The Future of Emotional Resilience

What if resilience isn't about staying calm but it's about how quickly you recover?

In this episode, Nancie McDonnell Dougherty sits down with Nicole Gibson, Founder and CEO of IN TRUTH, to explore the emerging science of emotional regulation and the role technology can play in helping us better understand ourselves. 

By combining biometrics, AI and nervous system data, Nicole and her team are building new ways to measure emotional resilience, offering insights into how we react, recover and perform under pressure. Hear why our emotions shape far more of our decisions than we realize, what leaders can learn from understanding their own nervous systems and how organizations can create environments that support people rather than work against them. Nicole also shares her unconventional path from theater and philosophy to entrepreneurship and her vision for a future where human systems are designed with well-being at their core. 

Learn more about Nicole Gibson and IN TRUTH at ⁠intruth.ai⁠.

Curious how leadership, culture and human behavior influence organizational success? 

At Noetic Consultants, we help leaders align strategy, culture and credibility to create lasting impact. Learn more at ⁠noeticconsultants.com⁠.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Our algorithm and our model basically aggregate those three submetrics and produce an emotion score for you, which you can look to to understand how emotionally resilient and regulated am I today.

SPEAKER_02 0:17

This is the Metamorphosis Moment, a podcast from Noetic Consultants. We are researchers, strategists, trainers, and coaches obsessed with how change actually sticks. On our show, we have candid discussions with leaders who are embracing change, and we work to uncover what they're doing to help others achieve similar success. Just like with our clients, we bring our noetic secret sauce to each conversation. We dig into the messy middle, finding human behavior and leadership factors that are making a difference, and sharing practical guidance that you can use in the moments that matter most. I'm your host, Nancy McDonald Doherty. Let's fly. We track our fitness, we track our productivity, and at least in my case, we obsessively track our sleep. For years, emotional resilience has been treated as something difficult to measure, a deeply personal experience that just lives beneath the surface. But what if we could better understand our emotional state the same way we understand our physical state? Today I'm joined by Nicole Gibson, founder and CEO of InTruth, a company working at the intersection of biometrics, emotion, and AI. Nicole is helping pioneer a new approach to understanding emotional regulation and resilience through data from the nervous system, offering new insights into how we react to stress, recover from challenges, and show up in our lives and our work. In this conversation, we explore the future of emotional resilience, the role of technology in understanding human emotion, and why awareness may be the first step toward lasting change. In our episode today, we're gonna dive deep into a topic that we really all need to pay more attention to. The future of our emotional resilience. Let's jump in. Welcome, Nicole. I'm so excited to have you on Metamorphosis Moment. I so appreciate you taking the time to be with us.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Thanks, Nancy. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 2:31

So we're gonna talk today about what you're building at your company in truth. You are bringing together emotion, biometrics, which we're gonna dissect what that means, and AI. Each of those are exciting in and of themselves, but the combination super fascinating. And I think you really, from what I know, you're very much on a frontier here. You're kind of trailblazing. So I'm gonna start in a pretty basic place because this is a new space, new technology. So can you help me as well as our listeners understand a bit about how it works?

SPEAKER_00 3:07

I think maybe you and most of your listeners would be familiar with a sleep score or a heart revariability score.

SPEAKER_02 3:14

I'm so addicted to my sleep score.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

So imagine that what we're building is the emotional equivalent. So we're taking actually the same data stream that calculates your sleep score called beat to beat interval data, and we're looking at the temporal dynamics in that data to get insights specifically related to emotional regulation. One of the things that we're doing that's very different under the category of emotion AI is we're really looking at the physiological reality of emotion, whereas a lot of people are looking at the microexpression expressions through facial recognition or language analysis. Whereas what we're doing that is very unique based on what we've you know seen our competitors do in the market is really translate the autonomic nervous system and its signal, which everything about our research shows and suggests is the truest form of emotion. And actually, I think challenges our cultural understanding of emotion quite significantly because a lot of people still believe that emotion is a subjective thing, you know, like what is happiness?

SPEAKER_02 4:12

Yeah, people get like really existential about it, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:15

It's not that that that's not a component of emotion, of course it is, it's not to underestimate our subjective meaning making, but actually in its rawest form, when emotion starts to emerge in the body, it happens ten times faster than your cognition. So it's it's emerging every you know 200 milliseconds. Whereas the brain, by the time you can even formulate the sentence, I feel happy or I feel angry, it's been several seconds, right? So it's it's happening a lot faster. So we're picking up on those signals and we're translating it into a score similar to your sleep score. We call it the emotion score uh out of 100, and it looks at three submetrics. So you know how your sleep score has deep sleep, REM, latency, the breakdown that constitutes the score. We look at three submetrics. The first is your capacity, so how much, let's say, reserve you have to deal with emotional dysregulation and triggers, reactivity, so how reactive you are, how quick you are to trigger, and your rebound, how quick you are to return to your baseline once you're in a triggered state. And our algorithm and our model basically aggregate those three submetrics and produce an emotion score for you, which you can look to to understand how emotionally resilient and regulated am I today.

