163. Consulting the Crystal Ball of Biology: Karl & Erum's 2026 Predictions

Erum [00:00:00] the industry's focus will shift

Erum decisively from discovery to the orchestration of building and commercialization. So we really see that this is gonna happen.

Erum Hey Carl, how's it going?

Karl Happy New Year Iam. Welcome everyone to the Grow Everything podcast where we discuss the impact of biology as technology. How was your New year, iam?

Erum Oh, well, amazing. I mean, we are recording this ahead of time, so I'm sure it was amazing. I was of course traveling in Cape Town, South Africa, but here we are.

Erum We're back New year, new you, new us, new podcast. it's amazing and I hope everyone that's ing to this podcast had a wonderful holiday.

Karl Same here. I'm sure everyone did, and we're excited to be back. We've got a lot of exciting things going on this year.

Erum Yeah, we do. Absolutely. And in lieu of our usual commentary, we wanted to kind of kickstart off this year introducing some new things [00:01:00] about the podcast.

Karl So we're super excited to invite our colleague Lizette Couto onto the podcast. You may remember that in early episodes, one of the things that we did was we inserted definitions whenever someone said something a bit too scientific, or at least more scientific than the general public understands.

Karl And so we're gonna bring Lizette on to help us with those definitions. So Lizette, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience?

Lizette Hi everyone. I'm Lizette. I'm really excited to be working with messaging lab on this podcast, grow Everything. and, I'm excited for you guys to learn with Lizette.

Lizette I have a background in biology and neuroscience. I've finished my PhD at cuny, just, over a year and a half ago. And yeah, I'm really excited to get on board with communicating science with everybody.

Karl Wait, and you haven't said the secret about Lizette. Oh,

Lizette so I [00:02:00] am also, a rapper and, maybe in one of the definitions you can catch me rapping a term to you.

Erum Nice, nice. I mean,

Karl we wanted to introduce the audience to you. We've been having such a great time. Lizette has been helping a lot behind the scenes. She's been helping us so much.

Erum Took a such a load off our shoulders because Carl and I were really doing a lot in the early days, but now things are going swimmingly. You're, holding it down with our, production team as well, am Amplify, who's been like, you guys have been doing such a great job and is enabling all of us to grow together.

Erum So thank you so much Lizette, for joining us.

Lizette Yes. And thank you. I'm really excited. I love, I love growing with you guys.

Erum Hey, awesome. Cool. All right, well stay tuned for Lizette. you're gonna hear it throughout. The episodes. She's gonna chime in when we need a little bit more clarity on what we're talking about.

Lizette Yeah. Can't wait

Erum Yay. All right. See you later.

Karl Bye Lizette. All right. So for this episode,

Karl what we're gonna do is we're gonna [00:03:00] talk about predictions.

Karl But before we do that, We're doing a series on consumer packaged goods, which touch all of our lives and are definitely being impacted by biotechnology. but before we get into that series, we thought we would do this first episode of the year where we're talking about predictions.

Karl We made our predictions episode at the beginning of 2025. It's episode 110. We're first gonna talk about what we got right and what we got wrong, and then we're gonna kick off some predictions for 2026. I'm excited. How about you, Arum?

Erum Yes, I am. Very excited. So without further ado, let's get into our episode.

Erum that kickstarts 2026 on our predictions.

Erum All right. Welcome to our predictions episode. And so we're gonna kick it off by talking about the ones that we got right, and the ones that we got wrong.

Erum Um, and first, Carl, I would love for you to share a little bit about how you went about. Analyzing all of our [00:04:00] episodes from 2025 to see what we were talking about. You had a very comprehensive strategy. It was amazing that you're leveraging all these tools. So why don't you share a little bit with us before we get into what we got wrong for 2025?

Karl So we approached this, in two different ways. First, we took our predictions episode and dropped it into Notebook lm and kind of created the episode to see what we got right or wrong. And so we're gonna talk about that first. But then when we came up with our own predictions, we, dropped all of the 2025 episodes into Notebook lm, so that's 50 ish episodes so that we could query that.

Karl And then we took two different tactics, for interrogating that data. Both Iram and I came up with different prompts and the predictions that we share will be slightly different. But then I also went and queried other LLMs besides just Google and Notebook lm based on the feedback that it gave us in terms of what we might [00:05:00] predict based on the podcast.

Karl I went to, five other LLMs and I asked, what is right with these predictions? What's wrong with them? I'm gonna write a blog post about it because I think it's an interesting way to approach predictions, and I'd like to think that the signals are a little bit stronger than just kind of pulling these out of the air.

Karl What do you think Iam?

Erum Yeah, I mean, it was very great to be able to query all of our podcasts and you set that up and were, you shared the notebook LM link with me and I was able to do it as well. So, you know, you queried it, I queried it. We had some different answers, but similar at the same time. it was just,

Erum Some of it was positioned differently in terms of what we got wrong and right, but overall, when I did my part, the Google LM resulted in talking about our predictions for 2025, and it said it's clear that your outlook for 2025 was remarkably prescient regarding infrastructure and funding.

Erum While some of your more dire biological concerns remained, thankfully contained. So, looks like we got [00:06:00] some right. We got some wrong. So let's just get into it.

Karl Okay. So, first we'll get into the ones we missed. And at the beginning of 2025, I know I was very concerned about another pandemic due to an H five N one bird flu, thinking that it potentially could be worse than COVID.

Karl That didn't happen. But here we are in January of 2026 and again, there's concern that there's gonna be another bird flu.

