Nicole Gibson - CEO & Founder at inTruth - Author & Philosopher

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom Podcast. We have Nicole Gibson with us today. She's a CEO and founder at InTruth. She's an author, a philosopher, many things. I loved her wildness the first time that I met her. I was like, yeah, that's someone I'd love, like to talk to and jam with and exchange, right? Like philosopher as a persona is always interesting, right? Means like someone that wants to that loves learning and loves to ask questions and debate stuff. So always eager to have these folks on my podcast. So Nicole, welcome to Pod. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to.

Thanks, Charles. Appreciate that. Yeah, I would actually say, you know, artist philosopher is who I am even before entrepreneur, because I think my entrepreneurial journey—

Same here.

Yeah, nice. Well, that's why we get on. That makes sense. Because the desire to create businesses kind of stemmed from the questions I was asking, which I think is a philosopher's job, is to ask questions and stay in the question and be less maybe focused on having all the answers, but enjoy the journey of asking, you know, curious questions and seeing where that leads. So the company I'm building at the moment, in truth, Really was born out of the same question I've been asking for 20 years, which is why don't we have a society of humans that are able to be present with their emotions and all of the, you know, the things that manifest as a result of that was really something that as a kid was very clear to me. And I can see that without being able to have difficult conversations, without being able to, you know, be direct and feel hard things. There were all of these symptoms that would manifest, you know. As a kid, I saw that basically in a micro sense— by that I mean kind of an individual sense— the people around me, the adults around me. But then as I started to grow up and I saw more of the world— and I've seen a lot of the world, I've traveled many countries— I've always been really interested in things like geopolitics. I could see actually that the core of a lot of these issues was stemming from that same condition, that emotional reactivity. So I asked myself the question before I started In Truth, why is emotion so widely misunderstood? Why has it never been, you know, quantified? Why is this something that remains this kind of esoteric idea. Like, you ask people, what is emotion? They really struggle to answer this question. And it was the only area really of, um, health, of, um, reality that I thought, you know, we never really given the due, um, attention to. So that was kind of the big idea. What if we could actually quantify it? What if we could understand it more from a physiological perspective rather than just a conceptual perspective and develop a shared language of emotion. So the tech is an emotion biotech. We pull data initially just from wearable devices, so the raw beat-to-beat interval data. But as the model evolves, we're actually looking at multimodal data inputs from context to language to physiology to basically quantify emotion. Yeah.

Why can't humans sit down with their emotions? Isn't it because they don't even know they have them in the first place? Does that require consciousness? Is it not knowing about not knowing kind of equation?

You know, I think it's kind of like, have you ever tried to have a conversation in another language that you're only just learning and you don't have the words to actually express yourself. I kind of think that that's a pretty akin experience that, you know, we have models like the feelings wheel, but the reality is emotions more than just the feelings wheel. And in building in truth, and, you know, even the feelings wheel, most people don't have that full emotional vocabulary. So I think a lot of the time, they're aware of it, you know, we feel it. There's very few people, I think, that are just not aware that they're feeling emotion, but the ability to build a bridge, the ability to communicate, to develop true understanding where if you say, "I'm feeling X, Y, and Z," I know exactly what that means. I have an immediate ability to empathize with what you're experiencing. There's so much nuance and it's so gray a lot of the time because we've never developed that universal language. Mm-hmm. Of emotion. I think that's a lot to do with it. And then obviously, as people grow in self-awareness and consciousness, I think they're able to regulate their emotion more. And then regulating your emotion in a, you know, in a better way definitely allows you to be in connection more easily. Because if you're dysregulated, you know, just think about a time you've been really reactive, it's very hard to feel connected to anything outside of that. that reactivity. And I think most people live in that state.

That's biochemistry though, right? Like cortisol and adrenaline, and you literally need to wait physically until these biochemicals go down before you can make any sense, sort of, right?

That's right. And, you know, I think like this is— this has been my challenge with just thinking about emotion as these labels or these tags, like emotion's not just happy, sad. Emotion is actually this physiological impulse that's happening in the nervous system. And what our research shows, um, again and again is actually, um, overall contentment and the, the enhancement of your life and the human condition isn't really the pursuit of happiness as much as it is the ability to regulate your emotional state regardless of what that is—

That's deep, man.

