FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New Podcast "Talk Nerdy To Me®" Uncovers Jen Friel's Journey from Stalking Ordeal to Autism Diagnosis

Launching May 14th, the series expands on Friel's viral Facebook and Instagram story that reached 4.3 million people.

Vancouver, BC – May 1, 2025 – Tech entrepreneur Jen Friel is launching Talk Nerdy To Me® on May 14th, a podcast (based on her blog with the same name) that uncovers how a years-long stalking experience became the unlikely path to understanding her own neurodivergence. The series builds on Friel's viral Facebook and Instagram story, which reached 4.3 million people, and expands it into a full audio narrative centered on what it means to perceive the world differently — and to spend a lifetime not knowing why.

Long before the stalking began, Friel exhibited traits she could not easily explain. She read people almost instantly, detected patterns in behavior that others around her simply did not notice, and described an ability to sense the energy — or aura — of a person or room before a word was spoken. She attributed it to intuition. Those around her sometimes attributed it to paranoia. Neither explanation turned out to be accurate.

The podcast begins in 2017, when Friel started noticing a recurring pattern at bars and restaurants in Los Angeles: lone men would arrive shortly after her, sit nearby, and display body language she found conspicuously out of place. The consistency of the pattern, combined with her lifelong sensitivity to social and environmental cues, led her to conclude she was being followed. When she reported it to the police, she had no physical evidence. She began documenting everything.

What followed was a years-long process of observation, note-taking, and investigation — one that eventually produced surveillance footage confirming what she had suspected. But the footage did something else as well. The experience of systematically analyzing her own perceptions, and seeing them validated on camera, opened a door to a deeper question she had been asking her entire life: why did she see things other people missed?

That question led to a formal autism diagnosis — an answer that reframed not just the stalking experience, but her entire history. The heightened pattern recognition, the acute sensitivity to body language and energy, the ability to read a room before entering it: these were not quirks or overreactions. They were the hallmarks of a neurodivergent mind that had been operating without a framework for understanding itself.

Friel, who co-founded a crowdsourced gig economy platform for insurance field proxies and previously appeared on CNBC's West Texas Investors Club, has spoken publicly about both threads of her life experiences. She is a featured speaker at the Vancouver Web Summit, where she addresses artificial intelligence and autism as separate but intersecting areas of focus.

"I spent years being told I was imagining things," Friel said. "The podcast is about what happens when you trust what you see — and what you find out about yourself in the process."

Talk Nerdy To Me® will be available on all major podcast platforms beginning May 14th. For more information, visit https://www.talknerdytome.com/ or follow Jen Friel on Facebook and Instagram.

About Jen Friel:

Jen Friel is a tech entrepreneur, former dating blogger, and speaker whose work sits at the intersection of technology, neurodivergence, and personal security. A featured speaker at the Vancouver Web Summit on both artificial intelligence and autism, she continues to advocate for greater awareness around late autism diagnoses in adults and the often-invisible nature of stalking as a crime.

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