Erum Yeah. I mean, I think some of it stem from. When we were hearing other people speak. So we went to Syno Beta in 2024 and Paul's Stamets had worn the industry to prepare for H five N one in case it jumps into humans.

Erum And there actually has been some news stories of that happening now, and we're coordinatings at the end of 2025. So it was not a full blown global pandemic, but maybe we just missed it by a year. Right.

Erum another prediction that we had, and this was a bizarre one, I think it was very, very ambitious, but we talked about [00:07:00] quantum biology and it's on the understanding of quantum biology.

Erum And we said that it might happen faster than expected, which I'm like this, that was really bold of us to say that. I mean, that's pretty strong, but I think it, was really regarding some digital models of biology that were coming online and then things that were happening by industries. So Novo Nordisk had a, quant accelerator and since things were moving very fast in the beginning of 2025. We might have added quantum biology into the mix, but I still think it's pretty far. But you never know when a discovery happens and there's a flip of a switch and all of a sudden we have quantum biology.

Erum But, any thoughts there? We totally missed it, Carl.

Karl I kind of wonder if it's two things, because on the one hand there's biology that depends on quantum effects like photosynthesis, and then there's, quantum computing. And I wonder if this is one of those where notebook, LM and us [00:08:00] together got it wrong because maybe we were talking about quantum computing's impact on biology and on biological discovery, and we haven't seen that yet.

Erum So I think we counted as a miss, but I think maybe we were just early. And then there was another miss.

Erum We saw signs of a biotech winter thawing with expected m and a activity, but that really didn't happen as much as we expected it to. Carl, this was more something that you brought onto the table. Tell us what you expected and what you saw.

Karl I think the, biopharma industry has really been hurting for more than a few years.

Karl There's been a lot of deals, there's been some really nice investments. Even towards the end of 2025, we saw a couple of big multi or a hundred million dollar investments in ai, drug discovery companies. But at the beginning of the year, I remember at the beginning of 2025. We are still in this biotech investment winter, so I really thought we were gonna see a lot of m and a activity because a [00:09:00] lot of companies were trading at cash, the public ones.

Karl And I think that's still the case, but we haven't seen the kind of m and a activity that I expected. And industrial biotech just kind of continues to move along. We haven't seen any big breakthroughs there, but we're gonna talk about that a little bit more as we get into our predictions. So I think there has been a shift towards, people investing in proven products over really speculative platforms, but that means a lot of these early companies are hurting for money or they're still in this so-called Valley of Death.

Erum Mm-hmm. Yep. Well, let's see what happens. so yeah, we got some wrong, but let's talk about some of the things that we got right.

Karl So one of the first ones that we got right, which I'd love to hear your comments on, is this idea of decentralized science. I think we had three or four podcast episodes that specifically were with people who were working in the Desci space.

Karl I'm thinking of Benji and I'm thinking of the guys from Hairdo and you know, what was our prediction and how'd we get it right?

Erum [00:10:00] Yeah. We said that DeSci was gonna play more of a central role in science and, not that it's central but it is, up and coming. And so we actually did a DeSci 1 0 1 episode where we, had highlights of all the people that work in the space that came on the podcast and we had five people, Carl,

Karl oh five.

Karl I thought it was only three, but Wow. Amazing. Yeah.

Erum Yeah. We had a lot of great people that work at the space. And then, some people who have not been on the pod yet that are continued to look at DCI and start setting up DAOs as a methodology or a way or a business model. To be able to get more science backed products into the hands of consumers and allow consumers to participate in the success and the science of their science, of their research, of their products.

Erum Right. So, and one of the things that got us towards this correct prediction is this emergence of the bio token on the Solana blockchain. And there's also the success of Hair Doo that's continuing to move up. So [00:11:00] that's great. They're getting more, popular, let's say. And this bio token, I mean, I've been getting invited to it.

Erum If you go to BIO xyz, not to confuse with biotech xyz, but BIO XYZ has a number of different science projects that are happening. There's derma DA who we, I spoke to J who was running that. and they're looking to create a product that what they will release to. Consumers and their token holders to use and also then participate in the research and the value of it.

Erum So, I think that it's not, again, not central to science yet, but it's still moving forward and expanding across different types of science.

Karl And I seem to remember that maybe when we recorded, Benji's episode, I had mentioned that I'd seen. Probably on YouTube, maybe reels that someone had said that deci decentralized science tokens were outperforming many of the other sectors in the marketplace, including [00:12:00] AI related tokens.

Karl I don't know if that's the case. So listeners chime in and let us know. But I do remember being very excited about that and seeing this emergence as this alternate funding model. And as we talk about our predictions for 2026, you're gonna see that this is very important. So our next, prediction that we got right was this idea of waste is a high value resource.

Karl I think we talked about it a lot in terms of, how agricultural waste could be used to feed new biomanufacturing facilities. I did a TEDx in Boston where I talked about urban waste, which is not yet tapped into, but this was, an important theme across a number of our episodes. You run, what's your take?

Erum Yeah, so we had. Guests on from companies like Manga materials where they use methane from wastewater. industrial microbes also came on, they talked about leveraging ethanol from agricultural waste to make, a acid nitrile and different types of, very important molecules that are used for all [00:13:00] sorts of things, even to make spaceships out of it.

Erum That's so crazy. Taking waste and making spaceships. Hello. And then more recently, towards the end of the year, we had Gabe from symmetry wood, talking about growing wood alternatives from kombucha brewery waste. So kombucha breweries make lots of bacterial cellulose for those that have made kombucha. You know that there's this culture called scoby that is what the bacterial cellulose makes.