Yeah. I love it. The more that someone's able to do that, you know, that they can feel maybe uncomfortable emotions, they can feel grief, they can feel sadness, they can feel maybe the things that we, you know, shun and say these are bad parts of the human experience or these are lows, actually more just become a spectrum. So I guess from a, you know, I'm quite a spiritualist in that sense. I look at basically the journey of life is an opportunity to integrate everything as me, to return to a state of completion or wholeness where I'm able to be with the spectrum of the human experience. And I think emotional regulation and our nervous system is actually at the core of that.

Isn't it funny that when I say, oh, that's deep, I meant from an intellectual perspective, and maybe you understand— you understood from an emotional perspective?

Well, I suppose, like, I think, you know, I'm pretty, um, I'm a very cerebral person, and, um, I think, you know, a lot of technologists and entrepreneurs are, right? You're an intellectual person. But for whatever reason, my intellectual obsession or passion has been to understand the human condition and understand emotion. So I have this kind of weird intersection of interest.

But can intellectualism exist without emotions? Because we talked about emotions being biochemicals, and when you and I talked about this stuff and we're being like two philosophers, we get like serotonin and dopamine off that because like it keeps feeding that interest. And ultimately we do that in the purpose of surviving, right? The smartest usually tends to survive. You agree with that?

I do, yeah. I mean, that's, that's, again, that's a big, that's a big conversation. But, you know, when you actually look at the neuroscience, emotion always comes before cognition. That's actually just how we're designed. It doesn't matter how intellectual or intelligent you are, that is the human design because it's instinct, it's survival. However, I think the, the intellectual layer, so how we cognize, is, is, is essentially how we make sense of those emotions that are coming, you know, up in our nervous system. So the meaning that we prescribe to that experience. And I think this is where different levels of intelligence play a role and maybe play into survival of the fittest. Because if I, I don't know, go through a deep period of pain and I have the intellect to make it mean something that's really significant and I don't want that pain to be in vain and I want to use my intelligence to sort of drive that in my life and create something, you know, that's going to create and shape a life experience that's very different maybe to someone that doesn't have the intellectual capacity to apply that same meaning-making or that same pattern recognition to their emotional experience. But ultimately, every human's life experience starts with emotion. It's at the core of—

Yeah.

Who we are and how we're wired.

So is emotion like energy in motions? And ultimately, are we like energy machines?

Yeah, I mean, people like— I don't mind that saying. I think that there's like maybe a bit of a better—

It's not fully accurate, right? It's like, oh, there's nuances.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, emotion is happening 100 milliseconds after an exposure to stimulus. So our brain can't cognize that quickly, you know, by the time I've even asked you, how do you feel? Or, you know, you had this emotional experience, what have you made that mean? Your emotional body has run at such an accelerated pace compared to your brain, even, even a very quick thinker. I mean, you're a quick thinker. I'm a quick think are we can't outthink our emotions, you know, and that's, um, it's, it's actually, I think we have a, a society that, um, kind of glorifies the intellect, you know, and then not necessarily the intelligence of the body. And when these two things can come together, they're not in competition with one another, but it's more so that we can use the power of our intellect to actually almost be like subservient to what our body is trying to tell us and build structures of meaning around that, that shape our life in a way that's more whole rather than your mind kind of running in a different direction and your body feeling, which I think a lot of people experience, right? Like a normal midlife crisis is maybe someone that has forced themselves to do something, you know, through the mind that hasn't actually— it's not really true to who they are, it's not true to how they feel, and then they have this break in their identity. The proposition that I'm trying to put forward through this company is we need to actually have these things coexist in harmony, the mind and the body, the body being the central nervous system where these emotions are being generated that are giving us these signals around how we're— how we're interpreting reality.

Emotions, hmm, they emerge from one part of the brain, right? Like one part of the brain is responsible for creating some of them. Are they stored? Is there such a thing as a subconscious? Is there, is it like a separate computer up there? Does it accumulate? Can you retrieve? Like, help me visualize it a bit more or. Refamiliarize my, my brain with these concepts.

