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Larry Weiss and Vicki Levine from Symbiome Interview · Skin Anarchy

• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: I have the co-founders today today, Dr.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: Larry Weiss and Vicky Levine.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so excited that they had the time to come onto our show.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: So welcome, Larry and Vicky.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so excited that you're here.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_03: Great to be here.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for inviting us.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: I actually want you both to tell me how Symbium was born and kind of go into your own backgrounds to begin with and tell us a little bit about yourselves.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, age before beauty, so I will start.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: This goes back a ways.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: I actually started my career as a natural products chemist at Cornell and then came out to Stanford and went to medical school and practiced for a while, but left the practice of medicine in the 90s when I became much more interested in restoring health than treating disease, and uh really started exploring that notion.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Then right around 2000, and the information around the microbiome started to become available.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: The whole world of microbiology really started to redefine itself.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: My practice was around the intersection between technology and healthcare and wellness, and uh started a company uh with uh IDEO, the design firm called Clean Well.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a product that was looking at a way to redefine people's relationship with the microbial world, take it from one where we were at war with the microbial world and we had to bring dangerous, engaging chemical warfare, and we became the collateral damage, to something where we looked to how does nature solve this problem and turn that into a product and start a conversation around moving us from a germ theory of disease where all these bacteria have to kill us, to a much larger, more inclusive germ theory of health.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, right around uh 214, I became the founding uh chief medical officer at a company called Aobiome and launched the first live probiotic skincare, which was Mother Dirt.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then from then in 217 had the opportunity to really start building something that has been a vision of mine for years, which is how do we make health a primary design parameter?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: And how do we redefine health and look back to an evolutionary definition of that and bring that forward and make products that not just start um uh people thinking about um what is health and how do I achieve it, but that actually do achieve that.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then shortly into the journey, I was introduced by one of our investors to Vicky, and here you go.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: Vicki, I'd love for you to continue and tell us about your background.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: That was that was quite a lot of uh stuff though, Larry.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's very impressive, I just want to say.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_03: Larry seems to have like a more related background.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_03: I'll give you very short background.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I actually started my career as a mechanical engineer, used to work on mobile phones back at Motorola, spent several years there, worked in advanced technology, and um worked on color strategy and design strategy.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um, went to business school, became an investment banker uh for several years, and then met the guys that started Groupon.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_03: And I went to join them, and I was the first hire at their venture fund called Light Bank, and I was a VC for four years, did early stage investing in consumer products, and then um decided I really was tired of sitting on the sidelines and wanted to run a company.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_03: And so I um did a turnaround.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_03: So a company that had been around for a really long time was a hair care company.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um, we made uh salon hair tools as well as sold a bunch of hair products, um, ran that for a couple of years to sell it.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_03: And then um as our investor, who's also a friend of mine, introduced me and Larry and said you guys would be great together.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I had always wanted to build a consumer brand from scratch and and was very much interested, having come from the beauty world, but being in hair care, was really interested in uh products that actually worked and that there was, you know, being a scientist, but on the hard science, um I really wanted to have something that would be part of something that was science back.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_03: So Larry and I came together and we had been working for several years and we knew really what we wanted to produce, but um worked for several years and finally um launched this past fall.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, that's really, really I I love that.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I love that you guys have such different backgrounds um in so many ways.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's really I think ideal.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: People like me need someone like her around to get these things done.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: No, Larry, I have so many questions for you because actually my father has been in um microbiome research.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: He's also a microbiologist and a toxicologist, and um and he al I remember growing up and hearing about the microbiome and how it was becoming this big, you know, um this phenomenon that everybody wanted to kind of get into.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: So can you give us a little bit more science of um what really got you, you know, into this idea and just tell us more of the nitty-gritty science stuff?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: So um it's it's actually a really interesting progression idea.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was in medical school, we had just sort of gotten, we there was this notion that we conquered infectious disease.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: This was in the 70s.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then things came along and gave us a little bit more religion that it was more complicated.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: But right around in the mid-80s, we started this human microbiome project, you know, we had developed the ability to sequence DNA.