SPEAKER_02 5:26

Got it. So I'm gonna give you an example and then let's like pull it through just to make it really tangible. I'm not super proud of this, but I got very deregulated yesterday. And I really pride myself on being pretty calm and being pretty patient. I do a ton of yoga. I I have been told I have a calm exterior generally, and that doesn't mean what you're feeling inside, right? So I got a new computer and I thought I had dealt with all of the stuff across the weekend. And yesterday morning I didn't realize that somehow my phone was mirroring to my computer, and I'm really strict with myself about no text on my laptop because I find it distracting. And not only was my text like popping to my laptop and I thought I disabled it and I couldn't disable it, but it like my text was going nuts and it's ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, right? And that just set me on a path. And I was so pissed off, and it's really like silly as I sit here and talk about it. But I got really mad and really frustrated because I was having trouble disabling it. So thinking about those submetrics, like just talk a little bit about what maybe I was my body was doing. I mean, I can tell you what I was doing, I was cursing.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

There's the signal happens before the behavior. Well, one thing I will say before we talk through how that would have shown up in our model. People have this misconception that actually our latest research publication disproved, which is when you're feeling kind of frustrated or anxious, the common kind of cultural and therapeutic mantra is well, you just need to calm down. And actually, what our research showed, our react and rebound model applied to anxiety, that people who are more reactive but quicker to rebound actually have a much higher sense of morale.

SPEAKER_02 7:14

Interesting. So like kind of get it out and then move on.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

Exactly. Yeah. So their nervous system is more agile. And you know, I think about even in the context of my life, I'm the CEO of a company, there's stress all the time. Trying to avoid stress would kind of be.

SPEAKER_02 7:28

Yeah, as a business owner myself, I would say futile.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Yeah. But what we can do is be really quick to rebound. And you can actually see that in in some of the ways that we've visualized the metrics. Like, for example, in your instance, probably that morning, your capacity score starting out would have been lower. So we would have been able to see, okay, today is not the day to put yourself in a hyper frustrating situation because you're probably going to have a higher react and a lower rebound. So the capacity kind of is the master metric in that sense, which you can look at your day and be like, okay, how much should I be moving into situations that I know are going to irritate me or annoy me?

SPEAKER_02 8:07

That's so interesting. So that's like your baseline of knowing. Yeah. I mean, kind of like sleep score. If your sleep score is low, it's like, okay, go go carefully today. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Yeah. And then if if your sleep score is low and you want to look deeper into your data, you can see, well, was it low because I didn't get enough sleep, or or did I actually get eight hours but I only had 30 minutes of deep sleep? Physically, you learn to interpret the data, right? If you understand sleep data, you'd know that deep sleep is crucial for physical recovery. So if that was the reason my sleep score was low, that then helps inform how I want to structure my day. Maybe I'm not going to go do like a really heavy workout at gym that day because I don't have the physical reserve based on my sleep. So you can understand our metrics in an equivalent way. So your capacity probably would have been lower for you to be that irritated. Or maybe not, maybe it was just exceptionally irritating. Right, maybe a little bit of your react would have been high in that moment and your rebound probably would have been low. Now, if your rebound had been high and your react had been high, your behavior probably would have looked slightly different in such a way that you could see that was happening, but you were like, I'm not gonna let this bother me. I'm just gonna go take a walk for five minutes.

SPEAKER_02 9:18

Those submetrics are so interesting because I think now that I have the language for it, the thing that I usually do far better than I did yesterday for whatever my you know reasons were within, I didn't rebound fast. Yeah. And usually I do, but I think I also usually like it wasn't like I peaked some anyway. We don't have to contemplate my little temperature. It's really helpful to like have that tangible. And I also thought it was kind of ironic because I knew I was gonna do this with you today. And so I was definitely thinking about you know, deregulation and you know, the role of emotion, and then had just a day yesterday. So, how did you come into this work, Nick? This is so fascinating, and you're running this company and standing all this up. What was your path that led you to developing in truth?

SPEAKER_00 10:06

Yeah, and it's uh that's a whole podcast in itself. I think like every founder that is obsessed with a problem, you can kind of look back in their history and see that there were origins of being connected to that problem, wanting to solve that problem since the beginning. And that that was definitely true for me in the earliest context. I had a pretty unconventional upbringing. I went to heaps of different schools, like eight different schools between the UK and Australia. My dad's a pro-gambler, or was, and my mum's like the most risk-averse person you've ever met.

