Nicole Gibson: Emotion has never had an objective element that allows us to come closer to empathy, closer to understanding each other. And I was pained, Georgie, right, by this question, why don't we have a more emotionally intelligent world? As I matured and I became more curious in this subject, I realized actually we don't have emotional intelligence because we don't even know what emotion is.

Nicole Gibson: Our machine learning starts to show when one emotion ends and another And we started with five primary clusters and now in our models in a pretty small test group of just a couple hundred people, we have up to 25 emotions. So when we start to, you know, accelerate that and we have hundreds of thousands, millions of people using the technology, what do you think's going to happen?

Nicole Gibson: Like we're going to have probably thousands of clusters that we do not have words for.

Georgie Healy: Oh my goodness.

Nicole Gibson: And so we're, we're painting finally a picture of. The complexity of what it is to be human.

Georgie Healy: Hello, and welcome to In the Blink of AI, where I talk to the brightest AI startups and innovators each week.

Georgie Healy: I'm Georgie Healy. And this week I'm speaking to Nicole Gibson, CEO and founder of InTruth. I first met Nicole at an event during South by Southwest, namely because on three separate occasions that night, people were absolutely astounded by the early insights InTruth had been able to capture already. I simply had to meet her, subsequently have found out that she's low key famous and absolutely an incredible entrepreneur that's based in Silicon Valley now.

Georgie Healy: This episode was recorded just after she was on the project the night before. And earlier in the week, she had a major feature in The Age. So InTruth is attracting a lot of attention and momentum as it's the first company, uh, in the world to track emotions through wearables with clinical grade accuracy.

Georgie Healy: In the episode, we discussed the technology behind getting emotional data, how to get signals that feed the algorithm, which then provides insights. And it's super interesting as Nicole shares on the pod, it can mean incredible things for how we understand ourselves and how humans can interact as a whole and are launching to the public next year.

Georgie Healy: And I'm super excited to be one of their beta customers. Let's jump into the episode.

Georgie Healy: Hi Nicole. Thank you for joining in the blink of a eye. Perhaps you can kick us off with giving us a quick explainer on what in

Nicole Gibson: truth is. Sure, Georgie. Happy to be here. So InTruth is the first company in the world to be able to track emotion through biometrics or wearable technology, uh, with clinical grade accuracy.

Nicole Gibson: So it's been a big journey, but a very exciting one.

Georgie Healy: I'm really excited to dive deeply into this today. As the founder and CEO of InTruth, what are you currently working on and what's top of mind for you? Georgie.

Nicole Gibson: I don't think a founder's ever working on one thing, right? But we're just about to do another deploy of the app, which will bring some updates to the original alpha testing version, which I'm quite excited about.

Nicole Gibson: We just had a meeting about that this morning and. Excitingly, there's, there's a lot of kind of media on us at the moment, you know, ride that wave and get an opportunity to talk about in truth. And some has been very favorable and, um, actually a segment I did last night, actually on the project, it was interesting to see the angle that they took.

Nicole Gibson: It was a very kind of fear based view on what we're building. So it's interesting, you know, when you, when you're on the leading edge of anything, the way people respond and I think is likely to sit on two ends of an extreme. It's quite fascinating because it's showing me societally actually where we sit.

Nicole Gibson: Not just with AI, but actually with the concept of emotional vulnerability.

Georgie Healy: I'm so glad you've mentioned that. This was going to be a question I was going to ask later on. I'm so glad you've brought this up. I was called out recently by a friend for fixating too much on the risks of certain things, which is not lost on me having an AI podcast and being super excited for what that could mean.

Georgie Healy: There was this Neuralink startup, you know, the more invasive ones, They potentially share your innermost thoughts with other people and us as well. Focusing purely on like the downside risks, but then my friend pointed out the upside of how this could form people with paralysis and neurogenerative diseases and how it can communicate with the worlds around them.

Georgie Healy: And it really makes me think, yeah, the potential upside is so huge. I would love to hear what you said on the project and what the upside benefits are that people that are focusing too much on the risks don't get. Yeah,

Nicole Gibson: I mean, this is a really big conversation, you know, for me, I'm coming from a space of having thought about this problem that we're solving for, you know, 15 years of my life every single day.

Nicole Gibson: And I understand that that's not the mainstream and when a concept is put to a mainstream audience for the first time, they see it in a completely different way. But for me to increase the level of emotional capacity. Of humanity at scale, you know in a hyper individualized personalized way but to be able to achieve that at scale So, to me, that is the, the bridge that we're finally able to build to, to a kind of more compassionate world and, uh, a more honest world.

Nicole Gibson: And I think that these kind of what have previously been seen as value based or character based qualities can finally become objective qualities, like to actually be able to. understand what it means to be emotionally intelligent, to be loving, to be compassionate. As soon as we're able to really see that, we can drive collective momentum in that direction at scale.

Nicole Gibson: Cause I really believe that we have more than a critical mass of people in our world that want that world. But we don't right now have a way of organizing the emotional state of the collective in a single direction. We're basically beholden to the media, which is what is driving fear and anxiety, or, you know, our kind of dopamine reward system that's constantly being manipulated by social media.

Nicole Gibson: So all of us have kind of. outsourced our vibration, you know, our emotional state to the things around us. And the point I made, I actually wrote a statement after, um, the segment went up because they interviewed me for about an hour and a half on data sovereignty, but didn't obviously show any of that.

