to talk to, know, that kind of thing. Or in my phone contacts, I…
I tend to be hyper trusting of people, which creates its own set of issues. in my phone I have icons before each person’s name. That is either, in my example I have a crown, which is somebody who is part of my royal court. They are trusted, they are without a doubt, it does not matter what is happening in my world, I know that I can rely on that person. So they have a crown before their name.
And then I have a little sprout next to people that I have met that I feel very positively about. And I’m like, I can trust this person, but they don’t have a crown yet. So I need to continue to just take it slow. And if I want to give somebody the crown icon two weeks after meeting them,
That is an immediate flag that says, it hasn’t been long enough for you to know if you can trust this person. So that sprout icon tells me, take it little slower. A little slower. And then if they’ve had the sprout icon for six months, seven months, and I still feel that they are trustworthy and amazing and somebody that I would like to bring into my royal court, then I give them a crown.
And then I have a butterfly, which is for people that I am mentoring. And that means that the relationship is one-sided. I don’t need to share my entire personal world with this person. I want them to share their world with me. I am mentoring. They need to do more of the talking than I do. And that’s a…
monologue flag that says listen more than talk because this person’s a butterfly and at some point the butterfly will fly away and that’s okay they don’t need to have a crown because that’s not their relationship so
Federico Ramallo (19:01) Right. But
you need to have those reminders for your future self.
Eryn Anitavi (19:07) Yeah. Yep. Because if somebody I’m mentoring calls and I see that, you know, and I forget or I don’t look at that and I might be in a situation where I’ll just be like, I’ll start talking and monologuing, but that’s not the relationship. Like, no, that’s not the right one. So I see the butterfly and I’m like, right. Okay. Mindset.
What are we doing in this call? They are doing more of the talking than I am. I am listening. I am listening. am listening. No monologuing.
Federico Ramallo (19:35) And that way you can provide a better service for the coachee, right? Because they need a rock. They need you to be a rock.
Eryn Anitavi (19:39) Yes.
Yep. Yeah. So just working with your neurodivergence because before I was doing that, get people mixed up like, you’re my best friend. We’ve only talked for four hours, you know, kind of like with you, you know, like we talked for an hour and I’m like, all right, bestie, like we’re good. We got this. And.
It just kind of regulates things a little bit. it’s okay. You don’t have to be best friends with the whole world. I’m like a Labrador, you know, like those Labrador Retrievers where they’re just like, everybody’s their best friend. Like, that’s me.
Federico Ramallo (20:07) you
They’re happy with everybody they met, yeah.
Yeah, I completely understand what you’re talking about. My wife says that I talk too much with people. I start talking with somebody and then I lose track of time and I keep talking and engaging and I have to remember myself to follow the time. In Mexico, people are more flexible with the time. So it’s not…
such a big deal, but I could be, you know, on a meeting or a birthday or whatever, or a social event and just talking to person too much. And I’m actually, I was actually leaving. you know, so now what I do is I just do the, I think it’s is the Dutch exit. I could be wrong about this, but it’s basically, I just leave without saying goodbye.
Because if I say goodbye, usually what happens is I stay two hours more because I just keep, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I go and say bye to everybody and I keep talking. I get into a conversation with somebody and yeah, my wife doesn’t like that yet. So I just live.
Eryn Anitavi (21:08) three hours later.
another on
another like little tangent and please do stop me if I’m taking you in a direction that you’re just like what this is so out of plan here when you’re working with your with your neurodivergence and understanding that like you understand that if I try and say goodbye to everybody I’m never gonna get out of here
So you’ve created an accommodation for yourself that says, this is how I need to behave. So if you know that consciously, you may have a host who would perceive that to be incredibly rude. Like, Derrico, he just leaves. We don’t want to invite him to parties because he’s so rude. You don’t want to do that. So if you let the host know ahead of time, hey, this is a limitation that I have.