SPEAKER_02 10:35

So it was like opposites attract, apparently.

unknown 10:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Super opposite. A dad that's very genius and like loves risk, and then a mum who's very cultured and hates risk. And I was the baby of the family, much younger than my brothers, like 12 and 8 years younger. And so I think that in itself, the older I get, the more I realize that was a unique kind of experience of the world where I was always kind of in observation mode, especially being like new almost every year at school. Like I was a new kid every year.

SPEAKER_02 11:09

And I think youngest have an opportunity to observe in the household, you know, more than other birth order.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

100%. And my brothers, I feel like they kind of idolized that, like they really wanted to be like that. And I was quite indifferent, like more artistic, and ironically, probably am the most like my dad. The older I get, the more I realize. But I was like him in the sense that I love risk. Like I have an unusually high tolerance for ambiguity. In fact, without levels of ambiguity and abstraction, I don't I don't enjoy that. That's why I hated school and I've never had a boss. That was actually one of my biggest fears. The idea of like working for someone and being on someone else's clock was deeply like even thinking about it now. Just the the thought of it is is horrible. So I had all that early, all that early context. And then my first love was was actually theatre. And that's thanks to my mum. So growing up in London, we'd go to the West End, and that was the place that I would just feel the most inspired. And I was fascinated by the fact that growing up in British culture, no one wanted to talk about emotion, right? You couldn't express your emotion. But then you go to the theater, and for two hours, people would like just get completely absorbed in this highly vulnerable masterpiece. It was like all of a sudden you'd walk through the doors of that theater and you'd get given permission to feel. And that really moved me to the point that I ended up pursuing theater when I was when I was 14. I left mainstream school to act. And I was trained in a style of theater called Meisner, which is a kind of a method acting, but it's kind of different to other acting at its core in the sense that it teaches you to be 100% yourself under the given imaginary circumstances. It's quite spiritual in its teaching, because it basically suggests that the ego is gonna constrain your ability to see who you really are, which is not your identity. You're cast in a role, you know, like a murderer or a liar, something that you're, you know, identity and most people I'd say you resist the idea of being that.

SPEAKER_02 13:08

Most people are winning.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Yeah. Well, this is the thing, because the truth is in everyone, and it's it's not that very, very, very small percentage of the population will ever enact it, but these parts of us, you know, everything that you can perceive in the world is you. And it's a very big concept to be confronted with as a 14-year-old. So that kind of derailed kind of my sense of identity and made me fall in love with expressions and emotion. But I also have my dad's mind. I'm very analytical. So I kind of laugh now that I'm building a technology on emotion because it's a weird intersection. People that love emotion don't generally end up in technology, and and people that end up in technology generally have a resistance to emotion or sort of the disconnection from it because it's so cerebral.

SPEAKER_02 13:55

I'm just smiling so much because um I have a book called Um How Senior Marketers Scale the Heights, and and you know, marketing is my craft, and and the book is all about how in the marketing, if you want to get to the top, you have to be able to span the range of art and science, which is really all about leveraging the emotional side, the creative side, the ideation, and you have to be able to be analytical and steep in data. And and most people do lean one way or the other, but the best marketers who really rise to the top can avail themselves as both, even if they had a leaning one way or the other. So I love the mashup of the two because I think it's the most powerful. Because the trick of it is when do you pull in the emotional side and when do you pull in the data? Like you have to you have to make a lot of trade-offs with that, but the way you're intersecting them together, I think is just fascinating. And yet the model is not too complex for people to grasp. They don't have to be deep in the data. And because we do have the sleep score, I do feel like it lends itself like people have kind of a baseline. So I want to ask you, because of course, as a marketer, I always have to understand like who's the audience. So for this, who would you say is like your core audience that you think will embrace this the most or even need this the most?

SPEAKER_00 15:12

I would say the the core person we build for, controversial thing I'm about to say, is not necessarily the ICP that we market to. And that's because we build for the end user. Like everything I do, everything we do as a team is to impact the life of the end user that's using in truth. Because that's their data. You know, nothing's more personal than I don't think there's a there's a more personal data set, honestly, that that exists. Like it's the translation system to your nervous system. We've built an fMRI for your emotions. For the first time, you can actually see the inner workings of why you do what you do. I mean, that's the data behind 90% of your decision making.

SPEAKER_02 15:50

That is an astounding statistic.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Yeah, yeah. And we think we're rational, right? Because we haven't had data to really democratize the understanding that actually humans are completely irrational. Like we rationalize our rational decisions. That's that's how we operate. And actually, that's been something that's been frowned upon. And I don't know, maybe because I am an artist, I feel really evangelistic in that sense. That actually that's something that we need to celebrate and embrace. Like our spontaneity built on emotion. Yeah. That our spontaneity and our irrationality is actually the most important and beautifully human part of who we are, especially in this rapidly evolving technological landscape. The one thing I believe that super intelligence and artificial intelligence isn't going to be able to replace is the spontaneity of how a human can act because of our nervous system.

