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The office sat on Louisiana Street near downtown, a squat concrete building under the freeway, the kind of place you would never notice had it not had “VIPPASSPORTS” emblazoned across the side.

I'd flown in from Medellín with a passport that needed renewing and crunch time on renewing my Colombian visa that depended on the people in this building living up to their name. Even though I have done this plenty of times, paperwork never gets easier or more enjoyable; in fact I would say the opposite. The world is always progressing toward more and more forms.

My contact was Kyler, at VIP Passport Services, and he was, in fact, very good at his job. He walked me through every step, was on point in returning emails, caught the things I would have missed, and turned a process I'd been dreading into one of the easiest errands of the trip.

Seven years abroad, roughly fifty countries, and the whole operation still runs through a small navy booklet I came back to Texas to renew.

Later that trip, my brother and I went down to Space Center Houston.

I stood under the space shuttle mounted on the back of its 747, a sight so absurd it looks like a toy some giant forgot to put away. I looked at moon rocks behind glass. But it looks like just any rock, you say. Not when you see it. It looks like a moon rock. I walked past a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster, still scorched from two cargo runs to the International Space Station.

Then we took the tram out to see the Saturn V, all 363 feet, laid on its side in a building made just to hold it, so long you walk it like going ‘round a football field. Only three Saturn Vs survive, and this is the only one assembled entirely from real flight hardware. Its stages were built for Apollo missions that got canceled.

It was ready for the Moon. It never got called up. Wonder if it still works.

What I wanted to see most was historic Mission Control, the room where they ran Apollo. I got there too late for the tour. But it’s always good to save something for next time.

If you go, give it two days, not the afternoon I gave it. There’s a Hilton and a Marriotts and a Best Western. The area has changed a lot since my elementary school field trip. Probably the Best Western was there back then, or just a Motel 6 with the lights left on.

The place has changed quite a bit since when I went on a field trip in elementary school.

There is a McDonald’s with an Astronaut Statue outside holding some French fries. How he eats those fries in a space suit, they didn’t think about.

There is a planned community called Nassau, like the island, and it intersects with the road NASA 1, so there is a NASA/Nassau intersection that seems built just to confuse motorists.

When we left, I bought a keychain, a retro NASA shirt, and a Neapolitan space ice cream sandwich, tucked it in my bag for Colombia.

When Neil Armstrong announced the landing on the Moon, the first word out of his mouth was the name of this city. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The astronauts got the glory. They earned it. But the men farthest from Earth were also the most dependent people alive. Every breath, every burn, every course correction ran through a room full of people in Houston watching numbers on screens.

So if you think about it, I hadn’t missed Mission Control at all. I had spent the morning there, on Louisiana Street.

At VIP Passport.

Houston has always been a city of people who came from somewhere else. Rice University's Kinder Institute calls it the most diverse metropolitan area in the country, and roughly one in four residents was born outside the U.S. Drive across town and you move through Vietnamese, Mexican, Nigerian, and Indian Houston, sometimes in the space of a few exits. Most of those families left a place they loved to build a life they designed.

I grew up here without seeing that clearly. It took leaving to understand that I'd been raised in a city of reinventions. I made the same move they did, just in the opposite direction.

Americans are leaving the country in numbers we haven't seen before, and most of the coverage frames it as flight. Burnout, politics, cost of living, a lifestyle fantasy with a beach attached. Some of that is real. But the people I know who've built something lasting abroad share one unglamorous trait. They never cut the cord. They built a ground crew.

The ground crew is boring by design. A passport with time left on it. A bank that won't freeze your card in a foreign pharmacy. Insurance that works where you actually live. A lawyer, an accountant, a friend back home who picks up at odd hours. Someone like Kyler, doing his job well on any given weekday.

Nobody posts about their ground crew. You can't photograph it against a sunset. But every astronaut who walked on the Moon would tell you the launch is the easy part to see. The mission belongs to the room.

The freedom you want runs on infrastructure you probably haven't built yet.

So here's my question for you this week. Who's your mission control? Name the people and systems keeping you tethered, and be honest about where the gaps are. If you're planning a launch of your own, a move, a pivot, a new life somewhere else, build the room before you light the engines.

As for the space ice cream, I ate it back in Medellín. It has the texture of drywall. I would eat it again tomorrow. Ten out of ten. (I filmed the tasting, plus the rest of the trip, over on Instagram)

Houston, problem solved.