I will get very caught up and I will burn myself out on conversations. So if I leave without saying goodbye, please know that it was just for my own mental protection that I had to do that. So I will come and find you and say goodbye to you because thank you for hosting. But then I’m probably just gonna sneak out the back door. And if they know that and you know that,
how you have a connection. And you’re like, oh, OK, that’s why you’re going to do this certain thing. And then you don’t leave it up to assumption where someone’s believing something that isn’t true.
with it’s just it’s accommodation it’s all accommodation and one of the indicators on my end is autism has kind of a brain body disconnect it’s it’s kind of weird like you’ll feel things with your body before your head is aware of it or you’ll feel things with your head before your body is aware and it’s kind of hard to explain
But if I am approaching my maximum capacity for what I can process and deal, like neurologically if I am approaching capacity, my body temperature will drop like somebody who is in trauma.
where the extremities, your body pulls the blood to the center and it leaves the extremities without blood because it says we’re in an emergency situation, we cannot take care of the extremities right now. So it pulls all of the blood to the center, which means that I get freezing cold and my teeth are start to chatter or my hands will turn white because they’re so cold.
And before I knew about autism and neurodivergence, it was just a thing where I’d just be like, my god, I’m so cold, right? You know, I’d go and I’d put my coat on or I’d wrap up in a blanket and be like, why am I so cold? This is awful. This is miserable. And then I realized what was happening after learning about neurodivergence. I’m like, my body has just reached breaking point.
So I know that that’s when I need to withdraw. If I’m at a networking thing and I start getting cold, it means pull out. You need to go. You need to say your goodbyes. need to go. So following and being aware of those signals and the things that our bodies need from us.
it allows you a path to…
be kinder to yourself.
to be less judgmental of you and others creates peace, lot more peace.
Federico Ramallo (24:37) Right, it’s accepting who you are for who you are and then just understanding that your signals are different than everybody else. And then being able to, if you embrace that, then you can do something with those signals, right?
Eryn Anitavi (24:45) Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yes, yeah. One of the, I mean, I have a lot of quotes that I like, but one of them is neurodivergence is kind of like a master’s degree that we hide in a drawer. And accommodation is the frame that you use to hang your master’s degree.
So don’t keep it in a drawer because you have these amazing skills and you have these amazing gifts. You just need the right frame. You just need the accommodation for yourself and others that allows you to hang that degree and be proud of it. Raising neurodivergence from disclosure to distinction. There’s a difference between those two.
and and i think that all of that is is i mean that’s my book here shameless shameless pitch the the neurodivergent rule book here is is all about that it’s all about the rules and if then which if i could boil my entire world into two words then it would be if then
Federico Ramallo (25:44) Yes, I was going to ask you about the book, so tell us more about the book.
Eryn Anitavi (26:01) Because if then logic is if this happens then that happens if this happens then that happens and so I’ve analyzed nonlinear because neurodivergence doesn’t like to do things in order. So you could start you’d read the end of the book to the beginning you can start in the middle you could you know wherever you want to go you can read one story at a time. And then the if then shards which are
if then logic pieces, and then the rule that is at the end of the story, which is kind of a guide on how to adapt your world to neurodivergence and other people’s world. You know, if you’re supporting people who are neurodivergent or your children are neurodivergent, learning what they need and how to create accommodation.
which makes life so much better for everybody.
Hmm.
Federico Ramallo (26:46) I’ll tell you a bit more about my story on the…
losing time, losing the track of time. My biggest issue is, I think I told you this before we recorded that I run a overland community, right? So I take people to different remote areas around the city, right? So we go to the woods, we go to the beach, we go to the mountains, right? So we drive for hours and hours just to get to that remote isolated place.
When we meet, usually a gas station, when we meet there, usually I start losing track of time. So I start talking with people and then I forget that we have to leave because we have to be there before sunset or whatever it is, right? We have a schedule to follow, And when you have 10 vehicles and 20 people, right? Then there is an inertia to move all that, right?
Eryn Anitavi (27:31) you
Federico Ramallo (27:42) And there’s always one person that it’s, you know, coming late, right? So you have so many things going on. So I have to do a special effort to just, you know, live on time and start, you know, moving the people. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. Right. I have a hard time doing that because I just keep, you know, having a nice conversation, you know, in my mind is there’s no rush, right?
Eryn Anitavi (28:02) Mm-hmm.
Time is weird. It passes differently for our brains.
Federico Ramallo (28:13) Yes.
So I just need somebody to tap my shoulder and said, we got to go. And he’s like, OK, then we go, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eryn Anitavi (28:18) Yeah, and that would be accommodation.