SPEAKER_02 16:43

So then why do you say that your ICP is different than who you build it for?

SPEAKER_00 16:47

Because we're selling directly to a coach for their clients. We're selling directly to a manager for their team as a performance tool. And of course, we want to build for them, like that's important. They're the ones paying for the product, they love it, you know. But when I'm thinking about the coach that's buying in truth or the sports performance expert or whatever, when I think about them looking at the data and working with their athlete or working with their client, I'm thinking about how they, in turn, do a better job at supporting that person.

SPEAKER_02 17:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:18

So it's always the end user.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

As a marketer, I will say that I don't see a dilemma in that as long as what you would build for the so there's the customer and then there's the end user, and and that can often be the situation when one is in any form of, you know, what would traditionally be called like B2B, right? So if I am making commercial cleaning products, I'm going to sell it to the restaurant. It's I think it's only creates conflict if there is conflicting priorities between what would be wanted by one, you know, or the other. So it's really just looking to figure out how you can like harmonize that. So is it for for for managers, for coaches, is it in primarily a business setting, a combination of athletics and business and other, or where where's your your kind of best playground for that?

SPEAKER_00 18:15

Wellness coaches, I'd say are our like most rapid adopters. And it's because they have been looking for this data. So the nature of the sales conversation is like, oh my god, I've wanted this to exist since I started.

unknown 18:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

Like which is fantastic, right? Yeah, like you created the thing that I've been thinking about for 20 years, and that's like that's an amazing feeling, obviously. And even the the high-end, what I would call kind of ultra-luxury wellness, we have some really interesting clients that we've started to work with now, and the use cases there are kind of really insane, like property development that is optimized for wellness and longevity, and looking to integrate our data into the smart system of the home so that everything interesting environmentally supports your emotion regulation, and then building agentic features that would give you an agent that you can give a budget to that manages your wellness schedule and optimizes because we we understand how does a sauna affect you differently to a yoga class, to a hyperbaric chamber. We have the millisecond to millisecond data on what supports you to achieve sympathetic, parasympathetic balance. And so that agent, if given the autonomy, can actually manage that in a really optimal way for you. So say you've flown from LA to New York, and you know, you're on the red eye. The agent can book you at 8 a.m. before your client meetings, hyperbaric, because they know that that gets you to overcome jet lag the fastest. Yeah. So a small example.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

Fascinating. Yeah. What does my nervous system need now? And I'm curious, like each person's different, right? And you can track that. Have you looked at all at generational differences in how people handle their emotional regulation?

SPEAKER_00 19:52

From a place of observation for sure. But you know, looking at it from data, I'd say the differences in in age group, but it's more about the stimulus than the generational difference. What I mean by that is if a boomer had the same screen time as a Z, they would probably be equally as dysregulated. It's not that like that just changed generation to generation. Like we're still mammals, we still have the same nervous system. But the stimulus between the pace of a boomer's life and the the stimulus that they're digesting, I would say is with how even tech's accelerated the last five years, probably sitting at like a 20x slower than a Z, like in terms of what they're inputting every day. Yeah, what that threshold could be. Better for the nervous system, actually. If your stimulus is sitting and and watching a show at the end of uh your night and that's the only kind of screen time you're having, like you're probably gonna be healthier in terms of your nervous system than someone that's digested 12 hours of screen time that day with short form content.

SPEAKER_02 20:51

So when you think about people in business of some sort, I think if someone's in athletics and we think about not having a handle on their emotional score and you know, getting depleted, it's a little bit of an obvious, well, they're not gonna perform as well. But if you think about it in a business setting, it can be a little bit more subtle. What do you think? I guess I'll call it like expensive aspects of, you know, leaders in business not caring for their emotional. I'll I'll call it kind of the rebound part, right? The recovery part.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

Yeah, I mean, enterprise has been really interesting for us. And I say that because I got pretty annoyed with talking to enterprises in the early days where I was like, you guys are definitely gonna adopt this tech, but I just know you're so annoying to deal with that like you can be our late adopters, not our early adopters.