Well, so at Intruth, we've built a proprietary model which kind of explores emotional regulation in a novel way that has never been done before. Like, that's our core innovation. So we've developed a model that we call React and Rebound. And basically what it looks at is the two parts of the central nervous system, which is the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. Is otherwise like a good analogy is the accelerator of the car and the brake of the car. So sympathetic is the accelerator, parasympathetic's the brake. Now you don't want to accelerate that car without a brake, which is the state most people are living in, right? Or a faulty brake. They're just go, go, go, go, go, do, do, do, do, do sympathetic, you know, activation all the time and no parasympathetic, which is also known as the rest and digest.

Yeah.

You also don't want to have the brake on all the time and not be able to activate. So emotional regulation and being a master of the things that we're talking about is about balancing the tension between these two parts of the nervous system so that you can accelerate when appropriate and you can brake and return to your baseline when appropriate. When these two parts of you can exist with equal fluency and equal balance, you kind of become like— have you seen someone who's amazing at martial arts and they just look like they're, you know, untouchable, you know? But then when they really need to— Yeah, exactly. When they really need to activate, it's very fast and they can do that very quickly. Like, that is a very, um, mastered nervous system where they're just in a really regulated state. Their breath and their mind is completely coherent with their body. And the way that they can move through that martial art, that's, that's something that all of us can attain. Like, it is possible in life where you're flowing through life, you know. And I think these concepts for a long time— flow state, um, you know, law of attraction, manifestation— these kinds of things have been explored through this conceptual lens. Mm-hmm. And one of the things that I want, in truth, to help people understand is this is a physiological state that, you know, we can master. And when we do master it, the rest kind of follows, including the mind.

It's fascinating. And I've worked on that over the years. But before I get into that, right, let's dive into both of our pasts. We said that most of us don't have, like, emotional control. Because we haven't been taught these lines when we were younger or these words to describe our emotions. At school, they sit down with us sometimes, right? Oh, you feel sad or you feel angry. I was in trouble lots of times when I was younger, always threatened to be kicked out of school and I had to circle emotions on a fucking sheet of paper. It's like, that was the emotional fluency I was—

Yeah.

Gorgo taught to me when we were younger, how would you sort of reshape that system? If you were to ask me, I'd start with meditation, right? And consciousness of my own stuff and describing like my feelings accurately and trying to close the loop. Oh, if I can describe my emotions, I can control them and I can have a better output, right? How would you reshape the system?

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So I mean, the first foundation I would teach probably wouldn't be labeling of emotion, because the thing is, emotions are never one-dimensional. Like, it's very rare that someone's just feeling angry. They feel angry, frustrated, hurt, sad, you know, isolated. Like, they're feeling so many things. So, and again, just my perspective from you know, what I've learned in my journey and the research we've done at InTruth, I personally think the most important foundational thing to teach is whatever activation you're experiencing, whether that's a high or a low— so like an apathy of the nervous system or an activation of the nervous system— the apathy of the nervous system being things like sadness, feeling down, feeling heartbroken, feeling depressed, those kinds of hard-eye low emotions. Mm-hmm. All the high emotions— excitement, anger, frustrated, irritable, you know, ecstatic— to, to, to be less interested and less attached to what those experiences are called, and to A) allow that emotion to move through your nervous system without resistance, and B) understand how to bring yourself back to a baseline. And if I think about an artist, or even, you know, when I give talks, a lot of the time I'm in a flow state, right? I'm not overanalyzing the specific emotion that I'm experiencing. But what I am doing is like allowing that energy to flow through my body without that attachment and then come, come back to my baseline state. And this is a creative force, you know, so I think it's— Personally, I think it's less important that we're fixated on the specific names. And I think it's more interesting to the human experience for us to know how to open and know how to come back, know how to open and know how to come back, whatever that openness creates, whatever it generates, the highs or the lows, because that's all a part of the human experience. And I think the mind is often the thing that will get in the way and convince us that this experience is wrong. Mm-hmm. I shouldn't be feeling this. This is like not meeting my expectation. And that hinders our, you know, experience of life in dramatic ways and actually prevents— probably the most important thing here is it prevents us from feeling a sense of agency in our lives because we're then constrained.

