Abby Newsham  0:04  

This is Abby, and you are listening to Upzoned.

Abby Newsham  0:18  

Hey everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upzoned, the show where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the Strong Towns conversation, and we upzone it: We talk about it in depth. Today, I am joined by my friend Chuck Marohn. He's back once again. I'm seeing you more regularly.

Chuck Marohn  0:38  

I know, it's really nice. I love being able to do this with you. You know, I just remembered something. I was actually going to say this at the beginning of the show. I know that last week we were not on together, but the week before we talked about mortgage fraud. I actually had a developer and my own personal banker get a hold of me and say, "Chuck, you did not commit mortgage fraud."

Abby Newsham  1:11  

Really, your banker?

Chuck Marohn  1:13  

My own personal banker. And you know, he's a really sweet guy, and we have kids the same age. And I mean, my office when I ran my own planning engineering firm was in the basement of that bank, so I knew them really well. But he apparently listened to the podcast and said, "You did not commit mortgage fraud." And someone sent me, like, a 1200 page federal guideline book and pointed out the one page where it said "You can have more than one primary residence if you meet one of these four criteria." And apparently I met it. I don't know if that was the case back in 2000 but it's the case today. It's interesting because the word primary is a singular word. Like, if we say, Abby, you are the primary host of Upzoned. I am also not the primary host. I would be a secondary host. That's how the word primary works. But apparently there are some niches of Fannie, Freddie, federal housing regulations that allow you to have more than one primary home if you meet certain guidelines and conditions, which apparently I did.

Abby Newsham  2:36  

Okay, interesting.

Chuck Marohn  2:38  

So no mortgage fraud!

Abby Newsham  2:40  

I got messages about it too. I got a few different messages debating whether or not that was mortgage fraud. So, glad to hear you're not going to prison.

Chuck Marohn  2:52  

I was pretty confident I was not going to go to prison. But, yeah, it's an interesting discussion. And I mean, the very fact that there's a 1200 page booklet outlining the nuances of federal housing policy just tells you that federal housing policy is really wack.

Abby Newsham  3:12  

Yeah, for sure. Well, today we're going to talk housing. So that's a good segue. Yay. We talk about housing a lot, but this is actually a very interesting article. I don't mean to, like, rip up off a scab for you Chuck, but we're going to talk about YIMBY today.

Chuck Marohn  3:33  

It's okay. I'm trying my best to have empathy. And empathy does not mean sympathy. It means trying to understand another's motivation. So I'm trying deeply to be empathetic towards the motivations of yimbys, which I think are generally well-aligned with my motivations, right?

Abby Newsham  3:57  

I mean, I think so too. And, you know, shout out Nolan, who's a friend of mine. I think that there's some great things that they're doing, and it's been fun to hear you guys debate over over the past year or so.

Chuck Marohn  4:12  

That is not what I would call it, but let's go with that.

Abby Newsham  4:14  

It's fun for me. It's fun to see two friends debate each other on housing. Okay, so we are looking at a very provocative opinion piece that was published by The Washington Post titled, "Forget yimby. The housing shortage could disappear on its own." So the author pushes back on the idea that the yimby movement, which stands for "yes in my backyard" is the hero in America's housing debates. The article cautions against shaping national housing policy around localized problems, noting that affordability depends on far more than zoning changes. Factors like interest rates, labor shortages, construction costs, property taxes, large scale investors and demographic shifts all shape housing markets. For example, Austin experienced a sharp drop in rental prices between 2023 and '24, not just from new construction but because developers misjudged slowing population growth, leading to excess supply. The author talks about the, quote, unquote, silver tsunami of baby boomers who will be downsizing, relocating, or inevitably passing away, which will release millions of homes back onto the market by 2030, with estimates ranging from four to 14 million units. Combined with new construction, even at slower levels, supply could exceed 1 million additional homes by the end of the decade. There's also a demand side, where immigration-driven household growth and declining birth rates and slower family formation has suggested steady but not explosive increases, and this means housing supply may not just catch up to demand, but potentially surpass it. So this was just a fascinating article. I will say, towards the end, it kind of devolves into this political argument that kind of kind of goes into this whole other diatribe that I felt probably wasn't needed for the article. But it is interesting, and it's something that I've certainly thought about as well. How is this conversation around the, quote, unquote, national housing crisis and the shortage impacted by the largest generation eventually graduating from life.

