Sunny Ray sits down with Nicole Gibson, founder and CEO of In Truth Technologies, a San Francisco based company building what she calls the world's first emotion biotech software. In Truth translates raw heart rate data from wearables like Oura, Apple Watch, and Whoop into an emotion score using machine learning, grounded in a proprietary react and rebound model of nervous system regulation. Gibson explains how emotion begins as an autonomic response and why regulating dynamic emotional range matters more for well being than chasing constant happiness. The conversation moves into her unconventional Australian childhood, her theater training in Meisner technique, her teenage struggle with anorexia and what it taught her about society's discomfort with vulnerability, and the eighteen months she spent living in a van visiting roughly 300 remote communities after founding a nonprofit. She also reflects on being appointed Australia's National Mental Health Commissioner at just 21 years old. Throughout, Gibson connects her personal journey of self acceptance to the mission behind In Truth, building technology that helps people truly see their inner emotional world.
Nicole Gibson on turning heart rate data into an emotion score and the wild personal journey behind it.
What is In Truth and what's your mission?
Our proprietary system is called the emotion score. Emotion actually begins in the autonomic nervous system, within 100 milliseconds we experience its first signal. In Truth captures your nervous system's autonomic response through how you express and regulate emotion, which is the key driver of behavior. We're surfacing data foundational to the human experience that's never been seen before, similar in impact to the birth of the fMRI, but for our emotions and nervous system.
Can you explain what emotion actually is and the breakthrough behind reading it through the nervous system?
Emotion is the first autonomic signal your body produces reacting to a stimulus. We built a model called react and rebound. Reactivity is your sympathetic nervous system, your fight or flight, how quickly it comes online. Rebound is your parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest brake. How well those two stay in coherence determines emotional regulation, which we quantify as emotional capacity, essentially how much fuel you have to handle challenging things.
How does one regulate their emotions?
Awareness is a good starting point. We call them phenotypes, archetypes of your nervous system, like the person who stays fumed for hours versus someone who lets things roll off. You can't control the initial autonomic reaction, but you can get better at rebounding, through breathwork and longitudinal practice, just like reps at a gym. Once you improve your rebound, you become able to take on stress and metabolize it faster instead of avoiding it.
Take me back to your early years in Australia. What was your home like and what kind of kid were you?
I was an entrepreneur from very early on, high threshold for risk, high tolerance for ambiguity. I went to eight different schools between Australia and the UK and left mainstream school at 14 for a performance academy majoring in theater. My dad's a pro gambler and mathematical genius, my mom is risk averse, so I lived in that tension. By 17 my greatest fear was ever having a boss, and I never have.
How does your theater background still show up in how you lead today?
I trained in Meisner, where the premise is being 100 percent yourself under given imaginary circumstances. Our director had us stand in front of the group and just be seen, without performing or deflecting. That taught me identity isn't really real and what we're seeking most is to be seen. That theory of change carried into In Truth, whose tagline is the window into your inner world.
Looking back, what was actually going on for you underneath your teenage anorexia?
It was many things, my disposition to take things to an extreme and seek perfection, combined with heavy change growing up and deep identity exploration during vulnerable years, plus being in performing arts and modeling where I was expected to look a certain way. What I learned was that the discomfort adults around me felt was really about their own dysregulation, mirroring a fragility they weren't comfortable with in themselves.
What did your 18 months living in a van and visiting around 300 communities teach you?
I founded a nonprofit and got sponsorship to tour mostly remote and rural Australia, sleeping under the stars with no cell reception. I'd given up everything material after overcoming anorexia and felt allergic to anything performative. Each day I was in service, sharing my story and facilitating circles for others to share theirs. It became the ingredients for a spiritual awakening and taught me way too much about what this life really is.
What did being appointed National Mental Health Commissioner at 21 teach you that prepared you for building a tech company?
It taught me that at any level of power, humans are all seeking the same thing. I hadn't pursued the role, it came from advocating for preventative, community based mental health models using stories from the communities I'd worked with. I saw the same need in policymakers as in a 12 year old kid in a remote community, and it happened at a time when having lived experience of mental illness was still seen as disqualifying.
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