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: We decided to study our favorite subject, and that was us.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: And what we discovered when we start were studying us is we were actually we're animals living in an almost entirely microbial and ancient world, and it subtly redefined everything.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: And everywhere we looked, we were interacting with these incredibly complex microbial communities.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: We have about 25,000 genes.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Our microbiome has at least 300 times that.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and they contribute all sorts of things to us, and this has been part of the what we have learned.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: But essentially, everywhere we looked, we found that things were much more complicated.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the big lesson from the microbiome is that all life on Earth is connected, almost all those connections are microbial, and we know almost nothing about them, and we're just beginning to start learning about it.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, this was um oh this was, you know, the what I just described took me about 20 years to get to.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's like the life of research.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: I feel you.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And um what we have discovered here is that compared to what the wild type, the you know, biologically optimized human looked like, we've lost 80% of the microbial diversity.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's the taxonomic diversity, that's all these species and strains of bacteria that you that we carried with us for 98% of the time that humans were on the planet.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: And over the past, let's call it 10,000, 15,000 years, we've lost 80% of it.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: And more important than that, we've lost their metabolic contribution.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not so much the missing microbes, it's what they were doing for us.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so we have spent the past couple of years doing an incredibly deep level, deep dive into the research of what that looks like and figuring out what are those metabolites.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: We can't go back in time, we can't get those bacteria back, even if we tried to put them on our microbiome, they won't stay.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: We are defined, our microbiome is literally the biologic history of our youth, and then we are defined by that, and we are defined by the world in which we live.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: But we didn't live this way for most of the time on planets.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: On the planet, we were hunter-gatherers, we lived, you know, deeply connected to the ecosystem in which we live.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: Now we live in boxes, we're connected by screens.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: And our microbiome is very different.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: So, what we have done with this brand is identified what they were doing for us.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: What was their metabolic contribution?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, haven't you always wondered why there were essential amino acids and essential fatty acids?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: Essential vitamins, and if it was essential, why don't we make them?
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason we don't make them is we never had to.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: They were there, they were always there.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: And what's happened is we've literally washed away a substantial amount of that metabolic capacity.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And since we can't get them back, what we're doing is we're identifying what they did for us, and we're building skin colour that does that for us.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's a very short, foreshortened version.
• 9:19
  unknown: Yeah.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: You can ask more questions.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: No, I no, it's very interesting because um, you know, I I know that when I was first introduced to the concept of the microbiome, it's exactly how you described it, but more so also um the idea that it's a fingerprint.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's each one of our, you know, it's it's like an individual fingerprint, and there's this, there's a homeostasis that that exists.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: And you're right, in the sense that, you know, um the more chemicals and the more things we're exposed to that are stripping our skin, obviously I can see how that has definitely changed over time and has um, you know, it's impacted our overall, you know, just how it works, how the microbiome works for our skin.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't work as well as it used to, I think, is like the and I think that's what we're like identifying here is that it doesn't work as well.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_03: And there's not very much that we can do to kind of reach back in time and re-engraft what used to be on our skin.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_03: So what we need to do is make products that kind of mimic or naturally kind of restore what once was there.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: No, that makes sense.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: Now, can we talk about um some of the um the organisms that are normally found on the skin?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: I know there's uh propanobacterium.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: I can talk about the the medical side, but I really want to go into that.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, what the baseline that you guys worked with when you wanted to create um this in a lab and really, you know, just I want to talk about that.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: So let's start.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Your skin microbiome at the point of birth, you know, assuming you have vaginal, you go through a birth canal and you pick up a lot of lactobacilli, that's sort of the pioneer species.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: And those are they make all sorts of bacteriophins and antimicrobial pests, they're the peacekeepers.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then your microbiome starts getting populated in waves, mostly from your mother or your parents in that environment.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: And by the time you reach adolescence, the number of species and strains that are in your microbiome is fixed.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: It is next to impossible.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: So and and by the way, this is the current state of the idea as it's still early.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: If new evidence comes along, we are, you know, we we design things, we are using rational evidence-based design based on the sciences as today.