If you need passport services and you are in Houston, I highly recommend Vip Passport Services, INC. Talk to Kyler, tell him I sent you.

🇱🇻 Latvia - As of September 15th, Latvia's 16-year golden visa is effectively over. Property purchase and bank deposits no longer qualify for new residence permit applications. The replacement fund route (€150,000) exists on paper but the state fund has not yet been established, leaving the program in legal limbo for new investors.

🇺🇸 U.S. EB-5 (TODAY) - September 30, 2026 is the EB-5 grandfathering deadline. Investors who file today lock in current minimums before a January 1, 2027 increase. If you have been on the fence, the fence just ended.

🇷🇴 Romania - Emerging as one of Europe's most underrated nomad plays: income threshold is roughly twice the national average gross wage (currently around €2,400/month), with a full exemption from income tax and social contributions for qualifying remote workers. EU access, low cost of living, five-year path to permanent residence.

🇵🇹 Portugal - Some good news buried in the backlog story: AIMA processing times have improved during 2026, with advisors noting real movement after years of stagnation. The program itself is unchanged - €500,000 fund route or €250,000 cultural donation, seven days minimum stay per year, permanent residence after five years.

🇹🇭 Thailand - Visa-free stays cut from 60 to 30 days on September 15th for most nationalities, making the Destination Thailand Visa the only reliable route for longer stays. The LTR program also quietly lowered its qualifying employer-revenue threshold from $150M to $50M, opening it to more mid-size company employees.

🇪🇸 Spain - The property golden visa remains closed as of September 2026. Investors still interested in Spain are being pushed toward entrepreneur, innovation, and strategic investment routes. If you own property in Spain, separate your real estate decision from your immigration strategy - they are now two different things.

🇮🇳 India - Launched its National Digital Tourism Stack on September 28th, integrating e-visa processing, accommodation verification, and bookings through a single API. E-Visa now covers 172 countries with QR-based border clearance under 30 seconds. Not a nomad visa - but a signal that India is modernizing its entry infrastructure faster than most.

Check your target country’s official immigration page for exact income thresholds and application windows. They move quickly.

Barnes and Noble gave me half off another monthly pick so I went in blind again. The cover said demon overlord. Fine.

The first fifteen pages are a slog. Very video game, very Dungeons and Dragons prologue energy. Power through them. It gets better and better from there and does not stop.

The premise: Galornus Prime, THE demon overlord, the one whose name made people physically squirm, has done everything worth doing several hundred times over and is exhausted. He fakes his death, takes human form, moves to a small village called Lower Middleton, and attempts to retire as a turnip farmer while quietly exploring pickling methods. He has a goat named Prometheus. The goat wins every encounter.

What surprised me about this one was how the book turns tender. Galornus starts out refusing to disturb the cosmic balance of good and evil purely out of self-interest. Protecting the town is good for the turnips. Helping the villagers is good for the retirement. And then somewhere in there, entirely against his will and better judgment, he starts to actually care. Evil becomes empathy through sheer inconvenience. The demon who just wanted to be left alone finds himself pulled back into the world, and by the end he has become something like an accidental angel.

"Evil should be grand, dramatic, and direct," he says at one point. "Not this paperwork persecution."

Being against annoying paperwork and bureaucracy won me over to his particular style of evil. I fully agree with the demon overlord. I imagine Kafka would as well. I will definitely continue to book 2 in the 3 part series.

For the last however-many videos, my workflow was printing out the script and reading it off the paper, glancing down every few seconds, flubbing each line three or five times before it was usable, and leaving my editor to stitch together the best takes. Functional. Not efficient.

The Elgato Prompter fixes that. It's a small beam-splitter display that sits directly in front of your lens, so the script scrolls right through the camera instead of off to the side, you're reading and making eye contact at the same time. It connects over a single USB-C cable, drag-and-drop your script straight onto the display, no extra tablet or phone propped up somewhere. Nine-inch screen, compatible with basically any camera setup I've thrown at it.

First video I shot with it, I nailed lines on the first take that used to take me five. If you're making YouTube videos solo and still printing scripts like it's 2009, this is the one upgrade that actually changes the math on how long a shoot takes.

(And if you're not subscribed to the channel yet, now's a good time.)

Buy it here.

My very first video, for anyone who's never seen it.

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See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.