Cameron Beebe spent much of his youth balanced atop skateboards, snowboards, and wakeboards. This was back in the nineties and oughts, in Red Wing, Minnesota, a pretty little town on the Mississippi River, the home of Red Wing Shoes. Mom was an entrepreneur, dad worked in the family business, and they lived at the end of a cul-de-sac. Cameron calls it “middle class nice.”

If the season was right, he’d snowboard nearly every day after school. That’s why, after graduating high school in 2008, he went to Montana State University. “My friends and I thought we’d be better snowboarders than we ever actually got to be. We practiced in a gymnastics center, and we progressed to the point that we could do flips. But it never really translated to the mountain.”

When he wasn’t boarding, he was reading philosophy and taking philosophy classes. He developed such an interest that he switched his major from anthropology.

Philosophy was a four-year program, the third of which was a year abroad, in Amsterdam. “This was when I started specializing in philosophy of physics, which became the focus of my BA and Master theses.”

Anki Lueggert, a German art history student, was in Amsterdam at the same time. It was her year abroad. Cameron remembers, “The first time I met her, she had come to our place from the library. She had a DVD of Cowboy Bebop with her. I knew the show, and thought, hmmm, good taste. She was cool. Pretty. Nice to hang out with. She had a better style than most other people.”

Love happened, and at the end of their year abroad, they took a trip to Florence and Cinque Terre together, then returned to their respective countries, apart. “Anki visited me in Bozeman once, and it went well. But the long distance thing was really hard. Things were shaky and uncertain for a while.”

So he pushed to finish his program in the remaining year, and applied to the Munich Center of Mathematical Philosophy. “As academic environments go, MCMP is in the top tier. I was excited about its masters program in logic and philosophy of science. Yet I don’t think I would have applied if not for this woman. I was in love, and when I was accepted to the program in 2012, I flew to Germany and moved in with her. It was a double whammy.”

Cameron earned his masters, went on for his Ph.D., and interned for a summer with Cray, Inc., the supercomputing company. “The internship was for machine learning and high performance computing. It’s hard to be a philosopher of science without any science experience.”

Just as he was wrapping up the doctoral work, the COVID came. “We were in Munich. Germany is densely populated, there was no easy way to get into open space. As soon as I completed my studies, we moved to the States and spent the summer at my parents’ cabin in northern Minnesota.”

Cameron began to think about tech as a career. If his snowboarding dreams had been granted, he would have moved to the Western Slope. But because of Anki’s work as a flight attendant, they had to live east of the Divide. With its tech jobs and proximity to Eldora, Boulder beckoned. They came for a month-long look.

Boulder was great, but rents were beyond their reach. Until they saw a Craigslist post for a tiny house on Stinky Gulch, right above Peak to Peak Imports. It worked for Anki, and Cameron figured he could commute to a tech job in Boulder.

They rented the place, but the tech job never happened. “I like it more in Ned. It’s cool, it’s nice, it’s refreshing to live among unique and different people.” Plans often change when people come up here - it’s The Ned Effect.

Cameron is open to tutoring now. “I’m trying to get people to realize it’s much cheaper to pay for a private tutor than a college degree. There’s an excess of Ph.D.s.”

But mostly, he spends his time working with The Bakery Brothers, LLC, a new grow house on Stinky Gulch Road. “I’ve been around weed in Amsterdam, Colorado, Montana. This shit is good! It’s craft weed. We’re a startup right now and we’re in a small building, but we hope to eventually sell it locally.”

See what I mean? From studying Freud and Jung in Munich, to growing craft weed in our small mountain town. And happily so. It’s The Ned Effect.