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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. This is Abby and you are listening to Upzoned. Hey everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upzone, a show where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the strong town's conversation and we upzone it, we talk about it in depth. Today I am joined. Joined by my friend Chuck Marone. He's back once again. I'm seeing you more regularly.
- [00:39]
B
I know, it's really nice.
- [00:40]
A
It's awesome.
- [00:41]
B
It's really nice. It is. 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 it was last week we were not on together, but the week before we talked about mortgage fraud.
- [00:59]
A
Yeah.
- [00:59]
B
And I had a developer and I actually had my own personal banker get a hold of me and say, chuck, you did not commit mortgage fraud. And someone. Yeah, someone. No, my own personal banker. And you know, he's a really sweet guy and we have kids the same age and I mean, I've been. My office, when I ran my own planning engineering firm was in the basement of that bank. So I knew them really, really well. But he apparently listened to the podcast and said, you know, you did not commit mortgage fraud. And someone sent me like a 1200 page federal guideline book and like pointed out the one page where it said you can have more than one primary residence if you meet like one of these four criteria. And apparently I met. I don't know if that was the case back in, you know, 2000, but it was, it's the case today. So.
- [01:54]
A
Really?
- [01:55]
B
Yeah, there were a lot of. It's interesting because, you know, the word primary is a singular word. You know, like if we say, you know, 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, like, 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 in the first county.
- [02:37]
A
Okay, interesting.
- [02:39]
B
So no mortgage.
- [02:41]
A
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.
- [02:53]
B
I was pretty confident I was not going to go to prison. But yeah, yeah, it's an interesting discussion. And I mean, the very fact that there's a 1200 page booklet outlining, you know, the nuances of federal housing policy just tells you that federal housing policy is really Whack.
- [03:12]
A
So, yeah. 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, this is 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 Yin Yi today.
- [03:34]
B
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.
- [03:57]
A
I mean, I think so, too. And, you know, shout out Nolan, who's a friend of mine, you know, 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.
- [04:12]
B
Fun is not what I would call it, but let's go.
- [04:15]
A
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 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, you know, inevitably passing away, which will release millions of homes back onto the market by 2030, with estimates ranging from 4 to 14 million units. And 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 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, yeah, it 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 is how, how does this conversation around the quote unquote national housing crisis and the shortage impacted by the largest generation eventually graduating from life.
- [06:53]
B
So I feel like there's so many layers to this. Can I start with a weird abstraction and then we can like pull it apart?
- [07:00]
A
Yeah, I expect nothing less.
- [07:03]
B
So, so I remember in the very early days when I was writing strong towns, like so like 20, 2010, you know, like in that time frame there was this push in a couple of cities and I remember Omaha was one to build a version of the High Line. New York City's High Line. At that point in time, I had never gone on, I'd never walked the High Line, I'd never been around it, I'd 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 like so many things to work on, so many things that are like low hanging fruit, so many things that they should focus on. Why is this the distraction? And it took me a while to like really understand and connect the idea that if you were. Because it was largely being pushed by like local planners there, if you are reading like 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 like a handful of places. If you are an urban planner, particularly back in 2008, 2009, when you know, I was one blog of like a handful talking about urban issues. This was not a, you know, not because people weren't interested in it, but because blogging was really immature. It wasn't really developed yet to where, you know, everybody has a, has a substack. Now I, I, I say this because there, I think there is a growing realization and there's studies that have backed this up. In fact, there's a really good one from the University of Kansas by a guy named Kirk McClure who has looked at what this opinion piece in the Washington Post says is a conflation between the, 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. That report from Kansas University, from ku, the professor there basically concludes, hey, 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, or you go to. 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, like a place to get started and start to grow into. But if you just look in the macro sense, we've built lots and lots of homes. In fact, home building in get out of those kind of high demand, high shortage places. And home demilling has not only kept up, but in a lot of places has exceeded the local demand. It's just that we're building big Sheetrock palaces and suburban tract homes that go for 300, 400, 500,000. And that idea of what housing advocates like to talk about, the filtering effect, you know, that 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, you know, the, the 40 year old suburb suddenly become affordable because the 20 year old suburb and the 10 year old suburb people have filtered up into them. What you're having is the third ring, you know, the, the old suburb falling apart and becoming a place nobody wants to live in and the other places, you know, 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 like the most heated places. Right. Does that, does that make sense, Abby?