Chuck Marohn  6:52  

So I feel like there's so many layers to this. Can I start with a weird abstraction and then we can pull it apart?

Abby Newsham  6:59  

Yeah. I expect nothing less.

Chuck Marohn  7:04  

So I remember in the very early days when I was writing Strong Towns, like 2010, in that timeframe, there was this push in a couple of cities -- I remember Omaha was one --  to build a version of the New York City's High Line. At that point in time, I had never walked the High Line. I'd never been around it. I had not experienced it. I've experienced a few times since then. It's astounding. It's amazing. But I remember looking at this, going, "Why in the world are we talking about this in Omaha?" Omaha has so many things to work on, so many things that are low hanging fruit, so many things that they should focus on. Why is this the distraction? And it was largely being pushed by local planners there. It took me a while to really understand and connect the idea that, if you are reading the latest thing, the biggest stuff, it's all coming out of New York. It's all coming out of San Francisco. It's all coming out of a handful of places. And that impacts how you think about the problems in your own place. There's a really good study from the University of Kansas by a guy named Kirk McClure who has looked at the conflation between -- and I'll quote from The Washington Post here -- the, quote, "extreme shortages in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco with the conditions in the nation overall." In the report from Kansas University, the professor there basically concludes that, nationally, there's no supply shortage. In these big markets, there's a huge supply shortage. That's where our media comes from. That's where our conversations come from. That's where our sensitivities are molded. But if you go to Wichita, or you go to Kansas City, or you go to Brainerd, there's not a net overall supply shortage. What there is -- and I think this is the urgency that this Washington Post article picks up -- there is a massive shortage of affordable units. There's a massive shortage of what we at Strong Towns have called starter units, a place to get started and grow into. But if you just look in the macro sense, we've built lots and lots of homes. In fact, once you get out of those high demand, high shortage places, home-to-million has not only kept up, but in a lot of places it has exceeded the local demand. It's just that we're building big sheetrock palaces and suburban tract homes that go for $300,000, $400,000, $500,000. The filtering effect really does not work in the second ring suburb, where everybody's house is based on a mortgage of a certain price and a certain amount. You're not having the 40-year-old suburb suddenly become affordable because people have filtered up into the 20-year-old suburb and the 10-year-old suburb. What you're having is the old suburb falling apart and becoming a place nobody wants to live in, and the other places still being not affordable because we're not building any affordable units there. I feel like that's an aspect of the yimby conversation that gets lost in the rhetoric coming out of the most heated places. Does that make sense, Abby?

Abby Newsham  11:18  

Yeah. To me, this is really more about having a housing market that is attuned to shifts in lifestyle. Right now we have a housing market that just has a limited supply of variety, that allows people to downsize, to align their housing type with the lifestyle they have, and I feel like that is really the core issue.

Chuck Marohn  11:56  

Elaborate on that a little bit. I feel like you're saying a Henry Ford-ism, which is "you can have any color of Model T, as long as it's black." You can have any housing style you want, as long as it's a four-bedroom suburban home or an urban apartment. Is that?

Abby Newsham  12:13  

That's not what I'm saying. I think the problem is that that is all we build. We build large apartment complexes or urban apartment buildings, maybe mixed use, or we build large suburban style houses. Especially for seniors, there's a huge market for having small format, one-story houses with low maintenance needs, not huge lots. That's a market that has been highlighted for seniors, but it's also, I think, a market that would be of interest to single people and first-time home buyers. The small format starter house, or I guess we could call it a starter or ender house, if we want to be morbid about it. But that is not a type that we provide. We don't allow accessory units. Seniors who live in these large houses, what if they were able to have their kids and their families move into their large houses, and they could take a portion of the first floor and make it a suite that they live in and their family could take the rest of it? We don't have housing policies that are attuned to localized lifestyle shifts in the population. I think what's interesting about this article is that it does talk about how our national conversation about housing has been really geared to San Francisco, New York, the things happening in these front-row cities where there are very nuanced, localized issues that different communities are dealing with. I deal with a lot of communities, and everyone has some version of the housing crisis happening, but it's not the same story in terms of what's needed. That's why I thought the quote in this article was interesting, that they said, "The United States is not just one housing market. Policy experts and journalists who dominate the housing narrative tend to conflate extreme shortages in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco with conditions in the nation overall. This winds up overstating a real but localized problem." That really aligned with my thinking on it. We have this broad, high-level perspective on this supply issue, but when you actually start to talk with communities and different cities, it's not just about needing to increase supply and that will suddenly fix our housing market. It's more about housing typologies so that they are attuned to lifestyle shifts that they are experiencing locally. So it's more nuanced than just "build, build, build, and it'll solve the problem".