Nicole Gibson: Which I thought was really interesting. I wrote a statement and basically said, you know, this isn't a matter of whether or not we should build this. This is a matter of which company you want to support to rise to power. As the founder of InTruth, I'm very passionate about that. We build with decentralization in mind.

Nicole Gibson: My vision for health data is for every user to own. Their own health data for that to sit in a wallet, you know A digital wallet that is encrypted and they can determine who gets access to that data So when you think about it from that perspective As I said, this is a big conversation That's actually an improvement in privacy because i'll give you an example last time I left australia to go.

Nicole Gibson: Um, I live in san francisco So I was going home after a visit to australia and I went and got a blood test a couple of days before I flew and the results weren't in before I, you know, had to go back. And so I called the clinic and did an identity check and the receptionist said, the doctor won't give you your blood results unless you actually come into the clinic.

Nicole Gibson: And I said, well, I've left the country, you know, these are my blood results, you know, I've confirmed my identity, give me my blood results and they wouldn't do it. And so the disposition within the existing healthcare system, right, is. The medical system, your doctor owns your data and you have to ask for permission and actually, you know, potentially go into the clinic face to face and see that doctor in order for him to release your blood results over to you.

Nicole Gibson: Now, I think that that's appalling. I think that that's a system that needs disruption. And this is finally a way that we can improve our level of privacy, you know, not decrease our level of privacy, but it's the way that the story is going to be told to the masses that I think. you know, really matters because a lot of people don't know what you and I know about data.

Nicole Gibson: And I think that that's problematic because we're on that acceleration curve, whether we like it or not. And some companies don't care about data sovereignty. And so the consumer should be empowered to make a decision around whether or not that's the company they want to support.

Georgie Healy: Yeah, such an incredible example.

Georgie Healy: I think we've all dealt with these kind of Kafkaesque almost examples of, but it's my data and, and I don't know why I don't have access to it, but someone that I don't even know has access to it. I was involved in building the COVID 19 app. And that was just another example of weird, disjointed privacy and security.

Georgie Healy: Look, taking a step back, you mentioned, and frankly, I I'm so glad I Googled you after having met you and asked you to come on the pod, because now quite intimidating seeing how much your work is. Celebrated and, and how much people are very keen to, to learn more about you and in truth and what you've been working on several years in Silicon Valley.

Georgie Healy: And here I encourage listeners to check out previous podcasts and articles because that talks about the emotional background side, but on the podcast today, focusing more on the technology. What technology are you building and how does it relate to overall goals of the business?

Nicole Gibson: I just want to sort of flag here that the tech is a way of driving a broader impact.

Nicole Gibson: What we're here to do is beyond just build a tech product. And in fact, Love Out Loud, which is actually the parent company of InTruth, so InTruth is a subsidiary of a company I started back in 2018. Based on a book I wrote actually called Love Out Loud. And I wrote that book after 10 years, almost 10 years working in the mental health sector as an entrepreneur.

Nicole Gibson: Also as a, as a commissioner, just realizing, man, we need a more humanitarian approach. Like the, the system is just, it's so fragmented, you know, when, when you're dealing with vulnerable people, that's the last thing that's helpful. Um, and there's really no personalized solutions. That can scale. There's a lot more to that story, but to kind of give an overview where that landed me was we need to build personalized solutions.

Nicole Gibson: And I see the technology that is in truth. Kind of being one of the most innovative ways of solving that problem, because the biggest design question I've had forever, you know, since I started my first organization at 18 years old, um, in mental health was how do we scale a solution without losing personalization?

Nicole Gibson: And this was even before, in fact, if you had told me eventually you're going to move into tech and you're going to start. The tech startup, I would have been like, yeah, like what? Like I had no engineering background or any of that, but it was kind of this iterative first principles thinking that brought me to, to where we are today.

Nicole Gibson: And, and what, what I'm very proud of having built with my, my very amazing team. What the tech does so I'll kind of explain it You know as if I was talking to a seven year old and then we can get more

Georgie Healy: please. Yeah

Nicole Gibson: Love that. It's basically like a um a sophisticated mood band. I think we'll remember the mood ring I

Georgie Healy: loved mood rings loved them.

Georgie Healy: Like if it turned a certain color, I would be like, yes Actually, I am quite emotional right now that tracks. Yeah loved

Nicole Gibson: it loved it Mood rings were using, uh, heat, so temperature, asking temperature to change the color, so you know that they were onto something, it was low tech. It's very analog, but you know, that, that actually, I think set the tone for, for the technology that will actually be able to do that.

Nicole Gibson: Uh, the way that we've built our sort of first version is through, I have to get a little bit technical, but I'll try my best to explain, we pull data from what's called a PPG sensor. So a PPG sensor. Is the sensor that sits in most consumer grade wearables. So if you wear an Apple Watch or an AA ring, or a Garin, or a whoop, um, I'm wearing one right now.

Nicole Gibson: Yeah.

Georgie Healy: I noticed you're wearing an

Nicole Gibson: an

Georgie Healy: AA ring. Yeah.

Nicole Gibson: So the AA ring, you know, has these sensors inside that's called the, and so if you are listening to this and you're not watching the video, I Yes. Well, but if you're watching the video, these sensors, so this is a bisra, this is what's tracking my interest data.

Georgie Healy: Anyone that wears a Fitbit, those green lights that blind you anytime you take on and off your Fitbit watch.

