Shiv Malik

Can you get

your act together.

Well, here's the other part to that thing.

So it's not just inspiration and it's not just kind of slight depression or embarrassment of the rest of the world, but it's at the heart of this project is really this, which is the social contract and repairing the social contract, right?

So what does that mean?

It simply means you have to have a country where people can work hard,

buy or rent a home and raise a family.

If you can't do that, your country is broken.

And that is basically what the heart of that book was in 2010.

And so that's been my motivation.

And it's actually imbued with a lot of, you know, I seem very positive and happy and I am an incredibly optimistic person, but there is a sadness, a welter of sadness.

Inside of me, having watched this for 15 years, nothing get better.

But more than that, losing my friends and family to abroad, to America, to Germany, to Norway.

You know, I've lost my community of people.

I thought our children would grow up together.

They have not.

So I was in the midst of writing another book, a third book called The Mutual Future.

And in it was the showcase of this idea was that you could build actually 10 cities if you want, premised on some interesting lines, right?

That you could have genuinely affordable housing, people where you're taking it back to the historic rate of about three and a half to five kind of price to earnings ratio, but beautiful housing.

And you could placemake at scale and you could, so sort of this, this kind of, and I thought, you know what, I'm just going to just go and do it.