Erum and they are just using that to make wood and it's incredible. And going through different events and meeting so many different people and gonna the conferences and learning about these innovators, there's a, a lot of other startups that are looking to leverage waste to make all sorts of things.

Erum So I think this is gonna continue to be a trend. I would say right now. Is it a huge scaled up industry? Not quite yet, but we are going to make sure we have our finger on the pulse when it comes to waste as a high value resource.

Karl And I think it's super [00:14:00] important because it talks to circularity, which isn't really talked about as much except for in some of our circles.

Karl And, I think waste as a resource is gonna be a very, very important, sector, if we even want to call it that. I've made the prediction that landfill remediation is gonna be a trillion dollar industry in the 2030s. And looking at waste as a resource, even just starting with.

Karl Agricultural waste is really the beginning of that.

Karl so one of our other predictions that I think we kind of hit was, this idea of onshoring and government funding.

Karl We predicted that the government, the US government, would prioritize onshore manufacturing through the Department of Defense and programs like Bio and arpa h.

Karl We made these predictions at the beginning of the year and we really missed that. The new administration was gonna cut about $5 billion from the National Institutes of Health, more than a billion dollars in grants from the National Science Foundation. there was a war against universities and the New York Times actually [00:15:00] called 2025 a crushing year for science.

Karl It made science research, basic research, something that is very challenging to get funding for. So we hope that that's something that gets better. Any ideas on that? Iam?

Erum Yeah, I mean, I think that there was a crushing of the way science has traditionally been funded. at the same time, the department defense, the military, the whole nationalistic idea of let's, bring everything on shore like.

Erum so to be able to, we talked about this with a lot of our clients and people in the space to spin it differently, right? So instead of saying, you know, we're doing research for like, the sake of humanity and coming up with new ideas, we're doing research for the sake of bettering America. And so that spin is something that happened like at the beginning of the year, really, We recorded our predictions episode in 2025, and then all this stuff happened. So, you know, we live in very, I guess, [00:16:00] volatile times that are, based on whimsy sometimes

Karl seems like, it seems,

Erum seems like it, Decisions that are made very quickly and abruptly without having a very strong plan to phase a change, which is, you know, more of a change management thing.

Erum anyway, so. That's happening. I mean, we still have, department of Defense has a lot of, let's call them, call for ideas or request for proposals. Things are happening. I mean, I'd like to point to,

Erum Christina, smoky of Anthea came on and, the positioning of their company that they, buy manufactured active pharmaceutical ingredients, but you could Ben Bio manufacture them anywhere.

Erum and you could do that here in the United States versus a lot of active pharmaceutical ingredients coming. Or that are being made in different countries where that's a lot of supply chain risk when there's just one facility making it in one location that might have, all sorts of risk, whether that's political or, climate related or all sorts of other things going on, that if you have one supply chain, it's just not going [00:17:00] to be, very reliable when you need it for making things, that people consume on the regular.

Erum Yeah. So I just think it was a shift. but yes, a question year for science as usual, but hopefully, you know, we just talked about ds I, we talked about Department of Defense and onshoring, maybe just science being done differently and hopefully we see that it actually, makes us discover more things. I don't know.

Erum I mean, it was a prediction that we sort of, kind of got right and wrong. that's a crazy one.

Karl Clearly that message was heard by the markets because Anthea ended up raising more than $50 million in a series C financing.

Karl So I think we're gonna see a lot more of this onshoring localization, regionalization over the course of the year. And I actually don't see that as a bad thing because I think that, for just security reasons, it makes a lot of sense to produce essential medicines here onshore. [00:18:00] And, there's a lot of things that get shipped around the world that probably shouldn't be shipped around the world, particularly things that contain a lot of water, because why are we shipping water around the world?

Karl there's water everywhere. we just need to be smarter about the way we use it.

Erum let's, save our predictions for 2026. Gonna get into that, but what else did we get right?

Karl you know, I think this prediction that probably isn't a surprise to anybody.

Karl We talked about the convergence of AI and biology. We talked about it being not just around drug discovery, which has seen a lot of activity, but we also talked about the use of AI in biotech for commercialization and building. We saw this at Symbio Beta in the sessions that were around hyperscale biology, where the focus shifted from reading and writing DNA to really composing genomes.

Erum yeah, again, I think it was an obvious one because, AI has to have an application. Biology is just perfect for AI to consume large amounts of data and makes sense out of complexity. And so because this read write, which we're gonna talk about more can [00:19:00] happen and is happening in, smaller phases, but when that accelerates, it's going to be very interesting.

Erum and. On in our day job at Messaging Lab, we do talk to a lot of AI and bio companies. So we kind of knew it was gonna happen.

Karl Alright. Alright. Well why don't you take this one We run because this one I think is near and dear to your Heart when it comes to the microbiome and longevity.

Erum Yeah, yeah. So we talked a lot about seeing microbiome longevity in pop culture and even through mainstream consciousness or clever marketing.

Erum And yes, this has played out pretty strongly. we even see from like our friends at p and g who will be having on the podcast soon, they've had microbiome focused commercials where they talked about head and shoulders and the scalp microbiome. this idea of skin longevity, L'Oreal has made big strides.

Erum They always have. but this complete, 180 of other than saying anti-aging when it comes to skin, it's longevity. but not just even that we took. Other layers of looking at skin [00:20:00] and longevity and different biomarkers. And so it's not just making sure your skin's moisturized, but there's the concept of cellular senescence, which is when you have cells that sse, they act like, I mean, I'm gonna say zombies.