SPEAKER_02 21:39

Tell me what's so annoying. This is the world I live in. So tell me what's so annoying. I want to know.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

Just like, you know, we're a very agile, innovative team. There's 13 of us, but you'd think there's 50 of us. We work very quickly, everyone the team's a gun. There's no bureaucracy. I really adopt Musk's kind of view around bureaucracy. Like as soon as you see signs of bureaucracy, you need To tear it down. And you know, an enterprise is obviously the opposite. They just love creating unnecessary roles.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

Yeah, it's kind of like your mom and your dad.

unknown 22:08

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:09

Yeah. No, so true. And I I think that one can get very anesthetized to it over many years. I remember early in my career when I hadn't been in business very long, I remember thinking, why does it take so long to make a decision? Why do I have to involve so many people?

SPEAKER_00 22:26

Like, I just want to get paid by you as my client. That in itself takes three months of paperwork. You know, I joke. And actually, we do have clients that are progressive in the early adopters, and it's great. But what I was going to say is with Enterprise, we've had to find really specific pain points. We're yet to find a company progressive enough to be like, this is just really amazing data, and we want to understand our people as much as we understand our Salesforce deal pipeline, you know, which there's obvious reasons why that would be a great thing. We use it internally. Like I use our in-truth data as a team, and I can look at team coherence. I can look at how people respond to different management styles. There's so many different insights I can get from the data because I'm committed to using the data. But in enterprise, we've actually found these really interesting niches. And it's been mostly in companies like superannuation companies, which in APAC is like it's like 401k that is compulsory. Out of every paycheck as an employee, you have to pay superannuation. So these funds have you know billions of dollars under management. I'll give a real use case. So five years ago in Australia and New Zealand during COVID, the governments made it legal for you to withdraw your super. Historically, you can't withdraw your super, like you can only access it after retirement. So it's a compulsory retirement fund. And they did that because people were going through financial hardship. And what they noticed when they first did that is the people making claims were taking thousands and thousands of dollars out for something really extreme, like life-saving surgery. Fast forward, the economy is going through such a difficult moment. People are calling and trying to withdraw like $500 to pay rent. Obviously, their claims are not getting approved. Apparently, what's happening for our clients is the people that work in these claims offices are getting met with a lot of aggression, violence, and even sometimes suicide threats. And these are like 20, 21-year-old kids basically in these offices. They have a quarter of calls they have to make a day. And in some of these organizations that we've spoken to, it's this problem they have no idea how to solve. In some cases, these people are turning up physically to their offices to sort of threaten violence. I was talking to my bank manager the other day, not even related to business, just my personal banking. And I noticed that she was wearing an Apple Watch. And I said, Is that a product that the bank has gotten you to wear? And she said, Yeah, it's actually because sometimes we get people coming in and they're aggressive, and that our manager can see if our heart rate accelerates when we're at our desk and it seems a warning sign.

SPEAKER_02 24:49

I I'm thinking as well, healthcare. One of the things that's happened that has amplified in recent years is really needing to care for the safety of the healthcare workers, in particular the ER. You know, but people coming in, they're not well. But now there's just so much work that has to go into trying to keep the workers safe.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Yeah, for sure. Healthcare and frontline workers in general, police, firefighters, EMTs, people that are working in high stress, high-stakes jobs. But what we've found when talking to these clients, it's not enough to just say, hey, here's the data. Invest in understanding the data and make your own decisions. They want us to solve the next part of that.

SPEAKER_02 25:26

That's exactly what I wanted to ask you about. Sometimes my husband and I laugh, like we were always looking at our sleep score. Mine is always better because I'm a better sleeper. Not that it's a competition. But you know, then it's like, well, what are you doing about it?

unknown 25:39

Right?

SPEAKER_02 25:40

What are you doing about it? I do think it does drive me to pay more attention to when I go to bed. And it does drive me to pay more attention to your length of sleep when you start kind of pushing it over the days, and you're like, okay, I really need more hours than this. So I will say, in small ways, I think it adjusts behavior. But when you're really looking at these scores, what about what I would call the applicability, the then what?

SPEAKER_00 26:01

Yeah, I want to like not skip over what you just said. Too often we dismiss awareness as an intervention. Awareness does create change. And even the amount of people that stopped drinking alcohol when they saw the impact it had on their HIV was considerable. So awareness does make change, but that's not to say we're not committed to taking the extra step. And that extra step is contextual. So if we use these enterprise examples, even healthcare workers in hospitals, we've found the biggest thing that these clients find valuable is if we can support with their rostering. So we take the employee data and we synthesize that data and we look at the patterns, how that person regulates and how that is going on to impact their morale at work, their ability to make good decisions, etc. And we can suggest personalized rosters for the employees. It's not even necessarily here's a roster over a month. It could just be this is how the person needs their day structured to make sure that they're staying in a regulated state. When we can deliver the data like that, it's super valuable because they're like, I wouldn't have known how to do that.