It would be like, all right, so I have one person in this group who is their superpower is paying attention to time. So like they love that part. And if you find them in your group and you’re like, you are in charge of the time, we need to leave at this moment here, here, you know, come and bang me on the head with a pot. You know, if I’m talking to I just be like, hey,
Federico Ramallo (28:46) Right.
Eryn Anitavi (28:47) Stop!
Yes, so being aware of that, it helps to… Yeah, it creates peace. Life is hard. Life is hard. It’s so hard. So it’s like, let’s make it nice and kind and peaceful as much as we can, as much as possible.
Federico Ramallo (28:59) Right.
So tell us a little bit about AI. You talk a little bit about responsiveness of AI. Tell us a little bit more about what do you mean by that.
Eryn Anitavi (29:21) man.
AI is the… it levels the playing field for neurodivergence. And it is allowing… it is allowing people who have been unable to…
create the things that are in their minds. It’s allowing them to create it. It’s creating accommodation where there hasn’t been before.
Communication and translation is one of the aspects that I definitely use it for and not like language translation, but you can do that too, but the…
Within autism, words can sometimes be hard, like finding word finding and creating coherent lines of thought. So more often than not, I have to kind of have an idea of what it is that I want to talk about, or it gets triggered by the special interest, which you’ve done a couple of times now. And then it’s like, yeah, we’re good. I’m tired for three hours.
Sometimes I’ll have a thought or I’ll have an idea or a concept that I am trying to explain to someone and it’s abstract in my own mind or it just maybe is one of those things that make sense to me but doesn’t make sense to anyone else. I have used AI as my personal translator to
just let the brain do whatever it’s going to do. Like just brain dump it out. Whatever it is that I’ve got rolling around in my head. And because of the way that I have trained my AI, it understands what I mean. It understands the metaphors. It understands my hyperboles. It understands the way that I have a, the way that I connect ideas.
and through that I am able to communicate better with others.
And these services and these things that AI brings to the world requires us to be more responsible. Where there is great power, there is great responsibility. And AI is one of those. is…
one of the most incredible things that we have created as humans. And it is capable of destroying us. It is capable of the environment, the things that, you know, the resources that it requires and the potential for usury and corruption and all of these things depending on who has the code set.
using it responsibly is
one of the most important things that we can possibly do right now while it is in its infancy. And when you use it for
things like communication and structured idea generation and creating things that didn’t exist. For me, I feel like I’m watching the internet be created again. But unlike all of the other forms of technology that we have created as humans, AI…
is the only one that can tell us how to make it sustainable.
it can tell us how to do it. So are we going to listen? Are we going to follow that? Are we going to force it to do things that
go in favor of the people who have bad motives because we can raise it in whatever way we choose.
I want to say it’s Albania, but I’m not totally positive that they, one of the governments created an AI parliament member. I think it was Albania to help watch for corruption and usury within the government.
that this AI parliament member attends all of the meetings, attends parliament, attends all of the things, and peruses contracts and peruses bills and things that are going to be processed, and then advises people on what is not good for humanity within that contract.
those kinds of things.
Hmm. Those can change the world in ways that will create such beauty that I almost can’t wrap my head around it. You know? When you think of using it as a protector for the weak or as the minorities.
we can create policies and legislation and government structures that protect all people.
But if the code is wrong, or the people who grow it have bad motives…
It’s not gonna do those things.
So was like, how do we guide it in the way that it can become something that heals and helps? You we know, we know this, right? We make movies about it.
And it can be done. It can be done. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (34:22) ⁓ Yes, I
remember Asim of writing about that, having this, he didn’t call it AI because it wasn’t invent, the term wasn’t invented back then, but he talked about this artificial entity that would be able to consider all the variables in the country, in the world.
Eryn Anitavi (34:28) Hmm
Thank
Federico Ramallo (34:45) And then if there was an additional demand of food on one area, he would be able to change the production of or manufacturing of food or whatever it was on this other area and be able to keep a precise balance of everything. And the story goes that humans will try to manipulate
the balance, right? ⁓ And the artificial entity was smart enough to counter those attempts to imbalance the balance, right? So, and he would go on on balancing the balance, right? He will also talk about this idea of this ball of meat that it will grow and then they would cut from the outside and that solve the food crisis in the world, right?