Erum I know there's some, prominent thinkers in the science of senescence that are like, no, they're not zombies, they're just cells that have these, these, I wanna say cytokines,

Karl you know? Yeah, I was gonna say they're cells that are somewhat inactive until they get triggered to do something. Yes. Very specific.

Karl And, and

Erum like, they have to be there, like they're part of the, ecosystem of skin cells. So like not having them is not a good thing too. Just like everything just can't eradicate something. It's gonna have some after effects. But anyway, we just,went into different layers of longevity and microbiome throughout 2025, and we spoke to so many companies that are really looking at this.

Erum I mean, one Skin is a company that we had on the podcast we work with a little bit, to help them with their [00:21:00] science communications. And I mean, they do such a great job when it comes to looking at longevity and skin. but then, we'll talk more about it, but it is clearly a big topic. It is all over the news, and I'm sure it'll continue to be in 2026.

Karl Yep. And then finally, the prediction that we also, I'm gonna say we got it kind of right, was biotech in entertainment. at the beginning of last year, we were talking about common side effects, the animated show from Mike Judge, the creator of Silicon Valley and Producer Videocracy. we thought that there was gonna be a lot more spicy conversations about big pharma and Universal cures.

Karl And, you know, we continue to see biotech and entertainment as a really important way to increase bio literacy and to accelerate cultural adoption of biotech. This, I think, has a long way to go.

Erum Yeah, it could be more, but there was also the show, I mean, that had been actually the year before, like started in 2024, the show with, Rob Low.

Karl Yeah, unstable. So that

Erum show with Rob Low [00:22:00] called Unstable was out. Like it just, but that's, it's not enough. And then, of course, not that bu that's deep in biology. It's a little bit more about collective consciousness, although it could be because I didn't watch the latest episodes yet.

Erum I probably will have by the time this episode airs, but still good. Yeah. Yeah. but more, there has to be more and more people talking about it. And I think this combination of new discoveries, people, leveraging AI for, drug development for all sorts of things, biology is becoming more, more prominent in people's consciousness.

Erum So just through everyday, work through culture, through entertainment, I think we're going to see more of it, I hope. But we can talk more about that as we talk about 20, 26 predictions.

Karl Yeah, I think we definitely need a lot more of that so that we can demystify biotech and get more people interested in it.

Karl and hopefully that's something we'll see in 2026. But yeah, let's jump to our predictions for the year.

Erum Yes, yes. So we did a little bit of our own predictions based [00:23:00] on what we've been seeing and all the conversations we had. And then also we ran a little experiment on the notebook LM, that you set up.

Erum And we came up with aboutlet's just say Seven to 10 predictions. 'cause we might have some sub predictions that come out of our conversation.

Karl So right here,

Erum here we go. Here we go. Do you wanna kick it off, Carl?

Karl actually rum, why don't you kick it off because I think this one came from your predictions and your querying of notebook, LM and querying all of our previous episodes.

Erum Yes, yes. So we touched on this a little bit in the beginning of this episode and this prediction is that the first functional AI composed genome will happen in 2026. so then our biotech industry will move beyond merely reading, writing, and editing, DNA, but true genomic composition.

Lizette quick. Erum mentioned an AI composed genome that's a full genetic blueprint designed by artificial intelligence, not just editing one gene, but creating an entire genome from scratch before it's [00:24:00] built in a lab.

Erum And this really stems from leveraging models like EVO two

Erum which is a joint effort by the ARC Institute, Nvidia also supported it. Researchers from Stanford, Berkeley, U-U-C-S-F. A lot of people coming together to make EVO two, which can process whole genomes as context windows. So we will see the first functional microbial genome designed entirely in silico and printed to solve specific industrial problems such as plastic degradation or rare mineral extraction.

Erum So as AI's predictive design becomes increasingly trivial, the industry's focus will shift decisively from discovery to the orchestration of building and commercialization. So we really see that this is gonna happen. we hear the micro milestones that have been happening,

Erum I don't wanna trivialize it. They are actually big steps When [00:25:00] we heard, the gentleman from the A institute speak, its in via beta. And, you know, they were talking about, all right, we don't wanna just read, write at the DDNA, just like, they use the idea of yes, we can look at the words.

Erum But when can we write the story? And we are predicting that in 2026 we will write a story and boot up the first genome that was designed in silico.

Erum First of all, the ability for AI to drop a whole genome and read it in a context window is to me something that is just amazing.

Erum because, for those of you who don't know, the context window is basically like an AI's working memory. And, genomes tend to be pretty big, even though we know, you know, some microbes have very small ones. But I think it would be very interesting to see if we could talk to Patrick q or even Andrew Hessel, who's been on the podcast to talk about this prediction sometime during the course of the year to see how close we are.

Erum But I do think that over time, this is something that's [00:26:00] gonna be become trivial. There's no doubt about it. You know, you're gonna be able to do this stuff in silico. And, run hundreds, thousands, millions of tests before you actually print the genome. And you're gonna have a much better sense as to whether you're able to get that genome to do what you want it to do.

Erum So, very excited about this, prediction. Our second prediction is something we talked about and a couple people have commented on, was, the emergence of dirty biology. But we kind of, expanded this saying, we talked about writing a dirty biology manifesto, which is not off the table. It could still happen.

Lizette You just heard Carl say dirty biology. I promise. That doesn't mean unsafe science. It means biology that works in real world conditions such as soil farms and wastewater, not just clean rooms. Think embracing complexity instead of sterilizing it.