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: But as of today, and people have been working at this very difficult for a long period of time, what we've discovered is you can't add something new to it very easily.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: If you have another strain of an existing species, like there's some work being done looking at propionabacteria, which is now a cutabacteria, acne, which is one of the most common bacteria we had.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's the bacteria that dominates on oily sebaceous skin because its food is oil.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: So if you want to look at who's going to predominate on a given environment, see what see what's being served for dinner.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_04: Right, right.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: And um and so, and when skin gets dry, you know, there's a general notion that um more diverse microbiome translates to healthier skin.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that is mostly true, but not always true, like everything in biology.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: If you have really dry skin and there's less oil, the propionic bacteria go down, but the diversity goes up.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay and zeroderma in particular has very high diversity.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: So all these things are approximations of a new science.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Now, once that population is fixed or engrafted, you can you can do whatever you like.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: You can use alcohol, you can use benzoyl peroxide, and a little while it's going to grow back.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's so removing or putting something else new, but what you can do is you can alter the general abundance or composition.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: And almost everything that we do has the potential.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: For example, if you have a prebiotic that selectively feeds one or several species, you can expect to see those species to end up with more real estate, more abundance.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_04: Right, right.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: If you have a selective antibiotic which will selectively reduce some, you can see those go down.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: But that's about all that we can do today.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: What we have learned is on top of our epidermal microbiome, the one we've just talked about, is something that none of us, from an evolutionary standpoint, we all had it.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: But none of us have it anymore.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: There was another layer on top of that, and that had much more diversity, and that layer was dynamic and interacted with the environment.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it made all sorts of important biomolecules that are absorbed transdermally, all of the fat-soluble vitamins, the ubiquinones, phytospherols, fatty acids.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's a huge metabolic factory.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you've heard people say skin is your largest organ.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and and when when I was in training, maybe when you were as well, they told us it was about 1.7 meters square, and that would be true if it was flat.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: And if you take the follicular area in there, it's about 25 to 30 meters squared, and it gets 15 to 50 percent of your cardiac output at any given time.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we have this huge transdermal area colonized with a massive uh amount of genetic and metabolic machinery, making all sorts of essential fatty acids and uh and fat and fat-soluble vitamins and all sorts of other things that either act locally or absorb systemically, but none of us have that anymore because we washed it away.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: So what we've done here is try to identify the function of that missing piece and replace that function.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's really amazing.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: And now, and so now in terms of like using products, so right now, you know, looking at it from like the market side of the skincare industry, there seems to be a lot of oversaturation with uh a lot of especially um probiotic stuff.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: I know there was a huge trend that popped up, you know, and it was like everyone was selling ingestibles and they were selling, you know, topical skincare, but it's like, you know, no one has ever gone into the science like you have just now, you know.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to talk about that in terms of um, is there a difference between like, you know, for example, taking a prebiotic versus um what we're doing here, which is a topical um, you know, uh approach in terms of restoring what we have lost at this point.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um well, it's still very early.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: So let me start with this.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this is a brand new science, it's transformative.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: I believe we are in the midst of a scientific revolution of significant importance.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: And our foundational methods by which we seek you know, sample, extract the DNA, and then sequence it, and then interpret that have so much bias built into them that the metaphor I use for this frequently is you may remember when cell phones first had a camera, you could tell they were people, but you couldn't tell who they were.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now, our methods are going to continue to get better, but basically it's very directional, it's semi-quantitative or non-quantitative at all.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: And we are still working with you know very fuzzy information.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Most of the products that are out there um in the microbiome are um well, let's just say they might have a hypothesis and maybe they don't, and they've got a lot of enthusiasm and they probably have capital.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: But many of the claims they're making, those of us who are doing the work in the microbiome wish that someday we actually knew that information, but we're not there yet.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: And and the concern that I have is that um we are stewards of an important science, and we need to behave and it's and it's a phenomenal opportunity.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: I have to tell you to be able to work in this field at this time, we are luckier than we all deserve to be.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: It is amazing what we're learning and what the promise of what we're gonna learn going forward.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: But if we keep making claims that are not evidence-based and are unsupported, what'll happen is we all burn our credibility.