Nicole Gibson: Yeah, amazing. These are the same sensors. It's called a PPG sensor. And the data that comes out of a PPG sensor is called IBI data. That data is what normally gets processed in existing wearable experiences into things like heart rate, heart rate variability.

Nicole Gibson: You know, they're the things that basically track your sleep score. The, I guess, groundbreaking solution that we've managed to build is our ability to pull that raw IBI data into a machine learning model sits in our servers. We process that raw data and we translate it into. Arousal and valence, which are the data points, basically that construct emotion.

Nicole Gibson: And once the ML has done that, then we, we push it back to the user so that you can actually see your emotional state. Obviously on a kind of basic level, you can see your emotional state, but once we combine that data in time against something like your calendar, then we can really start to aggregate complex data and show you complex, emotional, very nuanced, complex, emotional patterns.

Nicole Gibson: over time.

Georgie Healy: Wow. That is genuinely incredible. When you say complex, what's the five star version of this? What would you love to see?

Nicole Gibson: Yeah, this is what we're, um, we've been raising for actually. I think any founder feels that way, but just so been so excited to get to the other side of this phrase because.

Nicole Gibson: Yeah. I want to build it, you know, and I think that that's a good litmus test, right? If you you're that excited to try your own product, I think it's a really good thing The the five star version is basically going to be taking the the basic data So the emotion that we're tracking in time, you know, keep in mind that this is the the first Technology really ever to be able to to do that.

Nicole Gibson: So we're passively tracking your emotion without any user input Once we start to integrate that with the calendar and with generative AI, we can start to experience it more like sort of an AI coach. I like to, without getting too meta, think of it as like a chat GPT for your own subconscious mind. So it would know, for example, Georgie's having a podcast with Nick, um, from Intruth.

Nicole Gibson: And it's tracking you throughout the interview, right? And so then it's meta tagging Nick, InTruth, AI, EmotionTech, like it, it knows all these subcategories of what's related to our conversation. But say you wanted to focus on your and my, um, professional relationship. We did a few other things over the coming months and maybe we hit like a conflict.

Nicole Gibson: You could go to InTruth and say, Hey Antruth, Nick and I are going through this conflict relating to whatever. Can you go back and look in my data, where do you think this conflict started to arise? What were my vulnerabilities? What are the exact emotional patterns that are going on for me? And how could I meaningfully resolve this?

Georgie Healy: It's just incredible to think of all the, all the times that I would have found this super valuable in professional circumstances as well as personal ones. Even like I'm projecting here, but it's been a particularly busy week in startups, right? We had South by Southwest. I'm running a program that just had a bootcamp week, got super sick afterwards.

Georgie Healy: Like, like, I'm just thinking that the emotional tax can have a. Health techs sometimes,

Nicole Gibson: right? Totally. Obviously my background has been health and I'm passionate about, about this cause I saw it very much in my facilitation work, emotion is the underlying cause of all, you know, health conditions in my opinion.

Nicole Gibson: And that's, that's through kind of heavy anecdotal observation, but also the research that in truth has illuminated because the human emotion and behavior has been a lifelong kind of interest. But. Building this company has forced me to really get into the neuroscience of what Emotion really is. And this is what I was talking largely at South by Southwest on emotion drives 80 percent of our decision making.

Nicole Gibson: So your emotional patterns are driving the things that you choose, which are ultimately driving any kind of outcome you're experiencing in your life, in your health, in your relationships. You know, I think these concepts that have been a little elusive for people, like you have thought leaders from back in the day, like Louise Hay, who wrote The Body Keeps the Score, and they're like, Hmm, I don't know.

Nicole Gibson: You know, it doesn't, it's not very medical. We're starting to really see the data that makes that true. And it's not as elusive as I think it was originally portrayed. If you think about it in this very pragmatic way. Your emotion is driving 80 percent of your decision making, which is largely unconscious to you.

Nicole Gibson: That's driving you to make these decisions that bring you out of balance that compromise your health. Well, the intervention then is in being able to realign your behavior and your decision making to the outcomes that you're actually, you know, seeking. Of course, there's going to be, you know, factors that are beyond our control, but ultimately any external factor, for example, you know, a negative environment that we feel we can't control is still being internalized within our nervous system, creates an emotional response and pattern, which then reinforces behavior that's keeping us stuck.

Nicole Gibson: Our data is actually able to see that and aggregate that level of complexity that the mind is just never going to be able to, to do, you know, bar maybe. someone who dedicates their entire life to a meditation practice and kind of removes themselves from societal distraction.

Georgie Healy: You talk about how the, the data that's gathered by the PPG sensor is then leveraged and supported by calendar events, perhaps.

Georgie Healy: How do the insights get given back to the wearer? How, how do you

Nicole Gibson: hope to share those insights? I don't want our app to sort of say, Hey, you're stressed, do some breath work. Because I find this, you know, really.

Georgie Healy: That's

Nicole Gibson: really

Georgie Healy: stressful.

Nicole Gibson: Rather, I want people to think of InTruth as like a mirror into themselves.

Nicole Gibson: So what InTruth will be able to do is start to correlate some of these data points. So say you're, you know, trying to Overcome an emotional pattern of anxiety and in truth knows that that pattern is triggered every time you Drink coffee and have a meeting with the ceo and don't go to gym, you know It will start to actually correlate at the behavioral patterns and the activities associated With certain emotional or the inflammation of certain emotional patterns and then it can feed it back to you It's not going to tell you what to do We're not here to tell you how to live your life, but I see our job as being able to illuminate awareness That's hard to catch.