Chuck Marohn  15:27  

I've argued for a long time that doing just more of what we're set up to do is not going to make the problem better. I think we could say that San Francisco clearly has a housing shortage, clearly we need to think outside the box there. And taking places where we've put billions of dollars of transit in place and allowing people to build six-story condo units around that, like, I'm never going to argue that's not a sensible approach and that we shouldn't do that. I think, though, when we anchor on that as the solution, and then we export that around the country, what we end up with is a series of tools that are reinforcing the constraints that we have. I'll go back to the Henry Ford assembly line thing. If we set up a system where the federal government was going to have preferred financing for SUVs and Hot Rod cars and that was it, no one's going to build pickup trucks and sedans, no matter if there's a huge demand for it. It doesn't get preferred financing. It's not part of the system. You'd have to retool your entire manufacturing process to do it. You're not guaranteed a profit on it the way you are on the thing that you know how to produce over and over and over. When we look at housing, we see that, if you are a builder today, you can create as much single-family housing as you want. It's not well matched to the market. It's not what the market needs and wants, but people will pay your price. You can make money doing it. You're hardly taking any risk because the federal government has created that market. They backed that market, and if that market starts to go bad, they've shown over multiple cycles that they will step in and prop it up. Why would you do anything else? The other side of the market then is like, "We'll build apartment buildings and condo units and five over ones, and we'll build the same product over and over. We had a guy on a while back who's like, "Yeah, there's 28 companies in the country that build that." They, again, get preferential financing to do that. You can't enter that market if you're not part of that market. If anything, that market is consolidating, so there'll be fewer players five years from now building those than are building them now. And yeah, if it slows down, they're going to pull back. Neither of those are capturing where the market demand is. I think we can have discussions, and I think they're really good about, how do we get more missing middle? How do we build more of this stuff? How do we build affordable units? And we can center on zoning as a constraint, which it is, but there's two other constraints that we wholly ignore. One is, who the heck's gonna go build these things? What's the profile of the builder to do this? And then the third one is, who is gonna finance this? Where is the marketplace that will actually fill that financing gap and allow you to get into the cheaper home or the weird home type that doesn't really qualify for the subsidized mortgage, the big mortgage market. Who's going to take that risk if you are in one of the big markets? Those two things are not concerns, because you can just build more of the same stuff that we've already set up a market for, and your whole concern is just build more, build more, build more, build more, remove the obstacles. But as soon as you get outside of those four major markets, what you're really talking about is a more complex problem where the feedback loops around building more are just really different.

Abby Newsham  19:21  

Yeah. It doesn't capture market demand, but our current system also doesn't enable competition in the market or diversification. It's a few people that are building a product just in a copy-paste kind of way. We're building just a few different products, and then people look at that and say, "Well, that's what people want." We don't have a housing market that reflects what people want. I don't even know that we can collectively contemplate what a housing market that reflects what people want looks like, because I think it would look a lot more like the way we've built cities for 1000s of years, because that was much more reflective of what individuals were needing in terms of their housing. Because housing was an adaptable system. Right now, housing is primarily a financial product. And so when it's a financial product and you have financial tools that are specifically set up for that product, it's not going to be as attuned to individual lifestyle needs and changes over time, because we don't have the tools that support that.