• 17:11
  unknown: Yes.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: And someday we're gonna know this stuff, and hopefully then people will believe us.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: So look, I applaud the interest in it.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I what I would hope is that um we develop some critical thinking around how we look at these claims and what these what what it means, and uh so that when we get there, you know, we still have a constituency to talk to.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: I completely agree.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's a a wonderful, wonderful point.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I often worry worry about that in medical research overall is you know, just there's we you know one line and then people want to make a paragraph out of it, you know.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: You can't you can't assume from that.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_02: So, but you know, I want to talk a little bit about the um balance between um the you know the industry of skincare and then really introducing these science-heavy products.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: So um, Vicki, I would love for you to comment on when you were really um considering, you know, taking on this project and building this brand.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, what did you have in mind in terms of appealing to the daily consumer, but then obviously delivering this amazing scientific message that's really backing the product?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we we spent a really long time because the science is really complex, you do have to kind of distill it down, and we are constantly reworking how to kind of tell the scientific side of it, right?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: And so Larry and his team, and we have a team, you know, we have Larry, we have a chief medical officer, and we have three PhD microbiologists that are all behind the scenes, which is a little bit, which is rare for a consumer products skincare company that we have a really deep RD arm and we do all the formulations in-house.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a whole side of the business and we run all of our own clinical trials.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_03: So we have this really extensive team here doing science and doing research.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: And so it was an interesting, you know, it's interesting to try to kind of tell that story and tease it out because it's it's it's a lot to take on.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_03: But Larry and I knew that when we were when we were finally getting to the point where we're like, how do we put this in a product product?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_03: It was, you know, this is gonna be a clean product.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_03: And we're like, of course it's gonna be clean because we're gonna have so few ingredients.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_03: And so um we knew the trend, you know, we have science backed and then you have clean beauty, and there's no reason why they can't merge, but um, so it's very much around, and where we kind of like where we kind of have coined the minimal is the new clean, clean beauty tends to just look at a bunch, have a dirty list and like say, you can't use any of this stuff.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: We actually select from the ground up, and so we do we've we've committed to never having a product that has more than 10 ingredients.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_03: Right now, the most number of ingredients that we have is seven, and so we knew that was really important.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_03: And then we we were looking, as we were looking at, you know, the foot, you know, what what would become the products, we knew um, based on our research, that it had to be really intertwined with um the environment and really how we live we once lived among nature, and so um the idea that we were going to own we were gonna use fermented oils because as Larry says, everything ferments in our forest in the jungle, right?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_03: And so we know that that is kind of the natural breakdown, that's how you unlock nutrients.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_03: So that was gonna be, and by the way, those are like essentially postbiotic products because it is the it is bacteria, microbes, yeast that all start breaking down these products into more bioavailable nutrients.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_03: So we kind of fuse that together, knowing that anything that we that of these fermented oils would be safe to the microbiome, but it would also really you know highlight our commitment to clean and then as well to minimal.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_03: So we have like a bunch of different stories.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_03: So we kind of like brilliant though.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_03: That's truly brilliant.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, there's a lot to tell.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, it's really, but the fact that um that we have real science to kind of rely on, and that we're doing all of this in-house.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_03: And we, you know, Larry and his team will publish scientific papers um that we've gone and analyzed the microbiome at such levels that have never been done before, it makes it quite unique for you know, for us as a skincare company and as a consumer brand.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: I love seeing that.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: I want I really want to congratulate you guys on doing it right.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think research should always be from the get-go, you know what I mean?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: Like always there.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I that's one of my biggest issues with the skincare industry is that you know, we almost have to convince people at this point.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like, no, you want skincare with clinical trials behind it.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: You should be looking for that, you know.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: So I I really love that you guys have that at your core.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: I want to point out because being a bit mild.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: I ran the first virtual clinical trial when I was uh with uh Mother Dirt.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: And this was a phase 2B trial for the FDA that we ran over an iPhone.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: Vicky has taken this another level.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: We have built our own in-house trial platform.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: So all these products have got uh go through trials.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now we're not doing this to get drugs approved, we're not doing we're doing this to really optimize the outcomes.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: So when we build one of these products, think of it this way: we've got these these botanical materials that have a long history of in use by uh of human use uh by indigenous populations, but they were connected microbially.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: So all of these are fermented, so we're connecting the human, the botanical, and the microbial world.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then we take these things out and we put them into form products.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: So we have a cream that has three ingredients, and one of them is water, the other is a fermented oil, and the other is a ferment.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't design this, nature designed this, I translated this.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_03: Oh sorry, don't be modest.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_03: There's no other there's no other that have three ingredients.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, there's no way.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then we put them into trials with the same degree of rigor as though we were developing a therapeutic.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: We're trying to make sure that we get the best possible outcome.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: So before any of these are launched, they have they've already gone through our own internal trial mechanism.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: And this is something that Vicky has built.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: I love that the there's such few ingredients.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I'm really curious about the formulation aspect then, because um I know a lot of people talk about preservatives and they love talking about the stability of a formulation and all these, you know, these big marketing words, I feel like, because no one really truly, I think, understands um, you know, what the chemistry behind it.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: So when you were considering that for uh for the shelf life and all these little, you know, these things, um what were the pillars and the and the and the blueprints for that?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_02: How did you guys um go about that?