Oh yeah, words. Yeah, what if you find yourself in a situation in which there's actors constantly bringing negative feelings to you? And two, what if you're out of that situation but your mind keeps on repeating it again and again? How do you fix both of these scenarios?

So the first question is, what happens if someone—

You're in the presence of a dick or an asshole. And they keep on like, I don't know, bringing you down or making you feel some way. It's just like, take your two feet and walk. Uh, what if you're forced to be in that situation? How do you minimize damage? Let's start with that.

Yeah, I mean, I would probably like first check the, the, the mental assumptions, right? Like, um, forced. So I mean, sure, there might be some scenarios in our lives where something is truly, truly, truly out of our control, but I think—

Taxes.

Yeah. For a lot of entrepreneurs, for example, like part of what delineates an entrepreneur psychologically from someone who's not an entrepreneur is there's an internal locus of control. And it's what's defined as an internal locus of control, meaning that I have a greater sense of agency to control my destiny. So when you try that on as a lens of reality, all of a sudden I'm less inclined to stay paralyzed in a situation where I'm not enjoying the interaction or being treated in a way that I want to be treated, and I'm more inclined to assert myself. You know, I'm more inclined to be able to either push back or say, hey, let's call it, you know, this is who you want to be, I'm not interested in this, I'm going to walk away. So then you think about the things that constrain people. Well, the first thing I would say is probably rules around social politeness is often, you know, I have to be a people pleaser in this situation, I have to just allow this person to behave in this way because you know, that's the polite thing to do or whatever the narrative is. The second is the somatic component, which is you might have a bit of a paralysis in your emotional state, in your nervous system, not knowing how to actually breathe through that confrontation and reregulate. So again, regulation plays a really powerful role because if someone's screaming in my face, but I have control over my own ability to regulate, I then am actually the— I'm the powerful one in that scenario because they're, they're dysregulated and I'm ready to really do that. Yeah, I mean, I've definitely, um, I've gotten in— I've gotten very good, I'd say, at not, not subjecting myself to situations.

Yeah, I'll make you like a black belt. Uh, I've gotten better at this, right? Like, I, I mean, last time I had physical altercation, that dated a long time, it's very rare, right, because I live behind a screen. But I also know that I can like, um, knock someone out like less than 2 seconds. I, I guess that helps, right, like in terms of controlling like the fear, um, if it gets physical. But, um, yeah, I still have— I still feel the, the cortisol rising, the adrenaline. And then, yeah, you're right, breathing. Breathing is good, but sometimes tricky. Affirmations, right? Like that you let one out, which is like, I have full locus control or whatever. That was cool. What about like if you're in your own mind in bed and you're just like, you can't get out of like one specific thought, what are your tricks for that? Are they similar tips to being stuck with someone negative? Because at the end of the day, like we're all pretty negative, and we're humans as well, and sometimes we get stuck in our own spiraling thoughts, right? So any tips on that?