SPEAKER_02 27:02

Right. And each person is different. So this whole idea of as a manager, you really want to manage people the way they need to best be managed, but they don't wear it across their forehead, so you don't know how to do it.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

And actually, more remote teams, so it's becoming even harder. The conflict in one of the clients that I'm thinking of is their case managers were getting constantly judged against the amount of calls they were making, but they were like in distress. So it's healed that tension for them because now they can see, okay, this person wasn't being lazy. This person was actually really struggling, and it was the right thing for them to take an hour to not make any calls and kind of reset.

SPEAKER_02 27:35

Have you looked at the remote from live? I often have thought that because we so suddenly went into remote and video, what kept coming to mind for me is everybody's emotion feels muted, diminished, I guess is the better word to say. You just can't tell as well because I can't read the energy of a person as well. I can, but it's it's diminished.

SPEAKER_00 27:57

Have you looked at that? We don't have data from pre-COVID because it was a new tech. That would have been really interesting. We will be able to compare data sets, no doubt. It's not something we've specifically done where we look at teams using in tech that are working remotely. Maybe as our client base scorers, we could do it based on industry. So here's law firms that work remotely versus in person, so that we have some kind of control parameters around the data to make it more interesting. So I think that will come. My personal perspective, I agree with you in many ways. Even the basic things of I've had to hire and fire people over Zoom, and you go through that really horrible experience, and then you just command cue and see you later. So I think in general, I get worried, and I think the same thing about the younger generation, alphas in particular, and Z, digital natives, my generation, millennials are the last generation to remember a time before social media. I get worried, especially seeing how AI is going to evolve, that there's not going to be the opportunity for them to even develop the faculties of risk taking, emotion regulation. If you think about a 13-year-old asking someone out on a date for the first time in person, like really fundamentally important skills that teach you about life, teach you about who you are, develop your brain, develop your nervous system, but kind of robbing the younger generation of that development. And it's more problematic than a millennial falling into the trap of only using an iPhone for comms or an LLM for writing. I'm a writer, so I notice that if I use an LLM too much, my ability to write is actually diminished. It's better for me to be experiencing that because I remember a time where it wasn't that. So it's kind of like muscle memory. My brain volume had a chance to grow. And we're actually seeing that overuse of AI is creating the brain volume to shrink. The problem is if that happens in younger generation, during developmental phases, their brain just didn't develop. We need a solution for that, in my opinion, very, very quickly.

SPEAKER_02 29:54

So taking this to a detailed space, you said early on, it's about having that emotion happen and then recovering quickly. That kind of puts you in, let's call it like, you know, the healthiest spot. When you are a leader, you know, and you're managing people, there can be ramifications to fully expressing that emotion, even if you recover quickly. So when you're thinking about individuals, you talked a little bit about that, but what about for the manager who maybe gets really upset about something? Are they best off fully expressing it and then making their apologies? Or like what's what's the healthiest thing to do for them and the people, right?

SPEAKER_00 30:32

Yeah, I mean, my sense is imagining someone just kind of losing it and becoming like tile.

SPEAKER_02 30:37

And maybe saying something that isn't going to be productive.

SPEAKER_00 30:40

For sure. I would say from our lens, as in truth, this person does need to take responsibility for their rebound and they they need like conscious practices. Because when you have that fast rebound, if I get pissed off at something my team member has done and I have a quick rebound, it's awareness. It's like a mindfulness practice. I can catch myself, the emotion is there, but then I can bring myself back down. And then when I express it, it's still direct. I was really unhappy with the the result you delivered in this report. I'd like to talk to you about that, and these are the things I want to talk to you about, versus why the fuck did you do that?

SPEAKER_02 31:17

Less productive. And could that even include saying, I need a minute, right? And let me call you back, or for sure, I'm gonna step out to the restroom kind of thing to take your minute. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:30

I had one of our partners when he read our latest publication, and I've been sharing it like every chance because I think it's so accurate. He is actually a philosopher. And he said, When I read your paper, it really reminded me of the Taoist philosophy of Yin and Yang. The react and rebound model is basically the sympathetic, parasympathetic nervous system finding harmony, and it made me kind of aware of the fact that the tech that you guys are building is like a technological or scientific translation of this ancient wisdom of the perfect harmony between that duality. And I was like, wow, you know, as I'm really interested in philosophy myself.

SPEAKER_02 32:05

I was like, yeah, that's what I intended all along.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

In some creative way, it kind of is actually.

SPEAKER_02 32:11

But it is, as you said earlier. I mean, you wouldn't have necessarily said that you went back to ancient times and you know took yin, yeah, yeah, and resurrected in so many words. But it's exactly what you were saying about the emotion side, the analytical side, and the power of pulling those together in the name of understanding that we are 90% driven by emotion. So use data to understand it. I know being a CEO is very challenging. We could do a whole other podcast on that. But are you finding it challenging in what you're building? Like, is it seen as controversial? Do you get pushback on it? You definitely have a set of your audience that's saying, Where have you been all my life? I need this. But there is sort of this aspect of tracking people. So I'm just curious how that's coming up or if it is.