Chuck Marohn  20:45  

Yeah. Can we talk about this demographic shift thing? Let me say this as a preface. I was saying 10 years ago when a whole bunch of people were enamored with Elon Musk for green technology and solar panels and batteries and like "he's gonna fight climate change" and all this stuff. I was calling him PT Barnum because I was not buying the whole shtick. So I'm gonna say something now that Elon Musk said that I think is right, and I'm not endorsing him in any way. I've been critical of him for a long time. Elon Musk has been going around talking about demographic collapse, and he has kind of infamously, now, had this exposed where he's paid women to have his children.

Abby Newsham  21:38  

Oh my.

Chuck Marohn  21:40  

Have you not seen this?

Abby Newsham  21:41  

No.

Chuck Marohn  21:42  

It's very cringy. If you're interested, go look at it. I'm not bringing it up to get into the cringy part.

Abby Newsham  21:52  

That's interesting though.

Chuck Marohn  21:54  

He has raised a point that, as a culture, as a society, we are having a hard time listening to. I'm 52. I come out of this cultural understanding based on insights of the 70s and 80s about Malthusian shortages, population explosions. When I was a kid, China had the one child policy, because China was just going to be massively overpopulated and there would not be enough food to feed everybody, there would not be enough energy, we're destroying the planet. And the whole idea really kind of comes from the limits of growth, the environmental movement of the 60s and 70s, that humans are overpopulating the earth, and we're destroying the place, and that's the biggest problem we face. If you step back after decades of industrialization around the world, after decades of growing affluence, of urbanization. China is in a population collapse. I mean, the New York Times has had multiple articles about them being in terminal decline, to where, in a decade, they will not be able to have the workers to build iPhones, let alone feed themselves. You have places like Russia, where, with the war in Ukraine, it's kind of become more broadly discussed that Russia is in this terminal population decline. They just do not have enough people ages 18 to 25 to fight a war, one where you're having hundreds of 1000s of casualties. They literally don't the population, because they also need those people to work on farms producing food and bringing up oil from the ground and shipping it out. That's your workers. When we step back and we look at the United States, there's two things that are abundantly obvious about our demographics. We have a huge bubble. We've called them the baby boomers, they were the post war bubble, and they are aging out. And I have parents in this, and in laws in this. And what this means, in a very coarse way, is that in a decade or two, they will no longer be with us. The generation that follows them, my generation, Gen X, is really small in comparison. The millennials are a big generation, and as the millennials go through life, what we find is that the millennial priorities become society's priorities. This is an annoyance to me as a Gen Xer, because my priorities were never important to anyone. But for a while it was like, "How do we get people into college?" And now it's "How do we help people with college debt, and how do we get people into housing?" It's the millennial priorities. The generation that comes after millennials, my kids, again, no one's gonna ever care about them. They're in the wake of this big generation. I'm not saying this to minimize any of the hardship or the suffering, because it's very real, but the demographics of this country suggest that there's going to be an abundance of housing in a decade or two from now. Again, I'm not saying that helps anyone today. It does not help anyone today. But overall, when we're making 30-year investments in housing, it's pretty clear to see that what we have right now is the constriction, and that constriction is likely to go away. And I think one of the questions that we struggle with is "What comes after that?" And to me, what comes after that is a bunch of housing in a bunch of places we don't want it, that's falling apart, that's poorly built. So when you get Conor Dougherty riffing off the yimbys saying "We need to go build sprawl over the map," I'm like, that may be the solution if the problem is housing today, and that's the only thing you care about. But let me just tell you, that will create a disaster for people 20 years from now. It will take the pending problems that we're going to have 10, 20 years from now and just magnify them in ways that are hard to get our minds around.

Abby Newsham  26:20  

Well, yeah. I just think about Kansas City, and we have four times the land area and essentially the same population that we did in the 1950s. Everybody in this city is responsible for four times as much land area with infrastructure and everything to maintain. What happens at scale with all of our cities, if the population continues to go down and we have less people? I know at the end of this article, he does kind of start riffing on cities and how we shouldn't build in cities and and all that. And it's like, well, does that mean that we should just continue to expand, with a population that is going to go down? We're going to increase our supply of liabilities that we're all responsible for maintaining as taxpayers? That just doesn't make sense to me. If anything, we should be contracting.