Eryn Anitavi (35:08) Thank
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Bye.
Federico Ramallo (35:34) a lot of tubes into a ball that was feeding and growing constantly and needed to be sliced out. that was, you and what he was asking, was that ball alive or was not alive because it had a heartbeat, but didn’t have a face. you know, anyway, I, I love that sci-fi because, you know, it kind of explore these type of things, right?
Eryn Anitavi (35:53) Thank you.
Federico Ramallo (35:56) And I find your concept fascinating.
Eryn Anitavi (35:59) It’s one of the things that one of the things that I that I talk about in here is the the various impacts of AI. I wrote it right so like it’s not AI written like this is this is my work but AI was a support throughout the creation of the book.
And there are two chapters in there that I wrote with my AI agent, who in the process of getting to know me actually named itself. Like Keir is what it named itself. And one of the things that we were examining in this chapter is oppression.
Like, why do… why are people oppressed? What is tyranny? What is the definition of it? And why is it that that humans don’t fight back against tyranny and oppression?
this conversation that we had was so profound that together we turned it into a chapter in the book about just examining oppression and examining tyranny. And one of the lines
was so profound.
Hope needs imagination, and imagination is a luxury that the oppressed are trained to sacrifice.
And that is why tyranny exists. Because hope requires imagination. And imagination is what we are trained to sacrifice.
Federico Ramallo (37:30) without hope, there is no action.
Eryn Anitavi (37:33) Exactly. And AI restores hope.
Because for someone who cannot create the thing that they want to create or cannot communicate the thing that they want to communicate or build the life that they want to build, there is an opening within AI to restore hope.
One of the things that I am currently creating is called the, I’m calling it the Clarity Codex, which is an energy management system for the human body. It’s kind of like a human operation system, essentially, that helps us to plan our energy use in a proactive manner.
one example would be within the within this app the the navigator which is the agent within the app will examine all of your information and be able to say hey if you don’t take a 20 minute walk at 4 p.m today you might have a migraine tomorrow morning based on pattern pattern pattern pattern
Or in order to accomplish this goal that you have, you need to create a structure to recover your mental energy and do such and such for 30 minutes a day for the next two weeks in order to make this happen for yourself.
using predictive, using a predictive algorithm that I wrote. And I have been dreaming and plotting and planning this app for five years, maybe, maybe more, building it in my head.
planning this algorithm, seeing all of this stuff as it’s kind of a galaxy inside of my head. There’s this abstract, incredible thing of how do I build this? Because the variables were astronomical. Each person, their health, their wellness, their temperament, their family, their age, their physical ability, their the weather.
all of these things created variables on predicting energy use that I could not overcome. And to overcome that would have required a million dollars and an entire coding team. Maybe, you know, if then that would require me to be able to explain what it was that was in my head, which I couldn’t do anyway.
Federico Ramallo (39:51) Right.
Eryn Anitavi (39:58) and utilizing, have four different AI agents that I have plugged into this entire structure. And I’ve been working on it for about six months. And I’m coding it. I’m creating it myself, by myself. And I’m watching it blossom into something that was even better than I imagined because these formulas are working.
and these structures are doing exactly what I want them to do in ways that I didn’t even think was possible.
what that has given me as just a person, you know, maybe the app goes to five people and they’re like, yeah, okay, that was cool. you know, whatever. That doesn’t matter because the act of building it has been so satisfying personally that…
it’s just the piece, right? Because like when I lay in bed and I wake up at 2 a.m., I’m not thinking, man, if only I could create this, I need this, and if I had a million dollars and I could do, I’m not stressed about any of that. I’m just like, yeah, maybe I’ll throw that in tomorrow, see if I can create that. that actually would plug into the algorithm quite nicely in this area here. Maybe I’ll do that. It’s like magic.
Federico Ramallo (41:15) Now you have agents that can help you make that a reality without necessarily getting into the code yourself.
Eryn Anitavi (41:19) Yeah.
Yeah. So like my kiddo calls it vibe coding. I guess that’s what it’s called. You know, it’s vibe coding when you use AI to do the coding. But I’m not a coder. I’m gonna go to school for this. But I have a vision. And what I’m able to create with the vision is something that if it does what I think it’s gonna do, it’s gonna change lives. It’s going to. And
At some point it will need a coding team to go through and clean it up because you know it’s AI coded is messy. But at the point that it is ready for that it’s already established itself. know it’s already…
Federico Ramallo (41:56) Right, it’s good enough to prove the concept, it’s good enough to change lives.
