San Francisco is one of the greatest cities of the last hundred years. It sparked the Summer of Love, helped launch a global music movement, and became the definitive epicenter of modern technology.
I grew up 69 miles south in Morgan Hill, back when it was mostly farmers and ranchers, but I spent plenty of time as a teenager hanging out in the Haight. As a kid, outside of Santa Cruz and the redwoods, my favorite places were the Exploratorium and Alcatraz.
San Francisco still leads the world in innovation, and today it sits at the center of the AI supercycle. I live in San Diego now, but I’m in San Francisco a few times a month since OPAQUE’s largest office is on New Montgomery (just down from House of Shields — and old haunt of mine in past tech super cycles) in the city and many customer and partner conversations happen in the Bay Area.
Like the phoenix, San Francisco has a habit of burning down and rebuilding itself. After the 1906 earthquake—and again after the pandemic—the city was declared finished, only to reemerge around the next technological inflection point. Today that rebirth is happening through AI, with talent, capital, and experimentation reconverging as platforms reset. The metaphor works not because it’s poetic, but because SF’s history shows renewal follows real innovation. Often I’ll hear people bemoan the destruction of SF during the pandemic. Don’t count on it. This Phoenix always rises again, renewed, different, but always beautiful.
My rituals: Run along the Embarcadero and back through China town. Zevi for lunch, Working Girls across the street from OPAQUE for coffee and a bagel (hi Max), and Fang for working dinners.
Some cities shape who you become (as is the case for me with SF); San Francisco keeps shaping what comes next, globally.
The United Arab Emirates creates quite an impression. The country is anchored in a rich and long history that stretches from pre-history to ancient desert trade routes to coastal pearl-diving villages, yet it’s moving at a pace that makes western ambition seem tired. It feels decades ahead of the United States. Dubai’s kinetic and surreal skyline is a striking contrast with the historic old town. Abu Dhabi has a kind of cultural gravity and an incredible mosque. The quiet vastness of the Sharjah desert…I love the desert. The visuals were literally awesome and the people were warm, welcoming, and high-integrity.
I was there last July and I’ve been meaning to write about it. It was in the 90s F and humid. I still managed a 3-4 mile jog every morning. It was the equivalent of a Florida Summer, but it was unusually cool for that time of year.
As always, some brief history—because I love it. Human settlement on the Arabian Peninsula dates back over 100,000 years, with archaeological sites in the UAE showing early stone-tool industries, Bronze Age metallurgy, and extensive pre-Islamic trade networks linking Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Indus Valley. Coastal communities relied on fishing and pearl diving for centuries, while inland tribes moved with the seasons across desert oases. By the 16th century, European and regional powers competed for influence along the Gulf’s strategic maritime corridor, but the interior remained defined by tribal alliances, trade, and pilgrimage routes that shaped the region’s cultural continuity well into the modern era.
Some more interesting facts :
The UAE hosts one of the world’s oldest known pearling cultures; divers once descended 20-30 meters on a single breath, and many coastal towns still map to historic pearling fleets.
The traditional wind tower (barjeel) is an indigenous form of natural air-conditioning; entire neighborhoods in old Dubai were engineered around passive cooling centuries before electricity.
The Arabian oryx—once extinct in the wild—was reintroduced through UAE-led conservation and is now one of the world’s most successful large-mammal recovery efforts.
Sharjah’s Mleiha archaeological zone contains a 130,000-year human migration trail, one of the oldest documented routes of Homo sapiens out of Africa.
The date palm, a cultural and agricultural backbone of the Emirates, has supported food security for over 7,000 years; today the UAE maintains global gene banks to preserve lineage diversity.
Dubai Creek is a natural inlet that enabled centuries of Indian Ocean trade; its shape and depth dictated the city’s earliest merchant settlements long before oil or skyscrapers.
The Empty Quarter (Rub’ al Khali), which covers part of the UAE, contains dune systems that migrate up to 30 meters a year—an environment that shaped Bedouin navigation, camel-breeding, and oral poetry traditions.
The falconry heritage is so integral that UAE falcons carry their own passports for international travel; it reflects a conservation tradition that brought the once-endangered saker falcon population back from collapse.
I was thrilled to experience this place firsthand. Awesome is the best word to describe it. I look forward to returning to explore more.
Avignon sits on a limestone outcrop above the Rhône, a strategic perch that’s drawn humans since prehistoric settlements ringed the riverbanks. The Romans formalized it in the 1st century BCE as Avenio, a fortified trading post tied into the Via Agrippa road network. The bones of that layout still shape the old city’s narrow lanes—perfect for close-up architectural shots of stone textures and surviving Roman foundations.