Chuck Marohn  27:33  

I remember when Harley Davidson stock went through the roof, and I remember looking at that, going, "What is going on? Like, why is Harley Davidson the big thing everywhere?" This was my early investing days. I started listening to their earnings things. And basically what happened is all these boomers who grew up idolizing Grease and the motorcycle culture and all that as like a storybook thing got to their 50s and said, "Hey, we've got a little bit of disposable income. Let's go buy motorcycles. Let's go by Harley Davidsons." And the demand went through the roof, and the stock went through the roof. If you look at Harley Davidson stock today, I think they're on the verge of bankruptcy, because that whole group that idolized Harley Davidson has largely passed now into needing hip replacements and end-of-life insurance and other things that are booming industries now. These are questions that, in retrospect, always seem obvious to us but, in the moment, are so hard to deal with. I mean, five years ago, my school district we spent $200 million building new schools and expanding because we didn't have enough space. And now, five years later, they're talking about closing schools. The thing is, those demographic shifts were not hard to see, but we didn't analyze it in that way. We just looked at this. And again, there's a little bit of wishful thinking in all of it too.

Abby Newsham  29:20  

Well it's just short-term thinking, Chuck. Let me just say, it's short-term thinking to just react and say, "Well, then we just need to keep building," and we're not looking at the very clear demographic shifts that are coming ahead. My thought is that we really just need to be utilizing the cities that we've already built and building within that framework, rather than trying to continue to spread out and build more and more. Otherwise, like you said, it's that issue of having way too much in terms of public liabilities. It's going to face this generational shift, and I just think it's going to make it way worse.

Chuck Marohn  30:09  

I think that's a genius point. Let me make it very real for people, so people can visualize what this is. Let's say that Kansas City needs 1000 housing units that are affordable, that people can get into. And I know the number is probably many multiples of that, but let's just say 1000. We're going to go out and have 1000 units. We can build those 1000 affordable units out on the edge in an apartment complex and subsidize it and try to get people out there. We can build those 1000 units of single-family homes and try to buy down it, even though the end price is not going to be affordable to people. We can do those two options, and those are the two options in the marketplace today.

Abby Newsham  30:53  

Those are the finance packages that are available.

Chuck Marohn  30:56  

Right. Maybe we can do something heroic and try to get that apartment built on the back lot of Kohl's or Home Depot, in one of your urban neighborhoods. But that's what we're looking at. What if, instead, we put those 1000 units in our existing neighborhoods as backyard cottages, converting single family home to a duplex, doing a little bit of addition and making it a triplex. Go forward 15 years, when we will have a demographic shift, and we will have an abundance of units, as per this article, which I think is actually real. How do we adapt when we have choice one or choice two? What we have is a bunch of units that no longer have a lot of demand. The price is going to collapse, and we either need to prop that up artificially with monetary policy, making everybody's place more expensive in an inflationary, artificial way. We've got to pump a bunch of money into places that we really don't need to maintain. In other words, we deal with this bubble in a very clunky way. Or, let's say we did 1000 units in the neighborhood, and then we find out we don't need 1000 units anymore. We only needed 200. Well, then what? Okay, well, you've got a a bigger house now. You just knock out a wall and you got a little bit bigger house. You just convert that backyard cottage into a storage shed. You can make use of it, it's not like it becomes worthless. Then if 10 years from now, there's another boom and a constriction, well, we can rework this stuff and make it into housing again really quick.

Abby Newsham  32:31  

But Chuck, that is a housing market that is attuned to changes in the world. That is, that is a living, breathing ecosystem housing market. Not to root us in Kansas City, but that's where I'm at. We have 1000s of vacant lots, so if there is such an under supply of housing, build the 1000 units on all these vacant lots, upgrade the infrastructure, deal with the issue of these vacant lots. It's better in terms of your fiscal productivity for the city, because you're utilizing the existing framework of infrastructure. You're not building more public liability. But that's not what we will do because that's not what financial products are geared to implement and deliver to market. We don't have those tools, and until we have tools-

Chuck Marohn  33:31  

Or the people to build them, right.