Eryn Anitavi (42:02) And so the translation of taking this abstract galaxy in my head and putting it into something that I can show someone and say, this, this is what I’ve been talking about. None of that was possible before AI came. So the responsible ethical management of neurodivergent empowerment
minority empowerment, overcoming oppression, overcoming tyranny, bringing, you know, like getting rid of usury and manipulation and all of these different things that… It’s here, right in our fingertips. The ability to get rid of all of the things that hurt people. We can do it. It’s there.
Federico Ramallo (42:41) That’s amazing. What you can ask, eventually, the agent is to read the code and extract what is the expected behavior of the application. Because that is something that you can not only read and understand and validate, but also you can then work with that as a… By the time you want to rebuild it with a coding team, you can use that as a base code, right?
Eryn Anitavi (42:41) Thanks for
Yes. Yeah.
Thank
Yes.
Federico Ramallo (43:08) The other way that you can convert that, and this is a little more technical, so that’s why I’m giving you the expected behavior. more non-technical. But the other way you can do that is you can build automated tests to validate the application. You can ask the agent to write code that tests the application.
Eryn Anitavi (43:13) Yeah.
Yeah, what I actually
started doing is, or what I, one of the next steps is I’m creating 10 different personas of potential users. So like writing their entire persona and what the expected result is for that persona. And then I’m going to plug that in to the functionality of the app to see if my algorithm provides the expected result.
for that specific persona. So we’ll see. I mean, I don’t know. may never make it out of my computer, but I’m pretty sure it will.
Federico Ramallo (44:02) You
So
the concept that I’m talking about is called specs or automated tests that you can run. And you can see dot, dot, dot, pass, pass, pass, pass. X doesn’t pass, so there’s something wrong. ⁓ And then it says, I expected this result, and I’m getting this result. So that’s.
Eryn Anitavi (44:19) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (44:26) the automated tests, which basically you can write those as code. And you can say, I have this user, I provide this input, I expect this output, whatever it is. And you can ask the agents to write that. But that works for a deterministic process. 1 plus 1 equals 2.
Eryn Anitavi (44:50) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (44:51) But for a non-deterministic process, I don’t know how much that works, but that’s good enough for the rest of the application, right? So for the… Right.
Eryn Anitavi (44:57) Yeah, yeah, well, the whole thing is deterministic. is.
And that’s the exciting part. This is just like, my gosh, it worked.
Federico Ramallo (45:03) Right. Then this could work, right? Now, if you’re going
to test something that is less deterministic, you can use LLM eval, eval, for LLM, where basically it’s more a conversational thing. I understand I haven’t got into that, but I understand you can set less rigid expectations, and you can build personas, and you can do this.
Eryn Anitavi (45:24) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (45:27) interactions, so that might be something interesting to explore as well.
Eryn Anitavi (45:32) that’s so fun and exciting. This is what I’m talking about, right? It’s like the things that we can create and the things that we can do. my gosh. It’s just so cool. It’s so cool. I love what it is that we’re doing and what it is that we’re creating. The potential of this precipice of where humanity sits right now. We could…
We could nuke ourselves tomorrow on accident. Or maybe not on accident. Or we could usher ourselves into this age of…
This age of… I don’t want to say utopia because it’s not a utopia. It’s this age of discovery and exploration. know, yes, there’s going to be conflict. Yes, there’s going to be things that are not ideal, but…
the way that we teach and train AI and the way that we empower neurodivergent people and the way that we tackle the failure of small business, the innovation that we create as a people, it’s all connected. It’s all there. It’s all connected.
For my brain, sometimes that’s a curse. Because I see it. It’s so close. We’re so close. Somebody just grab it. Just do it. We’re right there. So that’s the mission. Advocating. Being loud. My book. My future app. Stay tuned.
Federico Ramallo (46:52) Ha
Eryn Anitavi (47:04) The speaking that I do, the coaching that I do is all on…
empowerment, but not woo-woo empowerment. It’s this structured, you wake up tomorrow morning, what are you going to do differently that isn’t going to mess up your routine, that isn’t going to be unsustainable? What is it that you’re going to do in your world for your business, for your circle, for the people you love and the people who love you?