Everything changed in the 14th century, when the papacy relocated from Rome to Avignon—first under Pope Clement V, then firmly established by John XXII. For nearly 70 years, Avignon was the administrative and spiritual capital of Western Christianity. This is the era that produced the massive Palais des Papes, Europe’s largest Gothic fortress-palace.
Across the river, Villeneuve-lès-Avignon emerged as the papacy’s defensive counterweight. When the popes settled in Avignon, they needed control of both banks of the Rhône to secure trade, movement, and military access. The French crown—keen to assert influence without directly challenging papal authority—established Villeneuve as a royal town. To anchor that power and guard the river crossing, the French built the formidable Fort Saint-André atop Mount Andaon.
The fort’s purpose was twofold. Militarily, it dominated the Rhône valley and kept a watchful eye on Avignon itself. Politically, it was a reminder that even while the papacy ruled the city, France controlled the high ground. Its massive walls and twin towers still photograph beautifully: clean sight lines, panoramic overlooks of the Palais des Papes, and vantage points that show how the Rhône once defined borders, loyalties, and strategies.
Taken together, Avignon and Villeneuve tell a single story—one city holding spiritual power, the other holding the heights—shaping a medieval landscape that still reads clearly through a modern lens.
I started a photography exercise of photographing a subject thirty-six times with pre-fixed constraints and from different angles, composition, and camera settings. Thirty-six because this is how many shots a roll of film usually had.
Art is the output of one’s passion for improving the world.
It’s an exercise in mindfulness and presence. You might enjoy this too. Here’s the pattern.
36 Frames Challenge
Pick a single subject/location. (e.g., a café corner, a stairwell, a street intersection, your kitchen sink at noon.)
Set constraints.
One lens/focal length.
No burst mode. No “chimping” (don’t check the screen).
Meter once, then adjust only when the light changes.
In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. Le Guin argues that storytelling (and human culture) shouldn’t be defined by the linear “hero slays monster” narrative (the spear or arrow), but rather by a “carrier bag” model: stories that gather, hold, and weave multiple voices and experiences into a dense and consumable package.
Many scholars believe the carrier bag was the earliest human invention. It makes sense because before a weapon to kill for meat there was the forager and the forager requires a means of carrying and storing surplus.
This concept changes the very nature of story, technology, and business. All of which are commonly communicated as a conflict. The hero slays the monster. The winner vanquished their foes. However, there’s another way to see a story and human endeavors. That of a collection, a process, a gathering and storing of progress.
I see all human endeavors as art. Travel, exercise, business, and technology. Building a company or a new technology doesn’t have to be approached as a conquest. It can be seen as an act of collection for the greater good. We gather ideas, constraints, possibilities, people and carry these forward in a fungible form in an effort to advance and improve the experience for all people. The value isn’t domination it’s the creation of freedom through new possibilities.
Update: my wife told me she now understands why I buy too many bags.
My wife is in a writing workshop. We’re each taking a prompt and writing for 10 minutes and then reading to each other what we wrote. It’s fun and connecting. 🙂 This was our first run on the color of joy and the color of grief. The grief one is too personal to share.
There are these moments in life when you can see past the veil of the world that’s bigger than our reality. The filters are removed and you can glimpse the truth of life. The awesome wonder and magic of it all. The limitless possibilities. The boundless beauty. We’re filled with joy from the wonder of it all. I’ve seen this most often through the eyes of my children when they were young and still close to the divine. Before the world layered its gauzy clothes of trauma and fear over their eyes. I’ve had these moments alone in nature. Seeing the vastness and age of it all in geological, not human time. And I’ve had this experience riding motorcycles on empty roads into the oblivion at the edge of the world, beyond human perception. This bliss, this pure joy in the wonder of it all is the bright yellow of the universe that shines through our souls and connects us with all things alive, dead, and yet to be born.
I have two teenage children. For those of you who also have teenagers you understand how easy it is to lose you ***t with them. And how their developing brains and surging hormones often lead to them losing control of their emotions as well.
I read somewhere emotions are like weather patterns. They affect the environment, but always pass. Recently I’ve learned a lovely and helpful mindfulness framework to help me manage my emotions and maintain agency (so I don’t lose my ***t) when I’m frustrated with my children and I’m also sharing this with my kids. It’s called R.A.I.N., which is a helpful tool for keeping cool.