Nicole Gibson: So once you know that we want to empower you Okay, you know if you want to continue to do that go right ahead, but now you can see it clear as day In a much more nuanced way than waking up and, you know, looking in my aura app and aura tells me you slept terribly again for the fifth day. And I'm like, okay, well, I know, but I don't actually know how to sleep better.

Nicole Gibson: You know, like, what do I actually have to do to sleep better? Our data is going to reach to that layer that says, well, this is why this is, this is what our data is showing on the days that you do X, Y, and Z. These were your emotional patterns. This is the emotional pattern that you ideally would experience I think that that's incredibly powerful, you know, but it's amazing, Georgie, how many people rebut that capability and say, well, you know, it's, yeah, it's showing the user data, but it's not necessarily going to change the way that they behave and what they choose to do.

Nicole Gibson: And I think that basically what we're saying is self awareness is not an intervention. And I think that that's because we've normalized just giving away our awareness to so many external things. And yeah, you know, someone might say, well, in truth is an external thing and the way that we've designed it is to continually bring your awareness back to you.

Nicole Gibson: And my hope, you know, in 20 years or, or whenever is that this is something that's very intuitive, you know, that we don't necessarily need our mission statement is to awaken the technology within to empower our users, to be able to do that on their own. That's the vision I have.

Georgie Healy: Thinking out loud here, you mentioned the sleep trackers and we've seen those across so many different hardware devices.

Georgie Healy: And it's, as you say, I slept for five hours and it's not that insightful to tell me that I had a bad night's sleep. It's like, yeah, I know. But what makes me quite excited about what you're building is. The variance with our days, weeks, months, the people we interact with and the insights that can be gained from a moving world, like sleep is, you know, generally, I guess we all need seven plus hours of sleep.

Georgie Healy: Right? But to be able to provide insight for, for me and the people I interact with and how that affects me as a person. Maybe Nicole, you're a little bit more emotionally stable than me. And the same interaction with the same person would have a different result on your body. I find that really interesting and really compelling.

Nicole Gibson: Exactly. Yeah. And it's, we've got to, we've got to weigh this up. And I actually saw this one, um, some, someone's comment on, on the segment from last night, just before it was like the way that we should be weighing any technology up is the perspective upside does that actually outweigh the downside. And I think I really encourage.

Nicole Gibson: everyone, you know, in the world to, to think more along those lines, because this very binary, something is only good or only bad, you know, that, that extreme binary thinking is not going to get us through the just era that we're in as a, as a civilization species, we have to think. In a far more nuanced way, and we have to be able to, you know, have these debates, I think that that's very important, which means putting all the information on the table, not spinning stories in one particular direction, you know, but to actually be Give and empower consumers with the facts, you know for them to be able to decide because again I talked about this at South by Southwest I think tech founders, you know have unprecedented levels of power the ones at the top You know that have really made it and the ones that that are about to I think because we've had to downturn in the market We're gonna see a A massive uptick in unicorns soon because unicorns are built, you know in a downturn These companies and we hope to be one of them, right and i'm not shy in saying that, you know, these companies Arguably going to be more powerful than governments so transparency really matters, you know that the way that we educate our users around the problems we're solving and I think there's been so much shame around like If you're a company that hasn't solved this problem, then, you know, just do everything in your PR to, to sweep that under the rug.

Nicole Gibson: Maybe it's a little bit idealistic, but the way I really want to grow in my leadership. It is to be able to say to our trusted clients and consumers, Hey, these are the problems we're currently solving. And these are our ways of solving them. I think Elon does that quite well, to be honest. He's good at taking people on the journey of the problems they're solving as a company.

Nicole Gibson: And I think he creates a loyal customer base as a result of that.

Georgie Healy: Yeah. I'd love to dive into that a little bit further. He is so polarizing, right? And, and frankly, you know, would I, would I want to be best mates with him? Not sure. But do I admire him? 100%. Yeah. I heard one person say, I don't know if it was Peter Thiel or someone like that, say for him to go off and build Tesla, we all laughed at him and then he nailed it.

Georgie Healy: But then to build Tesla and SpaceX, that's not an accident. Like, that is not, that is genius level. Yeah. Look, you're super familiar with the startups in Silicon Valley who live there. And let's go there about the, the fearful mindset, Uber wouldn't exist if we were too scared to get in a car with a stranger, Airbnb wouldn't exist, right?

Georgie Healy: If you pitched it to me and I was an investor for a year, I would have said. We'll never invest in this, which is why I'm not an investor anymore. By the way, did not see, did not see the potential upside. Clearly when your product hallucinates, it's not a Leonardo AI. It's not a, uh, text to image what happens and how do you mitigate against it?

Georgie Healy: And hallucinations in your. AI model?

Nicole Gibson: Yeah, it's a great question. So because we're using, um, ML and decision trees, actually the, the way the data is actually processed to get your emotion isn't AI driven, it's, it's classic machine learning. So it doesn't hallucinate, which is great. Good. Yeah. I think that's important.

Nicole Gibson: The hallucination, if it comes, will likely come through an, an LLM integration, you know, which, which will sort of fuel the, the generative AI features. And it's not about getting the LLM to give some sort of poetic and creative answer to a philosophical kind of direction for your life based on your emotional patterns.