Yeah, and you know, just one other thing on like a relational, um, scenario. I think the more that we're comfortable with our own emotion— like, a lot of the time we'll lose control or we'll become dysregulated if someone external to us is embodying an emotion that we're not yet comfortable feeling. So if you're comfortable feeling your own anger, for example, you're less likely to become dysregulated around another person who's angry. If you have shut your own anger down, that will be a heavily dysregulating experience for you. And, you know, it was actually one of my spiritual teachers that put it in a way that was like very profound for me, which is whatever you're not embodying will show up embodied in the people around you. So when you're, you know, because it has to, because you're, you're disowning that part of yourself. So as you disown that part of yourself, it will show up, you know, in, in those around you as a way to mirror back what you're rejecting. So what that's asking of you from a perspective of consciousness is to, to integrate. It's asking you to integrate yourself. Um, on the, on the scenario of you in your own mind, I mean, repetitive negative thoughts. Again, I'd say the causation for them is dysregulation. Like there's an anxiety that is, or a fear that is perpetuating that thought process. And again, this is my issue with things like cognitive behavioral therapy. I'm not, you know, I'm not against it. But do I think that it really is like the be-all end-all solution for people? No. People that are really struggling with something that's actually far more linked to nervous system dysregulation than it is cognition. And I'll, I'll give like an actual example in our research. So we published a paper, um, about a month ago that showed— and this data that we're collecting in the context of this study is just physiological. So it's physiological data that's been put through our algorithm. Mm-hmm. And it looked at that data against, um, self-reported generalized anxiety disorder outcomes. Now, our physiological data in some instances explained up to 70% of the variance in those GAD outcomes, meaning it's more of a physiological problem than it is a mental problem. And the, the challenge is when you go to therapy, they're going to try to train your mind to think a different thought. Okay, so your anxious repetitive thought is, um, I'm gonna fail at everything that I try. Well, come up with a new thought. I'm gonna succeed at everything I try. Changing that thought pattern doesn't necessarily re-pattern the nervous system, um, from this activated state. So this over— what we would, what we'd in truth would call the sympathetic drive. What you need is a counterbalancing of the parasympathetic activation so that as those kind of fears or whatever are playing out for you in the mind, you can actually calm the nervous system. And through calming the nervous system, the mind will all of a sudden understand that your body is feeling safe and it will have the space to run a different kind of movie.

And your app, once I know my emotions and I'm conscious about them, your main modalities are breathing and affirmations. Is that like the cure? Because if it's like physical, the mind goes immediately to meds, right? Change their biochemistry with meds. But what, what are your modalities? The low-hanging, low-hanging fruit.

And, and in truth, where we more see our role as being able to measure what's been immeasurable, and then also measure it in the context of your life. So, rather than, you know, every time someone's dysregulated saying, "Breathe," it's more, "Hey, Charles, you've been wearing Intrus for a couple of weeks. These are the patterns we've noticed in your nervous system. These are their activities that they're linked to. These are the succession of different activities or behaviors that you do in the context of your day that actually lead to greater emotional regulation." So it's about providing the contextual awareness to the user to help them understand their landscape. Because a lot of us get to the end of the day, we might feel shit, we might feel good, but understanding specifically why, you know, what happened. They can be big things that are obvious, like, you know, when I go to the gym, I generally feel better. But what about the smaller, you know, micro moments of how you're, regulating a conversation, a meeting, a disappointment, a stressful drive, and the accumulation of all of these things. Because it's, it's never just one thing. Like emotional dysregulation, getting to the point where you're having an emotional meltdown is kind of like if I was holding a cup of water right now, pouring it a little bit, pouring it a little bit, another event, another event, another event, another event, until all of that accumulates and the water's overflowing. Yeah. It's the stacking of these particular moments in our day that create this discord that I think it's very hard to be aware of that in the context of how busy our lives are. So that's what I hope In Truth can provide for people is like, your life is a complex life. Here's the context, here's how your nervous system is dealing with that complexity. And these are the, the correlates in your day, your week, your month, that cause you to experience your emotions in the way that you do.

And you'd outsource the solutions part to partners, let's say like an Eight Sleep and connect with them or a psychotherapist and you let them like give out the modalities or to a health coach, for example, is that the end play?

Yeah, there's a couple of clients we're working on bigger projects with where we're actually building like comprehensive digital twins. So which includes all the different interventions that they're doing, plus all their other biomarkers and how emotional regulation stacks up compared to that. Or it could just be that the average consumer is actually logging when they're doing those things. So, hey, Charles, you let us know that, you know, you had 8 hours of sleep last night, or we pulled that from your Apple Health data or your Garmin Connect. We know that you meditated, breathed, went to gym, saw someone you loved all before 12 PM. And when you had that investment investor meeting at 2:00 PM, you got a successful result. And that happened the last 5 times you did those things before you pitched versus a day where you didn't do those things and you, you know, 80% of the time got a negative outcome. That starts to become very helpful awareness, like over time, especially.

Love it. Nicole, thanks for being on today. Where can people find out more about you?

So you can go to intruth.io to check out the company and then feel free to follow me either on LinkedIn under Nicole Gibson or Instagram, Nick Gibson, N-I-C Gibson underscore.

Awesome.