From Berkeley to the White House

Reflections on Longevity, Coffee, and the American Dream

Dear friends,

For this week, I imagine myself in the 2070s, a 90-something enjoying a cup of coffee at the original Peet’s Coffee in Berkeley, California.

The future of life expectancy

My mother’s father died of a heart attack when he was 52 years old.¹ His father died when he was 42, younger than I am now. As I scroll up my family tree on Ancestry.com, plenty of my ancestors passed away in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.

But not Nana. A few days after I returned from Denver, Iris and I flew up to Seattle to celebrate her 95th birthday.

Iris elated because she figured out how to fix Nana’s wireless printer when I couldn’t. 😂

Two years ago, I wrote about my grandma’s “extra life:”

My grandmother was born in Berkeley in 1929 and turned 16 at the end of WWII.

Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was only 58 for men and 62 for women. According to a new report, the average life expectancy in the U.S. is now 77.

She has lived 33 more years than her expected life expectancy at birth. If I were to do the same, I’d live past 103.²

In that case, I wouldn’t start the second half of my life until at least 2032. I feel so young — like I’m just getting started, like I’ve just discovered the truest version of me. I don’t know whether I’ve already started The Second Half of Life, but whenever it starts I want to make the most of it!

(Fortunately for me, drinking coffee is associated with a longer lifespan.)

The future of coffee

In 1947, at the end of WWII and the start of the Cold War, Nana graduated from Berkeley High School and moved to Willamette University for college, where she met her first husband. He was class president. She was shy. When they were 19, he gave her his fraternity pin. It was his way of proposing.³

In 1952, when the fertility rate was twice what it is today, they moved into a backyard cottage in Berkeley just a few doors down from the original Peet’s Coffee.⁴ Except that Peet’s wouldn’t open for another 16 years when the cranky Dutchman Alfred Peet started his mission to get Americans to drink less crappy coffee.⁵

Alfred Peet sold his business in 1979 for about $1 million. Today it’s worth more than $10 billion.⁶

I thought I already knew everything about the history of Peet’s, Starbucks, and specialty coffee in the Bay Area, but I learned a ton of fascinating coffee trivia in

EastBay_Yesterday

’s “Bay Area coffee history crash course” podcast episode.

By his own admission, Alfred Peet was a bad businessman and difficult to get along with. He trained the founders of Starbucks and had the opportunity to buy the company, which today is worth over $100 billion.

Who would have ever thought, walking by that little corner cafe in 1960s hippie Berkeley, that it would one day be worth $20 billion?

And what’s next for the coffee industry? Is there still room for innovation and growth? After all, there’s only so much you can do with coffee, espresso, and milk. I guess I’ll find out when I re-open the Time Capsule.

The future of Kamala Harris

My mother was born in 1955 in the same backyard cottage down the street from what would become the original Peet’s Coffee. She was nine when Kamala Harris was born a mile away to immigrant parents from India and Jamaica. In stump speeches, Harris describes growing up in a middle-class neighborhood, which once was true, but now her childhood home is worth $1.85 million and would cost an estimated $8,000 per month to rent.

I took a class in college about the 1960s and couldn’t fathom what it was like to live through the turmoil of 1968.⁷ But now I can. It’s kinda exhausting. But also, life goes on. We watch movies, we pursue hobbies, we invite friends over for dinner. We wonder how on earth this will all turn out. And then it does. And we keep on keeping on.

In some parallel universe, Trump didn’t turn his head. In some parallel universe, Biden didn’t drop out of the race. There are lots of parallel universes.

At the beginning of the year, I was fairly confident that Biden would win re-election. Last month, I was sure that Trump would win and that Harris was the worst candidate the Democrats could have fielded. I was wrong on all three counts.

Now, I’m hopeful that Harris will win and that we’ll settle back into normalcy, calm, and maybe even joy in the coming years. What could derail her momentum or help Trump come back from his unforced errors?

I’ve learned two things writing this newsletter: The future is weirder than we can predict. And yet, somehow it all makes sense when seen through the rearview mirror.

I have a feeling that one day in the 2070s Iris and I will be drinking a cup of coffee in Berkeley — maybe even at the original Peet’s — as I re-read today’s newsletter. I picture myself in jeans, a soft flannel shirt, and a blue beanie. Maybe I’ll look up the value of Kamala Harris’ childhood home. Maybe I’ll be that old man who interrupts the studious college student to recall what it was like to live through the Covid pandemic and the wild election year of 2024. Perhaps that student will be just as interested in 2024 as I was about 1968. We’ll see.

If you’re in the US, happy Labor Day. I hope you’re enjoying the holiday weekend.

David

1. 8 years older than I am now; what if I just had 8 years left to live!?

2. The WSJ warns that Gen X is uniquely unprepared for retirement compared to Boomers or Millennials. My retirement plan has me retiring at 70 and living until 90. Probably time for me to run the numbers if I were to live past 100. 😬

3. I only learned recently that she left college before graduating to get married and start a family. The feminist version of my grandmother that I grew up with in the 80s and 90s would have never.

4. In a case of unknowable foreshadowing of my own life, when my grandma moved back to Berkeley her parents were in Oaxaca visiting my great aunt Gertrude, who my uncle would also come to visit 20 years later.

5. The cool kids drink their lukewarm, single-origin, acidic lightroast. Not me. I’m a proud Peetnik. Give me a a nutty medium roast espresso of a cup of Major Dickinson’s any day.

6. A significant drop from its $20 billion market cap just four years ago.

7. We spent the first two weeks reading books and articles published in 1960 and kept going until we finished 1969. When we got to 1968, the Year That Rocked The World, it was difficult for me to believe that so much happened in a single calendar year.