Abby Newsham  33:32  

Yeah. Well, the thing is, if we had the tools that makes that a good business model, and not just a business model for the kooky creative person who cares about urban infill, who happened to be able to make it work, whether they inherited some money or whatever, like, that's the thing. If this was a viable approach to building, the developers would do it. If this made money, the developers would do it. It doesn't matter if they care about urban infill or not, what people build goes into the least resistance direction. And right now that is large apartment complexes or maybe an urban mixed-use building, podium building, and big suburban shopping centers and subdivisions. Maybe not shopping centers because of retail, but you know.

Chuck Marohn  34:22  

Yeah, the most profit with the least risk. I feel like what we are describing is this nuance between complicated and complex. The existing system is like an assembly line. When we look at it in that simplified, complicated way, yes, there's suppliers of lumber, and there's suppliers of concrete, and there's people to go out and lay put in sheet rock, and it's a complicated system, but it's not one designed to adapt to feedback. You've got a huge surge of demand in a certain age group, we can't respond to that. We can just ramp up the assembly line or slow down the assembly line. A complex system is one that is able to change and adapt to different conditions. It does it in a spooky way where we're not directing it, it just happens behind the scenes. What we have done, really during the Great Depression, when we were trying to counteract housing decline, and after World War Two, when we were trying to grow our way out of economic malaise, we created a housing market that runs like a machine. It's complicated. There's a lot of parts to it, but the reality is that we can just jack up that assembly line or slow down that assembly line, depending on what we need at the moment. But it isn't responsive. It isn't nuanced. It doesn't respond to our needs or complexity. And so you do that for three generations, and you have housing that is unaffordable for everybody with no real skill to respond to it. We can argue -- and I feel like this is the core, often, of the yimby argument -- about how fast we make that assembly line go. I think a more sophisticated argument is, how do we get out of the assembly line process and make housing a real, bottom-up, complex, responsive system?

Abby Newsham  36:25  

I mean, credit to the yimby movement, they're focusing on how to enable it through regulation, making things less restrictive.

Chuck Marohn  36:36  

Which is a big part of this, right.

Abby Newsham  36:38  

Which is a part of it. But what I think is missing from this is, like, where are the finance people? Because form follows finance, and we need reform in our financial tools. If you really want things to change, it's about the finance. And I'm not the finance expert, so I'm not going to come up with that solution, but I think, ultimately, that's where that reform is needed.

Chuck Marohn  37:02  

Well, I commit mortgage fraud, so I'm not the one you want to.

Abby Newsham  37:05  

Apparently, yeah.

Chuck Marohn  37:07  

No, I didn't.

Abby Newsham  37:09  

According to your mortgage lender, you did not commit mortgage fraud. So hopefully no one will quote you on that.

Chuck Marohn  37:15  

That's right. I'm so excited to share my downzone with you.

Abby Newsham  37:21  

Downzone. Let's do it.

Chuck Marohn  37:23  

Okay, so this week is not a book or anything. This is Chuck and Abby related news. So this week, NASA held a press conference, and they said -- I'm looking at an article in The New York Times, but this has been everywhere in science news -- "We have just found the clearest sign of life so far." I think that understates what they actually found. And I want to explain what they actually found. Because to me, this is like monumental in a way that deserves way more than this article. So NASA has been having these rovers on Mars. They're checking things out. They're looking at rocks. They came across, essentially formations that are consistent with microbial life. When you have microbial life around and adjacent to that, the excretions and all that form these certain types of what now today, we'd look at as a rock. Basically they're looking at it, and they're like, "On earth, this is life. This is what it looks like." This was like a year ago, and they basically said, "We found this. It's really interesting. We're going to send it to a bunch of scientists to rip it apart and tell us all the reasons why this is not life, because it certainly looks like life to us." That verdict came in now. And basically, the scientists that have studied this -- and understand, I think that they're doing good science here. What I mean by that is you have a hypothesis, you have data that supports it, and then you ask the hard question: Where are all the ways that we could be wrong about this? And then you investigate those. And they basically came back and said, "Look, this type of formation, this chemical mixture, this is what you get when you have microbial life." You can also get something really close to this in other conditions. Those other conditions would be extreme heat, extreme acidity, they listed a couple of things. And then they said, "But when we look around this site, none of those extreme things are in evidence." There's no evidence that this site went through extreme heat, there's no evidence that this site went through extreme acidity. And so the most likely explanation -- percentage-wise, there really is no other reasonable explanation -- is that there's been life on Mars in the past. The only other explanation is that there is something going on that breaks the laws of geology and physics and everything else we've come to understand about the world and about the universe. That's not impossible, but Mars is a lot like Earth. The things going on there are understandable to us. When we study geology on Earth, it informs us about geology on Mars in ways that we've tested and proves out to be the case. I think that what they have said this week is that -- and they didn't put a number on it -- I think they're saying "We're 99% sure that there has been, in the past, microbial life on Mars." And at the worst case scenario, "We're 95% sure that there's been microbial life on Mars." That is a statistical number that is so profoundly altering of our sense of who we are in the universe that it should be the front page news and everything, and it just kind of got a secondary article and we move on, because it's like one in another series of discoveries. This is wild.