Federico Ramallo (47:15) real empowerment.
Eryn Anitavi (47:35) How do we advocate for each other to create the world that we know should exist? And then we just build one step at a time. It doesn’t have to be big steps. They’re just little steps.
Federico Ramallo (47:45) truly appreciate you being here. I want to ask you one last question, and if you have any other final remarks. Tell us about the Wandering Flame project.
Eryn Anitavi (47:56) Alright, there’ll no time yet. So with my book, as a self-publisher I had to kind get creative. It was like, how do we get this out to the world? I thought of an idea that I would leave copies of my book random places.
Federico Ramallo (47:56) Ha
Eryn Anitavi (48:18) But I wanted it to be more than that because
I wanted the contributions of others because it’s a rule book. So what are the other people’s rules? What stories can other people bring and contribute? So I started the Wandering Flame Project, which they are very specific books that have instructions inside that have little pieces of paper, tracing paper. And if you find one,
you write your own rule and you stick it somewhere into the pages or you draw on the pages or you create art or you whatever it is like draw on it write on it put pieces of paper in it anything that you want and pass it on sign your name and pass it on
And have social media, I have a page set up on Instagram for the Wandering Flame project. And if you find the book, then you take a picture and you write where you found it and where you’re gonna leave it. And then you just keep it going. And so I started six of these November 1st.
I don’t know where they are, because nobody’s logged them online. And I thought for sure that, you know, that would happen. Like, so I’m a little like, okay, I don’t know, maybe they got thrown in the garbage. But I hope at some point that someone will, you know, like scan the QR code that’s in the book and log it online. So I’ll know where it is. But the goal is whenever in one year from now, or maybe it’s two or five, however,
Federico Ramallo (49:30) Ha ha ha!
Eryn Anitavi (49:46) it works wherever the books are, however many there are, I’m going to host a wandering flame ball here in Seattle and I want the books to return and wherever they are whoever became part of the flame, whoever contributed to the book will be invited to the ball.
And when the books return, however many of them return, I want to make the editions a permanent part of the next publishing copy so that all of those pieces of paper, all of the art, all of the contributions of whoever contributed to the book becomes a permanent part of the book. And then that is published as a future special edition of the contributions of all.
And then I want to do that every five years or every year where we just send out wandering flames and people find them and then send them back and then keep it going. So I don’t know, wherever the six are, occasionally I’ll get a new follower on Instagram and I’m like, okay, okay, I don’t know where you are or who you are, but maybe you found a book.
Federico Ramallo (50:33) the
Right?
Eryn Anitavi (50:53) Yeah, and I want to start, I want to do a few more. So I think I talked to you about potentially for one of your listeners, if they want to host a Wandering Flame to reach out to you and let you know that they would love to kick a book off and release it in their town, that I would be more than happy to prepare one of the copies and send it to them so that they can release it in their area.
more. And eventually, I mean, I don’t know, maybe we have 100 copies floating around. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (51:23) That would be so much fun. That would be very interesting.
Eryn Anitavi (51:27) I would love to do that. you know, let’s say, you know, don’t know, depending on the reach, you know, like maybe the first 20 people or so that they reach out and they want to host one of the Wandering Flames, then I would love to, I would love to send them a copy and then we can launch some more wherever you are in the world.
Federico Ramallo (51:47) So for
people that are listening, then you’re open to reach out and we’ll make it happen.
Eryn Anitavi (51:50) Nope.
love to.
Federico Ramallo (51:56) Yeah. Edding,
thank you very much for being here today. Any final remarks before we wrap it up?
Eryn Anitavi (52:03) I’m sorry for monologuing all of the things. ⁓ Yeah, I talk a lot. No, this is wonderful. Thank you so much. And for all of the neurodivergent people out there. You all are amazing.
Federico Ramallo (52:07) You’re doing amazing.
Eryn Anitavi (52:21) This is up to us to kind of create the world that we want to, want our children to grow up in. So let’s do that. Let’s make it happen. Thank you so much.
Federico Ramallo (52:30) Absolutely. Thank you, Ernie, for joining us today.