Nicole Gibson: It's simply going to be, Hey, what was the exact thing I was feeling in that conversation? If you were to combine every time that I've ever spoken to Nick, what was going on for me? So it's not being asked to be creative in any way. In fact, that's an important design imperative for me and the team. We're not trying to be creative with the data.

Nicole Gibson: We're trying to tell you the data as it stands.

Georgie Healy: Just for the listeners, um, generative AI products. can hallucinate because the machine is coming up with the responses by itself, as Nicole clearly stated. If it's classic machine learning, it doesn't have the risk of doing that because it's based on a set of rules and instructions.

Georgie Healy: Did I explain that properly, Nicole? I think you nailed that. Yeah. Yes. Thank you. Look, you talked about raising. You know, AI startups raise often for compute because compute is expensive. Are you raising for compute? Are you building hardware as well? Can you talk to us about what the, what the raise will enable you to do?

Nicole Gibson: Yeah. Great question. So we're not building hardware. It's not off the table for us, but our view is, you know, there's amazing PPG hardware. So we're not here to build the best PPG sensor because the sensors are actually already great. Yeah. And we can simply integrate with that hardware through either API.

Nicole Gibson: That might change, uh, I guess if we could see an advantage of being able to supply, say like enterprise clients with custom hardware that we likely have already found some solutions, my vision there is to be able to drive the hardware price way down to sort of absorb it in the SaaS. Like you said, I think this has amazing professional applications in terms of like just team wellness and.

Nicole Gibson: Direction imagine being able to see kind of the subconscious 80 Of the decision making that's happening in a team. And actually this is what the project chose to focus on yesterday. Um, in a very obviously fear based tone of like, why would you want your employee to see your data? And it's like, well, the, the guy on the project was literally like, what are you going to do, print out, you know, a report and, and show your, your boss, your, your emotional report.

Nicole Gibson: It's, it's not exactly like that. You know, we're aggregating the data. We're depersonalizing the data, your employer, your leader, you know, is, is more so going to see trends. that support them to make decisions that are actually gonna, you know, help the, the team perform better and, and feel better. That's the, the hope.

Nicole Gibson: My friend actually voice noted me and said, I really can't see you as like a Mr. Burns behind the scenes, like with your fingers like this. I can't wait for every employer to be able to surveil all of their employees.

Georgie Healy: That does not track with your personality to be like big government.

Nicole Gibson: Exactly. So I think, you know, that's, that's important to state.

Nicole Gibson: So, you know, in short, no, we're not, we're not focused on building hardware. We're raising mostly to improve the machine learning model. So what we want to do without going into too much detail, because it kind of touches on some deep IP of the company, but we've trained the ML on a, on a clinical dataset, basically.

Nicole Gibson: And we want to be able to expand that clinical data set to as many countries and across as many people as possible, because obviously the more we do that, the more representative the data set is. So the research side of what we're doing is actually very exciting. And the family office actually that has closed out, I guess it's like a Series A equivalent because it's non dilutive funding.

Nicole Gibson: So it's a bit of unique. situation, but nice. Yeah. We've been talking with, with them about what it would actually look like potentially to separate the commercial imperative as a company with the research into a foundation, which I haven't actually spoken about that, you know, publicly. And it's, I just want to caveat, this isn't a decision we've yet made, but it's a decision we're exploring.

Nicole Gibson: Cause I think it's a very good model for us in that obviously if it's in a foundation, then commercially we don't own the data, which I think is, you know, important. B, there's so much utility in the data that we're collecting for research purposes beyond what will drive our commercial outcomes, right? So to have a foundation.

Nicole Gibson: That can focus on that. I think that there's so much we can learn broadly that's going to help humanity. That's, that's beyond, you know, getting in truth to market. So that's a very exciting imperative that we're working through at the moment, but yeah, it will also sort of change the budget level that we have for our consumer launch.

Nicole Gibson: But I really want InTruth to be like a cultural disruptor, you know, like I don't, I don't see our launch being like, Hey, let's run some ads and do a lookalike audience of Fitbit and let's go. Like. I want artists, you know, like I want Rufus DeSalle playing in the Vegas Dome with like everyone wearing in truth and like AI projections and lighting that's shifting based on people's biometric data, like.

Georgie Healy: I literally got goosebumps because I'm a, like, I'm not even a Swifty, but I really got into the Taylor Swift concert with the devices we were all wearing. And you'd look at your device and then you'd know which next album would be playing and things like that. But it was completely non personal.

Georgie Healy: Everyone had a device. It didn't really connect with the artists in any meaningful way. That was it. Gave me goosebumps, that idea. Although I'm not really into indie, so we're gonna have to chat about other artists you can, you can collab with, please.

Nicole Gibson: That's okay. Well, I mean, it's, it's any, right? I, I personally love.

Nicole Gibson: Love Rufus, but it could be any artist. And it's a bit of context. You know, I was, I was actually a performer before I was an entrepreneur. So I have a deep passion for performance and I was, um, mostly theater, but I do a bit of kind of spoken word stuff and philosophy, and it's a big part of my life, it's what I would be doing if I wasn't doing this and the opportunity eventually to converge these two things in, in this way is really.

