I asked Nicole Gibson for one word to describe being a founder.
She said amazement.
Not relief. Not exhaustion. Amazement, at how much the world has shifted around an idea that nobody could conceptualise when she first put it in front of them.
Nicole founded In Truth in 2021. The company measures emotion from biometric data, using signals your wearable already collects. Heart rate. Heart rate variability. The beat-to-beat data that shows your nervous system moving between stress and recovery.
When she started pitching it, the answer was no. Repeatedly. People could not hold the idea in their heads.
The gap she saw
Nicole was Australia’s youngest ever Commonwealth Mental Health Commissioner. That role gave her a view of how health systems work at a national level, and it showed her something odd.
Every other area of health had some objective measure. Something to diagnose with. Something to track. Mental health did not.
When she asked why, the answer came back the same way each time. Emotions are subjective. You cannot measure them.
That did not match her own experience. Ask anyone what an emotion feels like and they will describe something physical. A tightening. A drop. A surge. There is a physiological layer to it.
And if it is in the physiology, it is biological. If it is biological, it can be measured.
What the model actually does
In Truth’s science is built on what the team calls the react and rebound model.
The react is your sympathetic nervous system firing. Fight or flight. Nicole is clear that this is not the problem. If something bangs behind you and you cannot activate, you cannot protect yourself.
The rebound is your parasympathetic system bringing you back down.
What their data shows is that most people sit in sympathetic overdrive. Constantly activated, never recovering. Out of balance.
Nicole uses a rubber band to explain it. Stretch your nervous system far enough with no counterforce, and eventually it snaps. The model behind this is borrowed from physics.
They trialled it first with police officers, through a partner working with first responders. High-stakes environments where the cost of a dysregulated moment is severe.
But the point generalises. Most of her users are ordinary people trying to be less reactive with their kids, their partners, their boss.
Why this matters for the rest of us
There is a line in this conversation that stayed with me.
Nicole argues that as long as we tell ourselves emotional regulation is about willpower, we will never solve the problem. The impulse fires faster than thought. For most people, it cannot be overridden.
So blame is not an effective tool. Understanding the system is.
I often meet people in the sustainability sector who are running on empty and sadly treat it as a character flaw. It is not. It is physiology, in an environment that never lets you rebound. Until you learn to self regulate that is.
The surfing lesson
Nicole credits an early mentor with a metaphor she still uses.
You can be the best surfer in the world with perfect technique. It is not enough.
You need the strength to paddle. The patience to wait. The discernment to know which wave is the right one. Then the technique to get up. Then the willingness to surrender, and let the wave carry you or roll you.
All of it has to come together.
She launched In Truth before large language models became a mainstream conversation. Emotion AI is now one of the fastest growing categories in the field. Nervous system regulation has become something people talk about at dinner.
None of that was predicted. It was paddling, then a wave.
If you are building something the market does not understand yet, that is worth sitting with. Rejection is not always a verdict on the idea. Sometimes it is a verdict on the timing.
What’s next for In Truth
On 8 August, Nicole and investor Nick Moore ran a global peace activation. The goal was to get more than a million people meditating together across 150 countries, and to measure it.
Community leaders built their own satellite events, which the team call nodes. 131 nodes across the world (25+ countries) joined together in real time. There was no marketing spend at all. One synchronised moment of peace - nothing like this had ever been done.
9 September there will be a private viewing at Vatican City in the presence of His Holiness, senior Vaitcan and AI Academy leaders. A measurement of inner peace, placed in the hands of those who shape belief.
18 September, New York. UNGA week press conference, presenting the findings to global media and UN delegates. Streamed live; wherever you are, you are in the room.
19 Sep. World Peace Day, Times Square
23-25 Sep. Inside the United Nations
The ambition is a growing data set that looks at peace biologically. Peace is not managed into existence. It is felt into existence.
Watch the full conversation
We covered a lot more than fits here. The wearable ecosystem, what happens when you meet a genuinely regulated person, and Nicole’s view on why so much of what we call progress has tried to cut emotion out of the picture; note that our conversation was recorded before event took place.
Nicole Gibson is the founder of In Truth. Find the company at intruth.io.
I write about the sustainability sector and the people building it. If you’re working out where you fit, the AI Lab on my website has the tools I use with clients.