SPEAKER_00 32:55

Yeah, for sure. We've had like media coverage that has sort of slammed us because it's a surveillance tool.

SPEAKER_02 33:01

I saw some of that. That's why I'm asking.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

I always like I invite it. It's good that that we have some people that scrutinize new technologies. From my stance, we didn't kind of get to touch on my professional history, but anyone that looks deep enough, I think it's not hard to see how much integrity I have as a CEO in building what I'm building and why I'm building it, both in policy and in the nonprofit space before I built this company, which in itself was a really interesting additional lenses. Like I had this philosophical artistic lens, and then a grassroots change through my nonprofit, really understanding the problem in reality on the ground, not just in a theater room, and then through policy, where you see the way high-level decision making is influencing this core problem of us not feeling emotionally balanced and emotionally well. And I came to a point where I loved my career. After I left my third term as a commissioner in Australia, which is an advisory position to the Prime Minister, I left that at 25 and I wrote a book, a philosophy book. And the three years after that, my life was just the best. I had traveled the world, I got to meet amazing people, I really got to connect to like rites of passage and initiations across borders, deep ancient philosophy. Nothing in me from a fulfillment point of view where I was like, I need to build this technology to be like rich and powerful and whatever. Like I'm gonna go back to what I was doing after I built this company. Like that I feel like was truest to what I want to spend my time doing. But I got to this point where I understood the problem so deeply, and I could see the only way to really solve this problem was to build an architecture or an infrastructure that could use data to inform our systems. Because way too many people on the social change side were obsessed with saying things like, uh, we need to transform the system and we need human-centered systems and we need better outcomes, but no one knew how to measure any of it, right? And I could see that that was never going to get cut through because I was in those conversations and I was a part of that decision making. And as someone that deeply wanted to invest in community and preventative health, you can see why that doesn't happen. And that's aside from kind of the level of systemic corruption that exists in healthcare, and that's a whole other podcast in itself. But long story short, I got to a place where I recognized that if we really wanted to make meaningful change here, it had to be something like an advanced technology that could solve the problem of hyper-personal data, but at scale. And I resisted doing it. I was like, I don't, I know I knew what was ahead. Like I knew how hard the journey was gonna be.

SPEAKER_02 35:30

Yeah, because you're building from scratch, right? Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

And I went from just having the most amazing life, living between the Mediterranean and Australia and beautiful locations, like living in downtown LA and moving to San Francisco and the Somer district. Like for anyone that understands, like it's not paradise. And I'm so grateful, like I'm I'm so grateful for those experiences and who I am as a person six years into building this company. I'm someone that I never could have become unless I made that change in terms of my understanding of self and just the solidification of my values and my understanding of the world. So grateful for what this journey has made me. But all it's done is just crystallize how much it's not about those things for me. It's really about the impact. And I've seen firsthand, I've managed building this company more money than I've ever managed. And I've been the most financially stressed I've ever been. Money, having access to capital does not make you feel rich.

SPEAKER_02 36:27

No. There's such a responsibility to it, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

Yeah, and the more you have, the more you have to manage, and the more responsibility. I I really believe the Buddhist philosophy in that way that the happiest you can be is when you have enough to meet the means of the life that you want to live. And no more, it's to really have that balance and that harmony. And I feel grateful to not just say that as a platitude, but to actually really know that. And also, I grew up in an environment where I would see large amounts of money come and go. I remember a mentor asked me when I was 18, draw your relationship with money, and I drew a wave. So I've always had that kind of relationship with it. And actually, the more I've studied the psychology of money and things, I didn't I didn't mean for it to be, but it is kind of like a billion-dollar mindset. Learners have this way of not really being attached, and it means that money can come to you more easily because you're not resisting it, it doesn't affect your nervous system as much. So that's all cool, but at the core, for me, this is about building a technology for the new earth. I think that we're gonna see whole societal collapse in our lifetime. But with that, you know, I don't see it as dystopian. I see it as an opportunity to rebuild. And I think we need technologies like this that can help us build systems through completely different lens.

SPEAKER_02 37:41

Yeah. Can you paint a picture? I mean, it's such a massive question to ask you, but tell me what you see when this technology has taken root in a way that it's making the impact that you see. What does that look like in a day-to-day way?