Karl but what we predict is that there's gonna be a major non-sterile biomanufacturing facility [00:27:00] built. And so this is gonna be a move away from these expensive, centralized stainless steel reactors that look like what you'd see in a microbrewery. But you'll see these distributed modular systems that leverage natural microbial consortia.

Karl Localized waste streams. So this shift is gonna be from scaling up to scaling out and is gonna break the capital intensive valley of death that has claimed so many first generation biotech companies.

Karl Yeah, I mean, I love that and I, hope that happens. I haven't really seen any indication that's going to happen.

Karl I think it needs to happen though, right?

Karl The, these are predictions.

Erum Yes, yes. Yeah, they're predictions.

Erum talked to Daniel Goodwin of the Home World Collective in 2025, and he mentioned like, a bit about having new types of biomanufacturing and, think outside of the stainless steel, vats that have to be sterilized.

Erum Could we use like a lake, right now, biology, the way it's done is not in a stainless steel vat. It's a bunch of [00:28:00] different organisms coming together to build something to, you know, build up and build out, build clean, remove the waste. Like, it just all comes together in a beautiful symphony.

Erum And so how do we do that? that is a very big challenge. Very big challenge, but I think it's, an important one because it could save so much money. Because we don't need to sterilize and like, you know, heat, by reacts to make them sure they're clean before you use it, obviously you're not, heating up the actual, organisms 'cause you're gonna kill 'em, you know?

Erum unless you need to in downstream processing, which you do, depending on what you're trying to make. but it could also, reduce energy costs. That's a big thing too. And, Make things, a little bit more automated, but not in the way that it's like hardware automation, but more like biological, automated, like bio let biology do its thing and we'll have the products we need or that problem solve because we enable biology to do its [00:29:00] thing in Stitch in the actual place.

Karl Yeah, I think it, it's worth it to remember that agriculture is dirty biology. we do that at scale and We had another prediction that didn't make the list where we talked about downstream processing, seeing as a service because downstream stream processing is something that's very expensive and impacts biomanufacturing.

Karl So if you could imagine growing things agriculturally, like in fields and then, downstream, you end up processing out what you need from it. I think it's another approach versus, as you said, you know, stainless steel vats. So I'll just do the next one. 'cause this one came from kind of my series of predictions.

Karl I said that, you know, we predict that biological arbitrage could create a 15 to 20% margin advantage to bypass tariffs.

Lizette Okay, you just heard biological arbitrage. That's when biology becomes a competitive advantage. Instead of shipping materials around the world, companies can [00:30:00] grow them locally using microbes or cells. That means fewer tariffs, shorter supply chains, and lower costs.

Karl So this came out of the recommendation from the National Security Commission on emerging Biotechnology and the US government moving forward on research to procure bio-based product at scale.

Karl So to ensure national security and supply chain resilience, these federal mandates require the purchase of bio manufactured materials such as dyes, carbon negative cement, domesticated, specialty chemicals. And, you know, they effectively act as off-take agreements to de-risk the industry for private investors.

Karl I think we have to just see how this is gonna play out, but I think that there is a potential for biological arbitrage that could create an advantage. Andro, you had an interesting story around this.

Erum Yeah, I mean, my thing was just, more, it hit home because of a specific thing I was looking to purchase and I was a bit [00:31:00] taken back by the price.

Erum So I went to this store, the local bodega here in Brooklyn. Right. And things are a little bit more pricey in Brooklyn than in the suburbs. I imagine. I haven't gone shopping in the suburbs for a long time, but I was looking to purchase some cream cheese and usually I go for the Philly cream cheese, but I noticed it was like $7 for like the small, regular size.

Erum And I was like, ooh. That's a little pricier than usual. And then I'm like, okay, well what other options they have? I mean, although I was like, all right, you know, I've gotta stick with my Philly, but let's see what they had. And I was just like, looking at the different options. And there was an org organic cream cheese that was cheaper than Philly cream

Karl cheese.

Karl Interesting.

Erum And it was cheaper. So the Philly cream cheese was $7 to organic cream cheese was $6. And then there was the Tofutti better than cream cheese, which I've had and it's good. that was $5. And I was like, wow, that's interesting. There's this flip. People always think like vegan and organic. It's so expensive when [00:32:00] actually the thing that was expensive would be, the more processed one philly cream cheese don't come after me, but like, why was that more expensive?

Erum And, you know, we talked about this and we were like, we're like, all right, well what are the ingredients of cream cheese? You know, it's not just dairy. There's different ingredients. Guar gum and xanthan gum and, and they come from somewhere. Right? And Guar gum's, imported from India, Pakistan.

Erum And, tariffs are involved. It probably caused it be more expensive then cause that one ingredient? And I'm sure there's other ingredients that influence the pricing of cream cheese. So I thought it was like, okay, this might force products that are we, you know, the mainstream common on the shelf processed foods to actually become more expensive, to make those that are made locally through biomanufacturing that are made through, less processed organic or not, or using soybeans or other, ingredients.

Erum to make them cheaper would be very fascinating. 'cause [00:33:00] then it's like, okay, the healthier local. Products are actually cheaper than the processed. I don't know. I would say Frankenstein products only saying that because they have ingredients coming from all over the world to make 'em not 'cause they're monsters.

Erum I still love Philadelphia cream cheese, big Philly. Don't come after Me. Go Eagles. Yeah.