Abby Newsham  41:20  

That is wild.

Chuck Marohn  41:22  

20 years ago, we were like, "We see other stars, but we don't know if there's planets around those stars." And then we found one, and then we found two, and then we found five, and now we found 5000 and now we're pretty confident that pretty much every star, or most stars, have planets around it. And that's crazy. Now, we've actually gone to another planet, like that one right over there. We went there. We had a rover. We're like 98%, 99% sure that that planet, at one point in its past, and maybe still today, we don't know, had microbial life. In scientific ways, that changes everything.

Abby Newsham  42:06  

So what does that mean for the implications? Like did Mars used to be closer to the sun? Was it positioned differently? Was the sun hotter and it's burning out? I'm confused about what were the conditions that supported that? Because clearly, like, where we're positioned in the solar system and the temperature we have here is what supports what we currently have. So I just wonder what that means in terms of how our solar system has adapted.

Chuck Marohn  42:44  

I feel like the thing that it means, the thing that we can take away, and I think we have learned this about Earth too, is that microbial life on Earth started far earlier than anyone suspected, in conditions that seem far harsher than anything we recognize today. That the earth was like teeming with microbial life. Mars did pass through phases where it had conditions similar to that of prehistoric Earth, and Earth in much harsher conditions. To me, the takeaway is that microbial life might just be a lot easier to get going on a planetary scale than what we maybe have long suspected. And then you start getting into evolution, and like intelligent life, and like how life would evolve over time and what the conditions needed. Because no one is arguing that Mars, at one point in its past, had cities and canals and what have you. That is like a whole different thing.

Chuck Marohn  42:44  

Yeah, there would be more evidence.

Chuck Marohn  43:53  

Well, the idea that you could look out of the universe and see distant stars with plants going around them, and assume that a decent percentage of them have at least microbial life? I feel like that is the next level of conclusion that you could infer from from this, because if it happened in one place, it's a miracle. If it happens in two places, it's like, an anomaly, and if it happens in three then we've got a pattern of how things develop.

Abby Newsham  44:34  

Well, yeah, it's the nature of how the universe works. That's so cool.

Chuck Marohn  44:41  

Wild, wild. I know this has been a tough week for news. I've been just giddy over this article and these series of articles all week. We all want to be alive when extraordinary things happen, and sometimes extraordinary things happen that are dark and that history will not tell very favorably. But sometimes turning points happen, and they happen in subtle ways that maybe we don't stop and appreciate.

Abby Newsham  45:16  

For sure. Well, Chuck, I know that you have to end right now. And truth be told, I don't have a good downzone for you. I've been so busy, and then we recorded a different Upzoned just a few days ago, so I've been basically working since then. And yeah, I don't have a ton for you. I'm sorry.

Chuck Marohn  45:39  

Okay. Well, I think I'm off for a couple of weeks because I'm traveling.

Abby Newsham  45:46  

I'll have more for you when you return.

Chuck Marohn  45:48  

I'll look forward to the next time. Thank you.

Abby Newsham  45:51  

Okay. Thanks, Chuck. And thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Upzoned. Thanks.

Chuck Marohn  45:56  

Take care.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  46:01  

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