Santa Cruz Mountains

It was called the Law Cabin Ranch School.

And it was located in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

It's a medium security correctional facility for kids.

It was opened in the late 1930s and continued to operate until 2019 when we finally made the decision to close it.

And that facility...

It sits dormant in the Santa Cruz Mountains at a very nice location.

And the city spends a quarter million dollars a year for security and maintenance.

No kids there, but security and maintenance.

And Tushar Atre was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made the move into legal weed in California, becoming a weed entrepreneur.

And then, you know, his body was discovered, um, three years after launching his legal weed venture you know riddled with bullets in the middle of the redwood forest in the santa cruz mountains and so how did this guy get from there to there became the subject of the magazine article and then but you know i sort of instantly knew and the first phone calls that this would be bigger than just a magazine article and started to conceive of it as a much larger project a book project

For the epigraph, you quote Dr. O'Shaughnessy from 1838 on the preparation of the Indian hemp or ganja.

I guess where ganja comes from, right? Yes.

So it's not so foreign to them to be dealing in a darker world where you're breaking laws.

And then there's also the kind of the more – the kind of fun interconnections between Silicon Valley and cannabis that have been going on for generations, right? Like from Steve Jobs, you know, doing weed, you know, and Steve Wozniak abstaining while they were creating, you know, the first Apple computers.

And there were a lot of initial sort of computer world entrepreneurs who were getting their weed from some of the characters in the book from the Santa Cruz Mountains, which is one of the historic weed growing regions, you know, going back to black market times.

And Burning Man, which is a kind of hybrid tech work, Silicon Valley slash world slash weed world invention.

well that was some time ago was a minute ago for sure um that was 1979 and um i had just turned 30. so i was young i was searching and i knew i was on a spiritual search but i didn't know for what for And a friend invited me to a lecture that I was giving in a town very nearby.

I lived up in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

And he was giving a lecture there in a little town called Felton, California, in somebody's home.

So it was very intimate, a gathering.

It's wild.

They follow the Eucalyptus and the Pescadero Creek into the Santa Cruz Mountains.

I even had a Cal Fire guy tell me, you're not going to believe this, by San Jose on the...

Northeast side of the Santa Cruz mountains.

He said, we were up there doing CalPERS stuff and something was throwing rocks at us.

And he called his Lieutenant.

Let's walk back to August 2020.

The CZU fire complex tore through the Santa Cruz Mountains.

I awoke in the middle of the night to an epic lightning storm, one I was shocked did not wake my kids.

It hit at the end of a bone-dry season after years of drought.

Well, he wrote the book Blue Mind, which was all about the surprising science that shows how being near, in, on, or underwater can make you happier, healthier, more connected, and better at what you do.

Well, guess what? Years with not enough water in our forests meant that we were hyper vulnerable.

The house that he built 20 years before to raise his children from scratch, here like in the Santa Cruz mountains, it burned to the ground, toast, forever gone.

He even wrote a book with his daughter on this subject called Dear Wild Child.