SPEAKER_00 37:56

In a day-to-day way, it's the merging of the inner and outer world. And I think part of the conflicts and the difficulties that we have with modern Western civilization is that the outside world expects something very different to what you feel on the inside. People constantly live in that tension.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:15

When we have technologies, even think about the use case that's starting to emerge for us around environmental integration to actually build environments that are in harmony with our bodies. This is the opposite of working in corporate America the last 50 years, where you're under fluorescent lights, in a cubicle, never outside, never see the sun. This is so bad in so many ways. Blue light toxicity, no fresh air, bad circadian rhythm, alcohol every you know, lunch and dinner. That is not human flourishing. And yet that's been idolized as success, which is crazy. So I think technologies, like in truth, are going to be a bridge between the inner and outer world, which, if you think about every spiritual scripture, has said a version of the kingdom of heaven is within. It's when we learn who we truly are that the external world can reflect a more utopic version of reality.

SPEAKER_02 39:07

And we can feel safe that we can be that on the outside.

SPEAKER_00 39:12

And it will force our systems to design around it rather than constantly deny it.

SPEAKER_02 39:17

And that's and that's the key, right? As opposed to systems that are fighting it, not helping it at best or making it worse, which which certain of our systems do. So it brings me to our last question. I could talk to you for days on this topic. I think it's nothing short of fascinating, and I so appreciate the work that you're doing. You know, in the metamorphosis moment, we love to talk to people about shedding moments, things that you may have believed at one point in your life that were limiting you. What comes to mind in that is there's some sort of limiting belief that maybe you had early on that you no longer have and you think makes you stronger in in what you're trying to do and the change you're trying to make.

SPEAKER_00 39:56

I think in the context of building in truth, there was a long period of my journey within truth where I thought I had to operate like a tech founder and behave like a tech founder. And some point, I would say like relatively recently, I reflected on who are the actual serious backers of the company? How did they connect with me? Oh, they read my book, they came to my retreat, they were families that were beneficiaries of the work that was actually meaningful to me. They weren't the VC that put me through six months of fuckery just to not invest. When I really saw it all, I was like, your strength is being who you are. Don't, don't try to fit the mold of a you know tech bro. Maybe I think when the company is, you know, big enough, we will have those those investors probably knocking on our door and we have some VC backing, but our serious backers, the ones that I know will not let the company fail, they're the ones that I call when I haven't been able to make payroll to be like, hey, I need help. Like the ones that are really there for us. I have a totally different relationship that's outside the parameters of what is normal for a tech.

SPEAKER_02 41:00

And they know you and the person you are, right? So so be you.

SPEAKER_00 41:04

Yeah, exactly. So that the limiting belief was actually not my limiting belief. It was putting myself in too many environments where other people's disbelief was rubbing off on me rather than my world, which is very different to the tech world, my people, they believe me and they want they believe in me and they want to back me because I've decided to take on this audacious path that's quite different to where we've all come from. And that's actually a strength.

SPEAKER_02 41:30

May I ask you a a a personal question before we wrap? In your emotional health, what are one or two things that are very pivotal for you in being able to rebound and recover?

SPEAKER_00 41:42

I have a lot of practices, so depending on how practical you you want to be. The simplest things are find the kind of two or three things that work. And by work, I mean put you in a parasympathetic state. Yeah. Because we have a lot of sympathetic activation. For me, um, it's pretty basic, making sure that I get enough sunlight every day, exposure therapy, and rigorous training for five minutes to an hour a day, so that I'm just in my body. I spend a lot of time in my head. If I do those things, I sleep well, I naturally eat well, drink good quality water, everything else kind of grows from that. If you're balanced, you don't tend to have bad relationships. Everything kind of flows, and I think we overlook the simple things. And coming from the mental health world, the personal development world, I think a lot of people are seeking some kind of miracle, and all they need to do is just fix the basic habits in their life that that make a good day a good day.

SPEAKER_02 42:35

Yeah, I same. Yeah, same for me. And you know, just just getting getting sunlight, ideally, ideally daylight outside. Just get outside and move my body and drink water. The days when I get super busy and I don't drink water the next day, I just feel terrible. And I'm like, you know this already. Just do it, right? Well, Nick, I I so appreciate you spending the time. I think this area of the work that you're leading is beyond impactful. I'm super excited to see where you go and and where it goes. I I hope that we've given our listeners so much to think about and look forward to and and also steep in right now. There are things that we can all be doing right now to regulate ourselves. And I do think that this has applications even amongst the slow-moving enterprise businesses, but really for every individual on the planet. Truly. So thank you for the wonderful work you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 43:31

Thanks, Lancy.

SPEAKER_02 43:33

Thanks for listening to the Metamorphosis Moment, a podcast from Noetic Consultants. If this episode made you think about what's next for your team or about a challenge you're currently facing, we'd love to hear from you. We often help leaders think through complex issues to realize the change they seek. Until next time, trust the transformation and make a mistake.