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um I can answer it relatively simply.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: We we we think like a bacteria.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and so all of these problems were solved biologically long time before we got here.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: And we just sort of, you know, and and most often, you know, companies solve this chemically.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: We said, you know, how is it that nature, how is it that biology solves these problems?
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so these ferments become self-stabilizing and self-preser uh preserving on their own.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: They make all kinds of bacteriosins and antimicrobial peptides, and they will become self-protecting.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: And what we figured out is a way that we can actually get these things to essentially we you know, we call it biointact formulation.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: And we essentially allow it to do what it would do on its own in a controlled fashion.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: So we get the full complement of biomolecules that are that that were there, if they if if we actually still had it, but in a form that is stabilized naturally and biologically.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I won't say it's simple, it took a long time to figure this out.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, I'm sure it did.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: And and and there were many, and there were many uh glorious failures along the way.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_03: Well, actually, some of our our biggest failures may become some of our most innovative ingredients uh going forward.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you'll have to wait and see, but we'll probably have more on that later this year.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm gonna invite you guys back on to tell us more about that.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: So I, you know, I actually want to talk about um, you know, in terms of the skincare, I feel like the consumer side of things everyone loves focusing on, for example, the you know, Fitzpatrick scale, or what kind of skin type do I have, and all these like, you know, all these words.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I think that, you know, I personally am a believer that that skin is like, you know, I don't think about different types of liver, right?
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: Unless it's a pathology when I'm looking at a person.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: So um, in terms of the actual structure of the line, how um how would a consumer go about purchasing what is, you know, what they think they need from your products?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is a question for Vicky, yeah.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um but yeah, but but before you do that, I just want to insert something to follow up on something you said, which is you know, you'll hear stuff around personalization.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: And in medicine, we do personalization, we call it getting a diagnosis because we're treating a disease.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: We're restoring health.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: And health, like humanity, is something we all have in common.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: The things that I'm missing, you're missing, we're all missing.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: That was part of our evolutionary legacy of health.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: So our notion here is not to fix broken stuff, but to restore the resilience so there's less broken stuff to fix.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Vicki's gonna explain how the consumer works the way through.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_03: I was gonna say nature doesn't care about your skin type, really, right?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yeah.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, and and this is something we're we're a very data-driven company.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_03: And so, kind of starting at the research, looking at our clinical trials, and then, you know, why do we have four flavors of oils and and what skin types are they for?
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_03: And so we started out, um, we use such few so few ingredients because of these oils being fermented, and so they deliver this immense number of benefits, right?
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_03: And what we like to say is like these fermented oils do the work of like, you know, could be like five to ten lab ingredients, right?
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_03: And the way we've structured it is that you know, they kind of we started with the reset cleanser, which is like something Larry had, you know, been working on for several years and it's super clarifying.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_03: And um, the only reason we have a second cleanser is I I said, Larry, like we absolutely need a gel cleanser.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: And um, you know, but I said it has to be less than 10 ingredients and all this kind of stuff.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_03: It said, you know, this is kind of where it's going.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, it doesn't need to be as clarifying.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_03: And so we ended up with a a second type of cleanser.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it for consumers, it really depends on what you like, right?
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so if you want to use a cream, we have a form factor that's a cream.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_03: If you um, you know, happen to like face oils or new to face oils, we have four, we have four flavors of oils or of our post biomic oils because we actually formulated them and put them through trials and realized that some of the benefits just spoke to some of the objectives that people have, right?