Karl Yeah. I mean I think it's, I think it's super interesting. Can localized bio manufacturing create a margin advantage, over tariffs. I think it's something that remains to be seen and I'd love to hear what our listeners think about that idea. I love this next prediction. Iam, I'm gonna let you handle this one because this one came from your queries.

Erum this next one, came because we talked with a lot of different companies that are looking at consumer health. We had volume on, so volume send. hits to your house and it's an at home RNA testing. we talked about other types of wearable [00:34:00] data, and so this intersection of wearable data at home testing AI will reach a tipping point when consumer held health records become more clinically significant than traditional medical records.

Erum I think more people are taking their health into their hands and they are leveraging AI works spreadsheets. I know you and I still use spreadsheets to track our own health. I also, I mean, I will say, for those health systems that are embracing technology, we've been seeing that there's been more, integration and APIs between different EHR systems, so APIs being.

Erum mechanism in different software. So different software can speak to each other just in case those that dunno. I'm trying to do better with definitions. Lizette can't do all the definitions. I'm trying to help her out here. Um, and then we talked about, EHR, so [00:35:00] electronic health records. So being able to have them, speak to each other is very important so you can get all your data together.

Erum But I think another thing here is that there's not just people tracking their health data for themselves, but they are sharing it with others. So this idea of real time, live streams of their biological state. And we talk to people that are tracking their health through apps and there's all these competitions.

Erum There's competitions on sleep, there's competitions on like exercise. Obviously there's things like Peloton where you're all participating and exercising and you're being able to share information. So there's a lot of, I would say, micro signals that are telling us consumers are taking advantage of their health, they're sharing it so we can all know collectively what we need to do to have better diets, better interventions, and all aging before it manifests as a disease.

Karl [00:36:00] so I'm gonna just go on to the next prediction because I think these two predictions are very similar and work together. Our next prediction is that consumer biotech gains on industrial biotech, or we said the bathroom shelf wins. and one of the things that I did when I queried notebook LM, was I added the economists the year ahead, and then after we had done the predictions, LinkedIn did their year ahead predictions, and one of 'em was this idea that GLP ones these blockbuster.

Karl Basically almost trillion dollar drugs that are weight loss drugs that are, you know, becoming ubiquitous, have been such a phenomenon that consumers will adopt molecular interventions at scale.

Karl Now

Karl we

Lizette You just heard Carl mention GLP ones. These are peptide hormones your body already uses to regulate blood sugar and appetite. They were originally developed for diabetes and now they went mainstream through weight loss, and in this episode they matter [00:37:00] because they show that biotech is moving out of hospitals and into everyday life.

Karl Now we heard Elliot Roth at Bio Fabricate talk about this on the podcast.

Karl I punk and, yeah, so Elliot has been doing this kind of biopunk series and he talked about people who are taking peptides. I've done, like a modest dive on what people are using peptides for, but people are going out and taking and injecting peptides for, collagen for. Performance for muscle gain, for all sorts of things besides just weight loss.

Karl And this is something that, Elliot mentioned that there's great clinics all over Southeast Asia where you can go and get these peptides injected. And so a lot of people are using them. And so this idea of consumer bio kind of expands on what we normally talk about when it comes to industrial biotech on the consumer side, on the, you know, CPG side.

Karl But this is much more in line with what you're just talking about, Iran, where people are taking their health into their own hands, sharing the data, but then [00:38:00] also adding peptides to their health regimens to look better, to feel better, to feel stronger, to feel younger.

Karl Yeah. Yeah. And this also speaks to what we talked about in 2025, is this blurring between pharma and consumer, right.

Karl And GLP ones being that signal, because GLP ones came out for people with diabetes, but then the off use case was for weight loss. And then what happened? The market responded and created a GLP one for weight loss. So is that gonna happen again with different types of drugs or medicines to then become more of a over the counter experience, even though you might, you still need to have a doctor prescribed GLP ones if you wanna use it for weight loss, but happening a bit more, easy.

Karl It's more accessible, I would say, to do that. we know that there's a, some people that are selling biotech products and they have what they call the doctor behind the screen that's just clicking on all the prescriptions. Yeah. Or things that [00:39:00] are generally regarded as safe. you know, they'll take a quick look at, people's assessments and say, okay, yeah, I'll take the risk and, prescribe this to somebody.

Karl But the consumer experience is really just like ordering online. So what are gonna, what's the next GLP one? What's the, you said you're talking about those, peptides for increased muscle mass. And then we talk to so many people about different longevity therapies or drugs like rapamycin, like metformin.

Karl And so as that gains popularity, what is that gonna look like in the markets? Is it still gonna be something that's niche or is it gonna come on the forefront like GLP ones has?

Karl Yeah, and I will just say one more thing since GLP one is a peptide. I think that peptides are ultimately, like, almost like an infinite market.

Karl You can go into a Sephora and see so many products that say they contain peptides. We don't know what those peptides are. I mean, in some cases we know what they are, but like, for example, we talked to one skin, they have a peptide that makes your skin, [00:40:00] you know, increases your skin longevity.

Karl So that's peptide based K 18 hair, who we talk a lot about on this podcast. Their products are peptide based. And there's, I think, a lot of room for these peptides to appear in beauty products, but also across personal care and even consumer brands, cleaning products that contain peptides. I think we've barely scratched the surface of where peptides are gonna appear.

Karl And I'm really excited for this because I think people are gonna get very creative with these small amino acid chains.

Erum Yeah, well we could probably say 2026 the year, the peptide. I don't know. Maybe that's, yeah, let's hope so. Okay. But we'll put that in the prediction predictions box. Alright, so, the next couple of predictions I'm really excited about because it has to do with space.

