With Durham Bowls, she’s an integral part of an innovative initiative to improve school food for Durham Public Schools. With Upstream Works, she’s founded a new and amazing way to support the building of equitable communities. She’s one of the directors of Food Insight Group, whose motto even is “Good Food. Common Good.”

Beth holds a Ph.D. in Nutrition Intervention and Policy from UNC Chapel Hill, and on top of all the amazing work she does in her day-to-day worklife, she’s also a board member at the Durham Co-op Market.

It can’t exactly be taken for granted that people want to dedicate their lives to the common good. So the first question for Beth is this: What is it about working for the common good that’s just so appealing?

The so-called Third Wave of coffee, the important inspiration from Italian espresso culture, single origin coffee versus blends, and what Robbie describes as the macho approach to espresso.

They also share their impressions on each other's businesses while revealing their most favorite coffee shops in all of America.

The latter was founded by Robbie Roberts in 1991, and he now owns three Durham locations as well as one in Chapel Hill, and he’s taken over two Green Bean coffee houses in Greensboro.

Behind Cocoa Cinnamnon you’ll find Leon Grodski de Barrera and his wife Areli, and their coffee adventure had its beginnings a decade earlier. After humble beginnings in the Asheville Mall and selling coffee from a bike, Cocoa Cinnamon opened its first brick-and-mortar location in 2013, which has since been accompanied by two additional locations in Durham.

While some might expect Joe van Gogh and Cocoa Cinnamon to consider themselves each other’s biggest competitors, that really doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead there is a strong camaraderie and mutual respect between the two, and they are both in the business of serving the community through the power of good coffee and physical spaces that allow people to come together.

As such, the story of Joe van Gogh and Cocoa Cinnamon is representative of Durham at its best: A city that puts camaraderie above competition, a city that treasures that which is local and independent, and a city that loves people with interesting stories.

For this exclusive two-part interview, I sat down with Robbie and Leon to listen to *their* stories and ask them a whole lot of questions about their love of coffee.

In this first part, you get to hear about what these two coffee connaisseurs prefer to brew at home, and how they handle family and friends, who are not likely to serve them as good coffee as they themselves would be able to make. We cover the topic of the snooty factor among coffee enthusiasts, which might not be so snooty after all, and we talk about if Robbie and Leon were surprised at becoming as successful as they have, and, not least, what makes Durham so special.

The interview you’re about to listen to, however, does not deal with the details of the accusation, the libel lawsuit that followed it, or how it affected the record sales of Oberst. Suffice to say that Oberst was undoubtedly innocent, and that his accuser completely retracted her story, admitting she lied to get attention.

Instead this interview, which was recorded earlier this year in Copenhagen, focuses on how to find peace in this world. Through meditation, marriage, soothing YouTube videos, getting older, and, especially for Oberst, through songwriting.

After the false accusations, the mental state of Oberst declined. In his own words, Oberst went on tour with his old punk band, Desaparecidos, to outrun the nightmare he was living in. During the tour, however, a doctor had to check in on the health of Oberst, as he was clearly not feeling well. He was diagnosed with unusually high blood pressure, a cyst was discovered on his brain, and the tour was cut short about a month.

He then returned home to his native Nebraska after having lived for over a decade in New York. Back in Omaha, he went through the therapeutic recovery process of writing the songs that would appear on both the stripped-down album Ruminations and then the full-band album Salutations. It is against this backdrop that the following conversation about finding peace took place.