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_03: So rebalance oil, which is made from barici oil and green coffee oil, is really an all-around oil, right?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_03: So we found that.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_03: And then we formulated recharge oil and it was incredibly hydrating.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_03: It uses piki, which is a flowering tree from the Amazon and the surrounding area, and passion fruit and barrich as well.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_03: And it was ultra hydrating, but it also, because we run deep chemical analysis on all of our oils, we can see like we don't add, like if you look at it, you're like, there's so few ingredients, but like we don't need to add cofferols and uh you know different like oleic acid.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_03: These things are contained in the oils, right?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_03: And so we've created we've created these oils for just different objectives, right?
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_03: They actually will work on all skin types.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it really depends, like the the scent profile is different for some of them, but they also so rewind oil.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_03: We use um an oil called it's from a kumaroo, and it happens to have a lot of brightening properties.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_03: So that's like if you are looking to lighten pigmentation, that's a great oil for you as well.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_03: And and so are the fourth oils respond oil, which um is it's personally my favorite, um, but it's an incredibly great for sensitive skin.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_03: It works for acne-prone skin.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_03: So it's really your choice.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_03: Like if you and if you happen to be a person that loves to use an oil or use a cream and then um use an oil on top, you can do that.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_03: But the idea is that we've set these out so they kind of meet what what the consumer perceives is his or her their um skin needs, but we're not saying you need all of them.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_04: Right, right.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_03: And so um we're not trying to like say you need six, you know, six to twelve steps.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_03: You kind of pick what what's best for you, what form factor works best for you.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_03: And um we're just there really to support that.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: And either way, you guys are providing the ability to restore that microbiome that was the one that's not there in all your products, right?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_03: Well, let's talk about that.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, given the name of your pod your podcast.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_03: So um, as Larry mentioned, um, given where we live and the fact that we are no longer within our native ancestral environment, which could be in the jungle, living as nature, in nature, as hunter-gatherers, we actually cannot restore the microbiome back to its ancestral glory, shall we say?
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_03: Like we can't do it because we live in a world where, number one, we're not in constant contact with water and soil and plants, and we we we we tend to wash and we tend to live with the pollution.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_03: We live in in cities.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_03: And so what we like, what we're doing is we're actually not going out there and saying we're gonna restore your microbiome.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_03: What we're gonna do is we're gonna supplement what your microbiome used to do.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_03: We are going to naturally restore the nutrients and the vitamins that were once produced by your microbiome.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's can we talk about some of those nutrients then that um we should focus on?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so and these are just the ones we know of so far.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, this is a systems biology problem.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it is it is more complicated than we think that it is.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it's going to keep on delivering more information as we get deeper into it.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, when you take one of these plant oils and then you ferment it, and it's this post-biomic ferment fermentation, and we coined that term because a lot of these words get misused out there.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: We want to be very specific about what we mean.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: These are fermented with the uh the bacteria from their own microbiome and the environment in which they're grown.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: So these are ancient, ancient relationships.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it takes the original chemistry of the oil and adds all of this complexity.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: And typically what we're seeing is increases in the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, K1, K2, um, ubiquinones.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we're also seeing a really interesting uh collection of carotenoids and uh and uh fatty acids, uh um phytosterols, and and that's just sort of the beginning.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: So those things are actually in the oil and they're absorbed transdermally relatively easily.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um the uh you know, we think of the skin as having a barrier function.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: That barrier is fundamentally to keep water in.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: It does have some other, you know, more complicated functions, but lipids like these tend to get absorbed relatively quickly.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: Those are just the biomolecules of life, and since our metabolic function evolved from that of these microbes, there's a good deal of overlap.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: So these are the things, remember the essential fatty acids, the essential vitamins we talked about earlier.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um we never had to make them because that's where they came from.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: They'd come from our food, but they'd also come from our absorbed transdermalize from our microbiome.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: But there's other things we're gonna start discovering in these that are, you know, for instance, some of the lipophilic uh hydrophilic, the water-soluble things, are probably just acting locally right there on the skin.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and we're doing a deep dive into what all of these uh microbes made, and we've deeply sequenced um their uh them genetically so we see what their metabolic functions are.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: But we're also starting to look in the metabolomics to see what they were making, and then take them, take the microbes, get them, ferment them, get them to express the gene clusters, make those specific molecules, and then we turn that into the ingredient, not the live microbe, but the products, the postbiotic, the postbiotic products for the ferment.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: And to restore their function.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: I really, really that's very exciting, actually.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: And we're just getting started.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, it seems like it.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, I actually want to ask you one random question I have um for both of you is that, you know, right now I think there's a huge crazier on sunscreens and um the damage that's done by UV light and blue light and all of that stuff.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, given the conversation we've just had and this um almost this intrinsic ability for our skin to heal itself, right?