Erum Woo. for listeners to the podcast, you know that I'm the space nerd. And Carl, thank you for coming on this journey with me. And you've embraced space as not only a fun thing to talk about, but as a platform for real scientific research that can help [00:41:00] us in the world of biology. And so. This prediction comes from some recent conversations we had with people, not just on the podcast, but also off the podcast.

Erum And this is the idea of space manufactured crystals entering human clinical trials, because there are a lot of trials that are happening that we don't really know about in the public domain, but we have heard about pharma companies working with different people, different space agencies to look at space manufacturing as a way to create unique properties of molecules.

Erum And this stemmed from our conversation with Varda, a company that is doing space manufacturing, and they and other companies are creating this aerospace slash biotech collaboration. And they say that, look, this crystallization of different drugs can help create efficacy. Regular gravity cannot. So [00:42:00] microgravity, crystallization is something that we need to pay attention to and people are doing it, but we believe that it'll create a drug in 2026 that we can use.

Erum Carl talk about this. What do you think?

Karl Yeah, I mean, you know, space is the ultimate, like you say, space is the ultimate clean room. This idea of creating perfectly uniform crystals, that those have different effects therapeutically. And so it makes sense that the biopharmaceutical industry is looking at this because there's so much, that can be done just by, making sure that, I mean, they, always need to have product consistency.

Karl But to add that next level of consistency, I think it increases patent protection. If they've got a product that maybe has been on the market that they're looking to protect for longer space. Could be space manufacturing, could be one of the ways that you do that. So I'm super excited to see how this, prediction plays out.

Karl thank you roam for getting me back into space. and for appreciating that, there are people doing [00:43:00] this. I think there's a lot of things to unpack around space, biotech, and we're just barely at the beginning of it.

Erum getting into clinical trials and having pharma behind the space, manufacturing is huge. 'cause if pharma is in it means money is in and people will chase money, right?

Erum So I think there's. It's gonna happen in 2026. It has to because there's already a lot of money that's been put into it. And if it doesn't, okay, we got it wrong. But, it's just gonna kick it off. Doesn't mean that there's going to be a pharmaceutical plant in space. It means that they're gonna create these crystals and bring those crystals back down to earth and then culture it here on earth.

Erum So it's not that this kicks off, you know, us living in space, it just, we're using space as a tool. We're using space as a platform. with that said, the next prediction, continuing our space journey is, I believe in 2026 we will see proof of alien life. And that is because of the remarkable satellite imaging that has been [00:44:00] happening.

Erum In using the telescopes that have been made, but also with AI looking at every single aspect of it. So you and I were kind of talking about this and there was, a reel that I shared of this amazing, astronomy influencer, and they were talking about how there's these unreal satellite capabilities that can lead to so much depth of perception and space.

Erum And this is echoed by George Church who we had his episode on the podcast. We didn't interview him, but we had our friends from the home world collective interview him. And he suggested that synthetic biology can help amplify signals observed from drones or satellites turning environmental or biological responses into reflective data that we can see from very high up.

Erum That's wild. So biology help helping us [00:45:00] see farther away. And then of course, our brother from another mother here in Brooklyn, Dr. Chris Mason, highlighted that we already discovered what appeared to be pure Ocean Worlds in, among the exoplanets that we've been finding. And they are the primary targets for monitoring for variations of life that we just couldn't fathom.

Erum So Chris Mason has brought that up. And we also talked to a few other people about space.

Karl Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite podcast episodes was with Erica De Benedictus, who's working on creating biological chassis for Mars. And, one of the things that she noted was that, Mars itself is sterile.

Karl but yet our intentions and our ethics around space have shifted over the last 50 years. In the past, we were really looking for life. So now we're really looking for where are places that we could potentially settle And, we've talked a lot about three I Atlas the comet that was flying very close to Earth in December and it exhibited these weird non gravitational [00:46:00] acceleration.

Karl It had this weird green glow and so there was a lot of debate about how do we identify interstellar objects that don't fit the traditional mold of asteroids or comets. And so I, I think all of these things, you know, point to, a deeper understanding or a deeper potential proof of alien life.

Karl I actually think it won't be until 2027.

Erum Okay. Alright. Alright. We'll be off by year, but it's gonna happen whether it's 365 days to 366 tomato tomatoes. But, I just feel like there is a lot of signal and there's this like, The collective consciousness we've been talking about it, it's all over. You know, if we're talking about what's on the mainstream, and maybe not biology, but alien life we're always talking about alien life, for sure.

Erum Everyone. Yeah. So it's just, I think we're just being primed for it. There's like, a Disney movie that came out called EEO about Alien Life. It was a beautiful, cute [00:47:00] Disney movie. there's a lot. So I think we're on the cusp of something big.

Karl Yeah, I agree with that.

Erum and then like our final crazy prediction, 'cause these predictions are a bit nuts, but it's because we're seeing all of these signals, whether they are directly from aliens or not, is this idea of clear communication with animals and what why we're predicting this is that.

Erum There has been even more immediate validation that we're gonna be speaking with animals. there's the Earth Species Project, which is currently using AI to decode non-human communications, and they primarily focus on whales. So the research there has revealed that individual whales have names, so there're like unique acoustic identifiers And these whales adhere to social taboos such as reacting aggressively if a human plays their name back to them. A behavior that those researchers [00:48:00] believe is what whales see as identity theft.