I’ve been fond of Buddhism since I was a child and was introduced to it by my dear friend Henry Kikunaga (friends to this day 44 years later). And I love Science so I’m going to cover this from both the Buddhist and neuroscience angles. Also, it never ceases to amaze me ancient wisdom had it figured out before modern science.
The ancient Buddhist text Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta instructs practitioners to observe feeling tones (vedanā) as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral — recognizing them without clinging or aversion. Modern neuroscience confirms this wisdom: emotions themselves aren’t problems. The problem is reactive behavior. Like I said, it’s like weather patterns…they’re not the problem, they just are and it always passes.
The Neuroscience
Most people either avoid emotions (equating openness with weakness) or get swept away by them (unable to process without destabilization). Both lead to what neuroscience calls “bottom-up” responses from the limbic system: Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn.
Here’s why this framework matters, it helps you shift from:
Emotions → Behavior = Reflexive survival mode (limbic system), which means I’m probably raising my voice at my teenagers about dishes or laundry.
To a more effective and fulfilling approach:
Emotions → Processing → Behavior = Considered action (integrated brain)
Pausing creates space for the prefrontal cortex to interpret emotional signals and direct behavior that serves your goals. Research by Lieberman et al. (2007) shows that simply labeling emotions reduces their neural intensity — what they call “affect labeling.”
Now, onto the simple algorithm that helps achieve this.
The R.A.I.N. Framework
Buddhist teacher Tara Brach adapted this acronym from traditional mindfulness practice, turning ancient wisdom into a repeatable method for meeting emotions without blind reaction. She also wrote “Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha,” which is a great book.
R — Root Yourself (Establish Stability)
Before engaging with emotion, stabilize your nervous system:
Posture: Sit or stand with awareness of physical grounding (I like to imagine a Giant Redwood — works for me)
Anchor: Brief connection to core values or purpose
This mirrors the Buddhist quality of equanimity (upekkhā) — the stable mind that meets change without being overwhelmed.
A — Acknowledge the Weather (Observe Without Identity)
Name the emotion without judgment or story:
Say “frustration is here” not “I am frustrated” or “I’m feeling sad”
Avoid narrative (“because they…” or “this always…”)
See it as temporary, like weather patterns
The Buddha’s instruction in mindfulness practice: observe experiences without making them personal identity. Modern psychology confirms this “decentering” reduces emotional reactivity.
I — Investigate with Curiosity (Extract Information)
Explore what the emotion is telling you.
Ask: “What’s the signal here?”
Fear → What risk needs addressing?
Anger → What boundary’s been crossed?
Sadness → What loss needs honoring?
Treat it as intel, not identity. I’m feeling X rather than I am X. Stay curious rather than critical.
This aligns with Buddhist insight practice (vipassanā) — using investigation (dhamma-vicaya) to see clearly rather than react automatically. Treat emotions as intelligence, not identity.
N — Nourish and Navigate (Self-Compassion + Values-Based Action)
Two components backed by research:
Nourish: Self-compassion activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Kristin Neff’s research shows self-compassionate responses reduce cortisol and increase emotional resilience.
Navigate: Choose action aligned with values rather than emotional impulse. Ask: “What serves my longer-term goals?” Then select one concrete step forward.
Respond with kindness toward yourself, then act in alignment with your values rather than reacting from fear, anger, etc.
Offer yourself a supportive gesture (a breath, a kind phrase, unclenching your jaw). Anchor back into a strong posture.
Ask: “What’s my next best action that serves my goals?” Choose one concrete step forward that serves your longer-term goals. Pick one small move — send a message, set a boundary, take a walk — then do it.
Why: In both Buddhist compassion practice and modern self-compassion science (Kristin Neff), nurturing ourselves allows us to re-enter the world from a place of strength rather than depletion.
Acknowledge (2-3 seconds): Silent labeling without story
Investigate (5-10 seconds): Quick scan for signal/data
Navigate (5-10 seconds): Choose response aligned with goals
The Math
I do love math…Traditional reactive patterns operate at millisecond speeds through the amygdala. This 15-second process engages the prefrontal cortex, which processes information 200 milliseconds slower but with vastly superior decision-making capability.
Why This Works
Buddhist psychology and modern neuroscience converge: emotions provide valuable information, but emotional states shouldn’t determine behavior. The R.A.I.N. method creates what researchers call “cognitive reappraisal” — processing emotional information through higher-order thinking rather than automatic reaction.
Aaron Fulkerson 