- [11:19]
A
Yeah, to me, 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. And I do agree though, that I.
- [11:58]
B
Think the elaborate on that a little bit though. I feel like you're saying Henry Fordism, 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.
- [12:13]
A
Well, that's the, that's not what I'm saying like that. I think the problem is that that is all we build. We build Large apartment complexes, urban apartment buildings, maybe mixed use, or we build large suburban style houses and there isn't, I think there's a real market for, especially for seniors, there's a huge market for having small format one story houses with, you know, low maintenance needs. Not huge, lots of. And that goes, I mean that's a market that I think 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. Like the starter house, the small format starter house, or I guess we could call it starter or ender house if we want to be morbid about it. But that is not a type that we provide and we don't allow accessory units. I mean, seniors who live in these large houses, I mean, 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 that their family could take the rest of it? I mean, we don't, we just don't have, we don't have housing policies that are attuned to localized lifestyle shifts in the population. And I think, I think what's interesting about this article is that it does talk about how our kind of national conversation about housing has been really geared to San Francisco, New York, you know, the things happening in these front row cities where there are very nuanced localized issues that different communities are dealing with. And like, I mean, 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. And that's why I thought the quote in this article was interesting that they said the housing. 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. And that really kind of aligned with my thinking on it is that we have this kind of 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 like, oh, we need 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.
- [15:28]
B
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, you know, San Francisco clearly has a housing shortage. Clearly we need to think outside the box there. And clearly the idea of 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 that's not a sensible approach and that we shouldn't do that. I think though, when we anchor on that as like 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. You know, if, if we set up a system where the federal government was going to have preferred financing for SUVs and hot rod cars and like, that was it. And then there was a huge demand for pickup trucks and sedans. No one's going to build pickup trucks and sedans. No matter if there's a huge demand for it. If 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, what we see is that we can. 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, they're the market maker. They've created that market, they back that market. And if that market starts to go bad, they've shown over multiple now 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 like we'll build the same product over and over. And we had the, the, the guy on last summer, now this like 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 they're 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. And 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 and you know, don't worry about. One is who the heck's gonna go build these things? Like, what's the profile of the builder to do this? And then the third one is who is gonna finance this? Like, where is the marketplace that will actually fill that financing gap and allow you to get into the cheaper home that really doesn't qualify 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 second things are not concerns because you can just build more of the same stuff that we've already set up the 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, really different.
- [19:21]
A
Yeah, well, and it doesn't capture market demand. But our current system also, it doesn't, it doesn't enable competition in the market or diversification because, you know, it's a few people that are building a product just like kind of in a copy paste kind of way, like we're building just a few different products. And then people look at that and say, well, that's what people want. But we don't have a housing market that reflects what people want. I don't think that, 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 thousands of years. Because that was much more reflective of what, what individuals were needing in terms of their housing. Because housing was an adaptable system. Right now housing is, it's 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.
- [20:46]
B
Yeah, can. Can we talk about this demographic shift thing? Because I'm. Okay, let me, 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, you know, green technology and solar panels and batteries and like, he's going to fight climate change and all this stuff, I was calling him P.T. barnum because I was not buying the whole shtick. So I'm going to 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, long time. Elon Musk has been going around talking about demographic collapse and he has, you know, kind of infamously now had this exposed where he's paid women to have his children. And like, if you, if you want to see, like, cringy. Have you. You've not seen this? Okay. No, it's very cringy. Is it really, really cringy? If you're interested, go look at it. I'm not bringing it up to like, you know, get into the cringy part.
- [21:52]
A
But no, that is interesting, though.
- [21:55]
B
He has raised a point that as a culture, as a society, we're not. We have a. 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 in China, they 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. There would not be enough this. We're destroying the planet. And the whole idea, and this really kind of comes from the limits of growth. The environmental movement of the 60s and 70s is that humans are overpopulating the earth and we're destroying the place. And like, that's the biggest problem we face. If you step back, after decades of industrialization around the world, after decades of kind 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 like terminal decline to where, you know, in a decade they will not be able to have the workers to build iPhones, let alone like 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, like terminal population decline. They do just do not have enough people in ages 18 to 25 to fight a war. One where you're having hundreds of thousands of casualties. They just don't, they literally don't have the population because they also need those people to work on farms producing food and work in oil plant, bringing up oil from the ground and shipping it out. And 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, we have a huge bubble. We've called them the boomers, 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 you know, 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 are, again, no one's going to ever care about them. They're in the wake of this big generation. I think if we, I'm not saying this to minimize any of the hardship or the suffering because it's very, 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. Which 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 like the constriction. And that constriction is likely to go away. And I think one of the questions that we struggle with is like, 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. Um, you know, and so when you get Connor Daugherty, you know, riffing off the Yimby, saying we need to go broad sprawl all over the map. I'm like, that may be, 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. Like, 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?