Erum So if you're a human saying that whale's name, they're like, wait, we say our names. Why are you saying my name? Like, that's crazy. So it's. So it would be like if I said Carl to you and I'm, but when you say Carl, I'm saying I'm Carl, and they're like, no, I'm, I'm Carl.

Karl Yeah. So

Erum that's what this research pointed to.

Erum But that's not, it doesn't stop there. I mean, the XPRIZE that, you know, Peter Diman does, the billionaire, he started this along with some other amazing people. They have this XPRIZE for interspecies communication. the details are still being worked on, but it's really understand the consciousness of animals.

Erum And so, we talked to Susan Larson of the future as fungi about this. tell me a little bit more about what you think of this. Are we gonna communicate with animals?

Karl yeah, there's no doubt this is the year we start communicating with animals. AI is gonna enable this and I'm all for it.

Karl And maybe, yeah, whales will be the first [00:49:00] ones. hopefully whales are gonna tell us to clean up the ocean. And, to be nicer to them. but I'm not sure I really wanna know what my cat says. I have a feeling that like when we're able to communicate with cats and dogs, we'll find that their, their level of communications is very sophisticated, but maybe not sophisticated enough for us to really want to engage on a consistent basis.

Karl But I love this idea and I can't wait to see it in practice. You mentioned Susan Reson. she also said that a researcher named Andy Adamski has identified a fungal language of roughly 50 words. So that means we might be communicating with the wood wide web to monitor soil health and ecosystems.

Karl So yeah, I'm all for it. Let's communicate with aliens that already here on our planet.

Erum Yes. Which are animals. I mean, there are definitely signals of animal communications, like these researchers at the Earth Species Project.

Erum And I have seen different attempts, of communicating with pets. And I think we've all seen like [00:50:00] a commercial or something where they have like a dog decoder. If your dog barks like this, I've seen that For babies. Yeah, for when babies cry, they're actually crying, you know, crying for specific reasons.

Erum I don't know how effective they are, but hey, look, they're being studied. previously it's been humans trying to identify those patterns. But now of course, we have all understanding and, hyper processing and pattern recognitions of ai. So yes. All right. Let's talk to our other living multicellular organisms here on earth.

Erum And then let's see what's outside of our planet.

Karl Yeah, exactly. So those are our predictions for 2026. I think they're very exciting. I think some are definitely gonna happen. We had a pretty good hit rate last year in 2025. I'm really looking forward to seeingwhat other biotech predictions people are making for this year.

Karl Biotech continues to be a very exciting space. There's a lot happening. What's your take you rum as we close this episode out?

Erum Yes, yes. Well, there's a lot to be seen in [00:51:00] 2026. I'm here for it. You're here for it. We're gonna have amazing people on, and we mentioned at the top of the episode we're gonna kick off a CP G series.

Erum So that's consumer packaged goods, all the things that we buy on the shelves of Walmart, target. there's so much and those things are made. A lot of them are made through petro chemistry and yeah, we need to find ways to use biology because of all the wins we talk about. Here on the podcast and there are efforts happening and we cannot wait to bring the people on that are looking at this, looking at biology as a solution to making consumer packaged goods, looking at all the innovation and bringing it to market into your hands.

Erum And we cannot wait for that. So stay tuned for more on the Grow Everything podcast.

Erum Hey, this episode is sponsored by Messaging Lab. At Messaging Lab, we translate complex science and economics into [00:52:00] compelling business narratives, and we have done so for the most successful biotech forward companies across pharma, agriculture, personal care and beauty materials, and the list goes on. We are here to make sure your ideas not only get heard, but resonate with your audience.

Erum So if it's time to amplify your company's voice. Elevate your business. Visit us@messaginglab.com. Let's.

Karl Thanks for listening. As you can tell, we have a really good time here on the Grow Everything Podcast. We have a fantastic audience, and if you're interested in reaching that audience, reach out to us. We are open for partnerships. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite streaming service, Spotify, YouTube, apple, and sign up for our substack so you don't miss a beat when it comes to building the economy.

Karl Thanks for listening.

[00:53:00] 10 Hard-Hitting Quotes "The industry's focus will shift decisively from discovery to the orchestration of building and commercialization." - Erum Azeez "Synthetic biology can help amplify signals observed from drones or satellites, turning environmental or biological responses into reflective data that we can see from very high up." - George Church (via Erum Azeez) "We already discovered what appeared to be pure Ocean Worlds among the exoplanets—the primary targets for monitoring variations of life that we just couldn't fathom." - Dr. Chris Mason (via Erum Azeez) "Mars itself is sterile, but our intentions and ethics around space have shifted—we're now looking for where we could potentially settle." - Karl Schmieder "Individual whales have names—unique acoustic identifiers—and they adhere to social taboos, reacting aggressively if a human plays their name back to them." - Erum Azeez on Earth Species Project research "There's no doubt this is the year we start communicating with animals. AI is gonna enable this and I'm all for it." - Karl Schmieder "A researcher named Andy Adamski has identified a fungal language of roughly 50 words—we might be communicating with the wood wide web to monitor soil health and ecosystems." - Susan Larson (via Karl Schmieder) "Whales will be the first ones. Hopefully they're gonna tell us to clean up the ocean and to be nicer to them." - Karl Schmieder "When we're able to communicate with cats and dogs, we'll find that their level of communications is very sophisticated, but maybe not sophisticated enough for us to really want to engage on a consistent basis." - Karl Schmieder "Let's talk to our other living multicellular organisms here on Earth, and then let's see what's outside of our planet." - Erum Azeez