Chris Duffy

My dad worked for the Port Authority.

And I wouldn't say that he was ever like, you know what my passion is, is like helping manage toll collectors.

Like I think he would.

But the idea that he could like come in and do a job and have a pension at the end of his career and he would know that he was taken care of.

And he took a lot of pride in doing a job well and being a good steward of public funds.

That for me and for certainly for people who are younger than me, the idea that you would be at one job for 30 years is so the exception and not the rule.

Yeah, New York and New Jersey.

Yeah, New York and New Jersey.

Right.

So there's also this idea that we have tried efficiency and productivity.

I think a really new idea I got from From the Ashes was the way that grief works in our personal life.

How it's not linear.

It comes in waves.

It's circular.

Sometimes it's incredibly intense and then it goes away almost entirely and then it comes back and how that personal grief.

can actually be in some ways a roadmap for societal and communal ways of thinking about progress and of thinking about dealing with problems, that it doesn't have to just be this straight, incredibly efficient line from we are A, which is bad, and we're going to B, which is good, that that's not how it works.

For people who haven't read the book From the Ashes, and please tell me if I'm wrong, it's both the story of you grieving your father who passed away and it is a story of COVID-19 and deindustrialization and racism and societal failures.

You're explicitly connecting the grief of losing a person you love with the grief of losing a community or a sense of self or career, right?

How and why did you choose to do that?

We're going to take another quick break and then we'll be back.