- [26:20]
A
Well, yeah, because, I mean, I just think about Kansas City, and it's like we have four times the land area and essentially the same population that we did in the 1950s. Like, we. 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 kind of talks about. At the end of this article, he does kind of start riffing on cities and how we shouldn't build in cities and all that. And it's like, well, I mean, so does that mean that we should just continue to expand, expand, expand with a population that is going to go down? Like, that's just like we're going to continue to create supply of. We're going to increase our supply of liabilities that we're all responsible for maintaining as taxpayers. Yet that just doesn't make sense to me. If anything, we should be contracting.
- [27:33]
B
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? And then I recognized, because I listened. This was when I like my early investing days. And then I started listening to their earnings things. And basically what happened is all these boomers who grew up idolizing Greece and the motorcycle culture and all that as 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 buy 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 mean, I think they're on the verge of bankruptcy. Really? Oh, yeah. Because that whole group that idolized Harley Davidson has largely passed now into needing hip replacements and, you know, our 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, my school district, five years ago, we spent $200 million building new schools and expanding because we didn't have enough people or we didn't have enough space. And now, five years later, they're talking about closing schools because contracting, contracting. And 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.
- [29:22]
A
Well, just short term thinking, Chuck. I mean, 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 what we've already built, 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. Because otherwise, like you said, it's that issue of having way too much in terms of public liabilities is going to face this generational shift and it's. I just think that's going to make it way worse.
- [30:09]
B
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 a thousand housing units that are affordable that people can get into. And I know the number's probably like many multiples of that, but let's just say a thousand. We're going to go out and have a thousand units. We can build those thousand affordable units out on the edge in an apartment complex and subsidize it and try to get people in out there. We can build those thousand units of single family homes and try to buy down it, even though they're the end price is like not going to be affordable to people. We can do those two options, and those are the two options kind of in the marketplace today.
- [30:53]
A
Maybe we do something packages that are available.
- [30:57]
B
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 okay, that's what we're looking at. What if instead we put those thousand units into, 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. Okay, 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're going 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 a thousand units in the neighborhood and then we find out we don't need a thousand units anymore. We only needed 200. Or we only needed what? Well then what? Okay, well you've got 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. Like you can make use of it. It's not like it becomes worthless. And then if 10 years from now there's another boom in like a constriction, well, we can like rework this stuff and make it into housing again really quick.
- [32:32]
A
That is like, that is a housing market that is attuned to changes in the world. Like that, that is, that is a living, breathing ecosystem housing market. I mean I think like just to not rude us in Kansas City, but that's where I'm at. We have thousands of vacant lots like all. So, so if there, if there is such an undersupply of housing, build the thousand 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. That's just not how. That's not what we will do because. Because that is not the financial, that's not what financial products are geared to implement and deliver to market. We don't have those tools. And until we have or the people.
- [33:31]
B
To build them or. Right, yeah, yeah.
- [33:33]
A
Well, the thing is, is like 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 happens to be able to make it work, whether they inherited some money or whatever. Like, I mean that's the thing. It's like if this was a viable approach to building, the developers would do it. If this made money, the developers would do it. They, 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.
- [34:22]
B
Yeah, the most profit with the least risk.
- [34:25]
A
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
- [34:28]
B
I feel like what we are describing is this nuance between complicated and complex. What the existing system is, is like an assembly line. And 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 put in sheetrock. 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 in 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. And it does it in a spooky way where we're not directing it, it just happens behind the scenes. What we have done in our, I mean really during the Great Depression when we were trying to counteract housing decline, and after World War II, 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, is that we can just jack up that assembly line or slow down that assembly line, depending on what we need. And at the moment. But what it isn't is it isn't responsive, it isn't nuanced, it doesn't respond to our needs or complexity. And so you, you do that for three generations and you have housing that is unaffordable for everybody with no real like skill to respond to it. And that's not a we can argue. And I feel like this is the core often of the YIMBY argument is how fast do we make that assembly line go? I think a more sophisticated argument is how do we make, how do we get out of the assembly line process and make housing a real bottom up, complex, responsive system?