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: That's been around forever.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I want to talk to you guys about your opinion on just you know UV protection.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: Is that something that symbiome is going to be focusing on, or is that, you know, not really with the ethos of your brand?
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_02: I just want to know your thoughts on it.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, sunscreen is a regulated claim, it's a drug claim.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: So um, and it's a mess, very messy area right now.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: So putting that part of it aside, what we have discovered is the ancestral microbiome had sunscreen function, and more importantly, than just the fact that it had UVA and UVB absorbers, that it made these naturally uh was the fact that it also made endonucleases which repair the genetic damage from UV radiation.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: So it is very likely that among the other things that we washed away when we washed away this layer is a natural sunscreen and a natural ability to repair the damage and a natural ability to keep the inflammatory consequences of that damage to a minimum.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: Now, all of that said is as we discover more and more of this, um it's an important need and it's an important area, and we're not going to withhold that information from developing a product if it's something that we can practically bring to practice, if we can bring to practice.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: That makes sense.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: That makes sense.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: And that's exactly what I wanted to ask you is about that intrinsic ability for us to be able to protect against UV.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_02: So thank you for answering that.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_03: The only thing I would say is that in our ancestral condition, and we we are exposed to a lot more UVA and UVB rays given what we've done to the environment.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, I think that everyone probably should, you know, wear uh sunscreen.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_03: But I, you know, I think with the jury's out whether we can do that on our.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_03: And if we can do it naturally, that would be fantastic.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: And and also like um what sunscreen does, right?
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's another thing that really came to my mind after talking to you both is that, you know, if we can enhance the normal, you know, levels and on our skin of just what's supposed to be there, everything else will be optimized.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_02: So the entire industry will be optimized in that way.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's so many products that are like, well, this sunscreen is 105 SPF well.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I don't think that really matters, you know, where I'm going is it needs more optimization.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you guys are definitely the first step towards that.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: So, okay, I want to actually um that's mostly all the questions I had, but I want to um ask you what's next for the for the company.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, what's can you give us a sneak peek into what you're working on?
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: And yeah, sure.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_03: So in um two weeks, three weeks, we are introducing um a stem cell serum and an eye cream that's made from the same biointech emulsion that we talked about.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_03: So, whereas our face cream, the one, has three ingredients, we're actually introducing eye cream that is only made from four ingredients.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_03: And as we talk about what we're doing and that we're kind of supplementing our microbiome with the nutrients we once made on our own, we cannot um ignore that we have been exposed to the elements and through time we do, we would like the opportunity to repair.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_03: And so the stem cell serum, which is called the answer, is is really our is our product that gives you the ability to kind of go back in time.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_03: Where most of our products are forward-looking, are giving you what you need to go forward for healthy skin.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_03: We are using the answer to say, you know, there are you know some things that we would like to repair the damage from.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_03: And the most unique thing about this, you know, you will normally see true stem cell, you know, conditioned stem cell media products uh in the dermatologist's office, and they tend to have a lot of ingredients.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, Larry and his infinite formulation wisdom has been able to um create a product that only has six ingredients.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_03: And so we're really excited about putting this incredibly reparative serum on the market, but something that is so clean and minimal, um, it's really fantastic.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_03: So we're utterly excited about that.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_03: And the eye cream, and that'll be launching next month, and then we will have um some body products, hand and and and body coming out mid-year.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's very exciting.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and everybody listening, I I really urge you guys to check out some bio.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, your products are really lovely.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I I've been using them and I love them, and you know, I can tell that it's it's nourishing my skin.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's my point, you know, and I think that that really should be the essence of skincare.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_02: So um I just want to congratulate you both on a very, very wonderful, wonderful line.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and everybody out there listening, please leave us some feedback.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, any questions you have um that I might have not asked and you're curious about um for Vicky or Larry, let me know and I will pass them along to their team.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you guys so much.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having us.
• 40:14
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• 41:21
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