Nicole Gibson: profound for me because I think performance and art gives people this ability to Feel and to be vulnerable and to process, you know Deeper parts of the human experience that often worlds can't touch And to be able to combine the power of the art the arts with something as personal as kind of the biometric you know, data that is in truth and converge these experiences so that your inner world starts to reflect fully in the outer world.

Nicole Gibson: It's very exciting because I think what it will create is this transcendental experience where we actually unify. It's an emotional thought for me, but that on the consumer side of things. That's the direction. And so when investors ask, you know, Oh, well, you know, when, you know, whoop's going to do this or is going to do this, it's, it's very frustrating as a founder, cause I'm like, these companies don't have the vision we have, you know, at all.

Nicole Gibson: And we're often misrepresented in that way. Yeah, there was a write up actually that came out. On Monday, which I was very happy with. It was, you know, shout out to Sydney Morning Herald.

Georgie Healy: I saw this article. It was fantastic. Please, please share what, what it explained the people listening.

Nicole Gibson: I just think you did a great job, you know, cause you can, you can write about in truth in many ways.

Nicole Gibson: You can compare us to the next whoop and we get that a lot and like, what's special about you. Or you can really highlight the vision we have to, to transform the planet. And I feel like that was, that was captured and, and the role of motion has in solving that problem as well. Cause I think culturally we're resistant to this, right?

Nicole Gibson: Like we don't culturally like talking about our emotions. Still. We have, have work to do. And I think that that bias, you know, you asked me about raising before I've experienced that time and time again, where I can see. That we tick every box, you know, we tick every box. And I know a lot of founders have this, you know, qualm and I really do take, you know, rejection in my stride.

Nicole Gibson: It's, it's not, that's not the point I'm trying to make here. The point I am trying to make is at times I've seen investors want to invest in us. You know, because our projections, our ideas, you know, our cross national reach, like everything checks out. But I can see that they're struggling to embrace a future where emotional transparency is celebrated because of their own stuff.

Nicole Gibson: And they might not even know that. That's just my observation through the sheer quantity of facilitation work I've done over the years. And I can see when people are triggered, you know, by, by something. And so that's been a really fascinating journey, but I think that comes with, again, being on the leading edge.

Nicole Gibson: You're going to have people that want to either kind of disqualify what you're doing or be afraid of what you're doing. And then you're going to have people that celebrate, you know, and, and you've got to find your early adopters and the people that see what you see. And I think for any founder, you have to do your best to Not be defensive, like take on feedback.

Nicole Gibson: I think that's important, but at the same time, drown it out and just stay true to your vision.

Georgie Healy: 100 percent being a bit philosophical. Do you see humans? And their emotions of evolving in a major way. Like, like the reason I ask is I'm thinking of the model you're building and the data that it must ingest.

Georgie Healy: So does it change? Like, do we, do our emotions inherently

Nicole Gibson: evolve? And this is a really amazing and important question as well, for the reason that. Okay, there's a few things I need to go through one at a time, please. The first is culturally we use emotion and feeling interchangeably and we don't understand and it even happened last night, again, referencing this, this segment, this, the, the psychologist that they got to, to come and talk wasn't actually representing what emotion actually is from a neuroscience perspective.

Nicole Gibson: She was talking about feelings, but the way neuroscience understands emotion and the scientific model that we build our technology on is. Raw stimulus, then emotion that's triggered every 200 milliseconds. So it's pre cognizant. Then when those series, those clusters of emotions have been processed, it becomes a feeling.

Nicole Gibson: So when I say, Hey, Georgie, how are you feeling? And you say, I'm feeling happy. You've actually, your brain has aggregated about 30 emotions in order to come up with happy. But those emotions that are pre processed are the things that are actually driving your behavior. The subjective layer is just the mind's way of making something simple that's very, very complex.

Nicole Gibson: Just like the rest of the world, right? We're only actually seeing a very small slither of reality through our belief systems and our senses. Well, our mind has to keep up with just how complex our nervous system's ability to experience emotion is. Now what's amazing about that is we don't have words that touch the degree and amount of emotions that we experience.

Nicole Gibson: There's a model of emotion that's the most kind of well known model of emotion. It's called the circumflex model of emotion. And if you Google it and you look at it, you'll see that it's a graph with an X and a Y axis, and our user interface mirrors that. Now what's interesting about the circumflex model is there's no universal, like, agreement.

Nicole Gibson: Because the circumflex model, basically the Y axis is stress and the X axis is stress. Is, uh, valence, which is sentiment. So negative to positive, low stress to high stress. Now you could be sitting like at the extreme of positive and stressed and you'd be excited, right? Or something. Me right

Georgie Healy: now, yep.

Nicole Gibson: Perfect. Great, good to hear it. I can check on my emotion afterwards, you

Georgie Healy: know,

Nicole Gibson: and everything in between. But the way that these circumplex models have been drawn up in neuroscience, there's no objective consensus. So, you know, this is a huge scientific breakthrough to actually be on the precipice of being able to build an objective model of emotion for starters, means that finally, for the first time ever, When you say happy and I say happy, we can actually know what the F we mean, because at the moment we don't, you know?

Nicole Gibson: Oh, so true. Okay. Someone can say, this is an objection that I've got. Yeah, but you know, you look at the sky and see blue and I look at the sky and I say that that's blue, but we could be saying different things, but the difference is at least we have a marker of objectivity. Yes, you could be seeing that blue differently, but whatever you're seeing, whatever I'm seeing, we have something objective to say.