- [36:26]
A
In my thought, I mean, to credit for the YIMBY movement, I mean they're focusing on how do you enable it through regulation, making things, which is a strict part of this, 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. 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 like ultimately that's where that reform is needed.
- [37:02]
B
Well, I commit mortgage fraud, so I'm not the one you want to go to, apparently. Yeah, no, I didn't.
- [37:10]
A
According to Your mortgage lender. You did not commit mortgage fraud. So hopefully no one will quote you on that.
- [37:16]
B
That's right. Can I share? Can we, Can I. I'm so excited to share my down zone with down zone.
- [37:21]
A
Let's do it. Yep.
- [37:23]
B
Okay, so this week, this is not a book or anything. This is, this is news. This is Chuck and Abby related news. So this week, NASA held a press conference and they said, and I'm looking at 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. Right. And I want to explain what they actually found because to me, this is. This is like monumental in a way that deserves way more than this article. So NASA's 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. But they basically, like, they're looking at it and they're like, on Earth, this is life. This is what it looks like. And so this was like a year ago. And they basically said, like, we found this. It's really, 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 like good science here. And good science by what, 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 and all this, this is like a pre. This, this is like what you have. When you have microbial life, this is what you get. You can also get something really close to this in other conditions. Those other conditions would be extreme heat, extreme acidity, extreme like, you know, they listed like a couple things and then they said, but when we look around this site, none of those extreme things are in evidence. Like, 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, like, you know, percentage wise, like, 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, which is not like, 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 like, yeah, like that 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 like the front page news and everything. And it just kind of like got a secondary article and we move on because it's like one in another series of discoveries. This is wild, because that is wild if you say that there is life on another planet. 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 5,000. And now we're pretty confident that pretty much every star or most stars have planets around it. And, and that's, that's like crazy right now. We're, we've actually gone to another planet like that one right over there. We went there, we had a rover. It looked, 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. That changes, like in scientific ways. That changes everything.
- [42:07]
A
What does that mean for the implications of like, 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 how, like, what were the conditions that supported that? Because clearly where we're positioned in the solar system and the temperature we have here is what supports the, what we currently have. So I just wonder what that means in terms of how our solar system has adapted.
- [42:45]
B
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. And so, to me, Mars did pass through phases where it had conditions similar to that on prehistoric Earth and Earth in much harsher conditions. To me, the takeaway is microbial life might just be a lot easier to get going on a planetary scale than what we maybe have long suspected. And, you know, then you start getting into evolution and, like, intelligent life and, like, how life would evolve over time and what the conditions needed. Because, you know, no one is arguing that Mars, at one point in their past, had cities and, you know, canals and, like, what have you. I mean, that. That is, like, a whole different thing.
- [43:50]
A
But, yeah, there would be more evidence.
- [43:53]
B
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, that is a. I feel like that is the next level of conclusion that you could infer from this. Because if it happened in one place, it's a miracle. And if it happens in two places, it's, you know, like, anomaly. Yeah. And if it happens in three, then you're like, all right, now we've got, like, kind of a pattern of how things develop, right?
- [44:34]
A
Well, yeah, it's the nature of how the universe works.
- [44:39]
B
Yeah.
- [44:39]
A
That's so cool.
- [44:40]
B
So, okay. Wild. Wild. I'm just, like. I've been. 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.
- [44:55]
A
Good for you. Yeah.
- [44:57]
B
I mean, this is like, you know, we all want to be alive when, like, extraordinary things happen. And sometimes extraordinary things happen that are dark and that history will not, you know, tell very favorably. But sometimes turning points happen, and they happen in subtle ways that maybe we don't stop and appreciate for sure.
- [45:18]
A
Well, Chuck, I know that you have to end right now, and truth be told, I don't have a good down zone for you. I've been so busy. I've been so busy. And then we recorded a different up zone 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.
- [45:39]
B
Okay, well, let's. I think I'm off for a couple weeks because I'm traveling.
- [45:46]
A
But I'll have more for you when you return.
- [45:49]
B
I'll look forward to the next time.
- [45:51]
A
Yeah.
- [45:51]
B
Thank you.
- [45:52]
A
Okay. Thanks, Chuck. And thanks, everyone, for listening. To another episode of Upsound. Thanks.
- [45:57]
B
Take care. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a non profit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong towns member@strongtowns.org membership.