You guys, welcome back to Skin Anarchy. This is a very special episode because we're going to be covering a topic that I think we rarely get to sit down and speak about in detail and in full fullness in terms of the science.

And so for decades, I know a lot of you have heard about acne, eczema, kind of the same way when it comes to the bacteria that are involved, the microbiome

that's involved. But nobody dives into like what that actually means. I feel like we keep having

this conversation and going in circles and not really getting to the nitty gritty of all of it.

So our guest today is going to do exactly that and really talk to us in depth about the microbiome and really

what that means for these different skin conditions. So without further ado, please welcome Dr. Oliver

Lou, who is the co-founder and CEO of Hypothesis. Welcome, Dr. Lou. I'm so excited to host you.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Really excited to have this conversation. Yeah, I'm really excited to dive in.

I would actually love to start off with learning more about your background.

I know you have such extensive experience in biochemistry, genetics, metagenomics.

I mean, I would love for you to dive into that and kind of walk us down memory lane and tell us about your background.

Yeah, as you mentioned, the bulk of my career since my PhD has been in what's called metagenomics.

Metagenomics is the study of communities of microorganisms, whether that be in the soil,

in a hot spring, or on your body, like with the skin microbiome.

The thing that makes metagenomics so interesting is that we honestly have barely scratched

the surface of natural diversity.

It's estimated that 99.9% of microbial diversity in the world has never been studied,

primarily because we don't know how to grow them in the lab. That means almost everything we've

learned. All these huge databases of species and genomic information, all these things,

come from just a small sliver of natural

diversity. And the thing that I and my fellow co-founders at Hypothesis have learned, both at

Hypothesis, as well as at Radiant Genomics, the previous company I co-founded, is that if you do

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