Nicole Gibson: You know, okay, that's the sky. This is a glass, even if we might see it in a different way. And I'm sure that that's true, right? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Like there's, there's subjective layers to it. It's multidimensional, but emotion has never had an objective element that allows us to come closer to empathy, closer to understanding each other.

Nicole Gibson: And I was pained, Georgie, right, by this question. Why don't we have a more emotionally intelligent world? That question has driven me for, you know, 20 years, like even before my entrepreneurial journey as a kid, I didn't understand why, you know, we, we behaved the way that we behaved and it was so difficult for people to feel like I was always very empathetic.

Nicole Gibson: Like I could feel the people around me, but I could see at a very young age that that very few people have that ability. You know, and for many years I took it personally. I thought that there was something wrong with me. And I blamed myself when people weren't acting compassionately. I, as a child, you think that the world revolves around you, it's the only kind of point of reference you have.

Nicole Gibson: Obviously, as I matured and I became more curious in this subject, I realized actually, we don't have emotional intelligence because we don't even know what emotion is. You know, the clusters that we're seeing in our ML will transcend, and by clusters I mean our machine learning starts to show when one emotion ends and another begins.

Nicole Gibson: And we started with five primary clusters and now in our models in a pretty small test group of just a couple hundred people, we have up to 25 emotions. So when we start to, you know, accelerate that and we have hundreds of thousands, millions of people using the technology, what do you think is going to happen?

Nicole Gibson: Like we're going to have thousands, most likely definitely hundreds, probably thousands of clusters that we do not have words for.

Georgie Healy: Oh my goodness.

Nicole Gibson: And so we're, we're painting finally a picture of. The complexity of what it is to be human. And so when people push back and say, You're trying to paint a world where we become less human.

Nicole Gibson: It's like, no, we're going to show, you know, we're going to actually validate what the soul is, I think we're going to validate what, what it means, you know, what humanity actually means. And I think that that's very important because we haven't managed to get there. In fact, The more sophisticated we've become societally, the less connected we've become to that unique humanity, in my opinion.

Georgie Healy: Wow, I am so excited to see the data that comes out as well. I didn't even think of what you mentioned about going from one emotion to the next. It made me think of, you know, when someone goes through grief and there's the seven stages of grief and first love. There's denial and then there's this, whatever, whatever the stages are.

Georgie Healy: I'm curious, like, can you ever go from anger to happiness or does that just never happen? Or does that only happen to 2 percent of people or is it always anger to sadness and then to, I'm just like, just thinking of all the potential that this could

Nicole Gibson: have. What I know, you know, through what we've already seen is every human is very unique in how their nervous system emotes.

Nicole Gibson: And because there's so many things that have influenced it, right, and I think we're also going to start to touch what are the generational impacts, you know, what, what your mom was experiencing and your dad was experiencing before you were born, when you were in utero, like, we're going to be able to track that.

Nicole Gibson: It's going to be very interesting. Like, to give an example, we haven't done this yet, but imagine being able to, you know, track a, a mother who's pregnant and then track her child and actually see the, you know, the, the similarities in, in the emotional patterns when the newborn's finally able to be tracked.

Nicole Gibson: I think that that's really interesting. Like my partner and I obviously track our data and I presented this at, at South by Southwest and it was probably the thing that got the most, the biggest response, which is interesting. Over time, my partner and I's data started to mirror each other, and now our profiles almost look identical.

Nicole Gibson: And what it shows is We co regulate, you know, so that some people might look at it and be like, oh, well, you're similar people. No, we're actually, I mean, sure in some ways, but you know, fundamentally no, but together our nervous systems have reached this place of homeostasis with each other where we now emotionally mirror each other.

Nicole Gibson: And that's amazing, you know, the, the, to be able to prove I was talking about it in that talk. Cause I was, I was asked to speak on diversity. I mean, I see diversity in this in a very different way than I think how the world's trying to have. I think we're honestly, it's controversial opinion. I think we're going about it in the right way.

Nicole Gibson: I think trying to fight over identity politics is not it like it's, it's, it's a futile way of trying to go about it because it, it relies purely on subjectivity. And I think that these objective layers of reality are actually really important. They allow us to come into, you know, a place of agreement.

Nicole Gibson: And if we don't have those places of agreement, then the world's going to be chaos. It's like a post post modernist era that will send us towards, which is like, everything is subjective. Nothing is objective. And I think that that's, I personally think that's dangerous, you know, I think we need to come back to what's.

Nicole Gibson: actually real and innate so that we can find agreement or even disagreement, but, you know, find a position so that we can feel balanced in a very complex world. Right. And so I was showing through this data, having diversity on your team to me means having people that fundamentally emotionally experienced the world in a different way, because it will change the way that they behave and that those changes in behavior will disrupt any kind of emotional You know groupthink that's going on because what tends to Happen, you know, is this this phenomenon of co regulation?

Nicole Gibson: So if you get 10 people that were already the same and then you put them together, you know That's just going to strengthen right if you get 10 people that all have very very different temperament profiles and you put them together They're going to co regulate, you know If we measured them after working together in an office for three months You They're going to start to emotionally mirror each other, but what will happen is it will be the mean average of all of those differences.

Nicole Gibson: So that really matters. And of course that's going to accelerate the success of your company, of your products, you know, of all of that, because it's going to be more representative and inclusive of what the world experience.

Georgie Healy: It is so incredibly fascinating, especially in a world that, I mean, I don't live in America, but it seems like politics will make people very binary.

Georgie Healy: And so some people are getting more and more similar, but a different group's getting more and more similar, but Those two groups are getting further and further apart, and it's just

Nicole Gibson: Actually, Georgie, my prediction, I obviously don't have an in truth bound on every American, but my prediction would be their emotion profiles look identical, but their belief systems are different.

Nicole Gibson: So they're fighting with the same emotion, you know, I'm right, I'm, you know Yes! Their emotions are probably identical, uh, but their belief systems are different. And again, you know, when you look at it, maybe through a spiritual lens, Spiritualists will say the journey of spirituality is to kind of become come into the non dual and You know, it's important that I think we understand that that if you're on this side of the spectrum on this side of the Spectrum, you know, it's two sides of the same coin You're actually mirroring each other both sides want to feel safe.

Nicole Gibson: Both sides probably think they're fighting for the right thing I would say they are, you know, both both parties whatever and this is in any conversation Provax anti vax kamala trump. Yes fairs It's, it's just the same thing with a different set of belief systems that, that make it look different and wrap it in different wrapping paper.

Nicole Gibson: But ultimately the, the real solution isn't for one side to be right and the other to be wrong. The real solution is unification through empathy. Which I believe will happen when we can see that we are experiencing exactly the same thing.

Georgie Healy: I could talk to you for another three hours, which would be amazing for me.

Georgie Healy: Um, I do encourage everyone seeks your other incredible materials. I listened to several podcasts, just really enjoying learning from, from the years of research and work you've done, Nicole. We finished the episode with some rapid fire questions. How does that sound?

Nicole Gibson: Perfect.

Georgie Healy: Let's do it. On another pod, you said that if you weren't solving problems with technology, we've touched on this, it would be music.

Georgie Healy: What genre of music would you be releasing?

Nicole Gibson: Great question. Probably, um, like, EDM, maybe with a little bit of like instrumental influence, but something that people could dance to. I think that that's important.

Georgie Healy: Amazing. Will we see AGI in our lifetime?

Nicole Gibson: Yeah, I think that we've already began that process.

Nicole Gibson: That's my personal opinion.

Georgie Healy: AI startup other than InTruth that you're most impressed

Nicole Gibson: by? Wow. Good question. I'm so siloed day to day and obsessed in what we're,

Georgie Healy: in what we're creating. You like Elon Musk, I guess. That,

Nicole Gibson: that was quite, quite interesting. I like, uh, Google LM if we're, if we're going to choose a giant.

Nicole Gibson: AI based notebooks is allowing my team and I to build like entire second brains. Actually, Obsidium is a great AI company. It's a, an infrastructure to build a second brain. And I think the utility for that's out of control.

Georgie Healy: Amazing. Favorite AI software or hardware that you like to use?

Nicole Gibson: I use UPT the most, but I think that that's everyone, but I'm really getting into the different ways that we can create inputs.

Nicole Gibson: So this is a good hack for anyone that's listening. If you get a software like Obsidian, you can even use Notion. And then you have an LLM integration with a bunch of different inputs, like, you know, Fathom, AI, Notetaker. As an example, or Otter, or whatever the other inputs are, files from your Google Drive.

Nicole Gibson: It basically starts to build a second brain. Then you can have a front end chat bot and you can just ask it questions rather than needing to search, you know, for hours and hours about things you can aggregate sort of like a sophisticated GBT thread, but for the specific things you want to know. So like what we'll build one for our company so that when a new team member comes on, they don't need to ask.

Nicole Gibson: Customer service or whatever, a thousand questions that are just silly questions.

Georgie Healy: Or I've already answered that or you read the email thread. Amazing. There's a lot written about you online, Nicole, anything you've read about yourself or in truth or heard or been asked that's complete bullshit nonsense.

Georgie Healy: Thank you for asking. Like sick of it.

Nicole Gibson: Uh, yes, definitely. That. Well, we have a, you know, a, a notorious mission. I think like any, any article or reference to us building this with malice intent. I really, you know, I challenge anyone to, to look deeper into what we're doing and not just me, but my whole team, you know, we all have a shed.

Nicole Gibson: Vision for what the world needs to look like. And that's one of sovereignty and freedom and, you know, equity. We believe in that.

Georgie Healy: Amazing. Thank you. Finally, what would you like to shout out to the people listening, anything that we need to be on the lookout for? What would you like us to be signing up for?

Georgie Healy: How do I get involved in InTruth? Tell me.

Nicole Gibson: Yeah. Jump on the beta list. I think that that's probably the easiest way to get updates. So InTruth. io, I as a, um, individual. Oh slash beta if you jump on that list We're going to send you all the all the ways including being part of our next testing round if that's interesting to you guys

Georgie Healy: Thank you so much for chatting with me.

Georgie Healy: This was Genuinely Such a fun hour for me. I really appreciate it You're welcome. Enjoy. Jimmy, too Thanks Nicole. Bye. Thank you for listening to In the Blink of AI. You can check out the show notes for anything discussed in this week's episode, and we will be back next week. This podcast was produced by Day One with music by Dan Hanson and visual artwork by Sophie Tyrell.

Georgie Healy: If you loved the episode, please tell your mates. And I love AI news. Please share your thoughts and suggestions to GeorginaRoseHealy at gmail. com.