📩 In Today’s Email

• TL;DR: In an age built to hijack your attention and sell your soul by the click, deep work is your last unfair edge. Ghost the noise. Build yourself in the dark. Come back undeniable.

• The Deep Dive: The years I disappeared in Medellín and came back sharper than ever. Monk mode, pushups, blackout curtains, the Lego Titanic and the art of tearing yourself down to build better.

• The Read: Cal Newport’s Deep Work, the book that makes your brain bulletproof when the shallow world comes knocking.

• The Stream: Stardew Valley, Eric Barone, and why good games train you to design your life instead of drifting through it.

📢 Newsletter News

1. 🎉 We hit 1,000 subscribers! Thank you for joining this crew of deep work, quiet rebellion, and relentless reinvention.

2. 🎙️ Controlled Burn, Episode 2: Six Packs and Snake Oil is live. Recorded in Medellín with me and Chris talking living abroad, fake fitness, lost credibility, and AI shenanigans. Two in and already burning hot.

3. 🇨🇴 Colombia Digital Nomad Visa update: The Type V now lets you stay up to two years with renewals. No more visa runs. Proof of foreign income (around COP 4.27 million per month or ~$1,100 USD), health insurance, and a clean record required.

4. 🇸🇮 Slovenia: Launching a one-year digital nomad visa on November 21, 2025, for non-EU/EEA remote workers. Non-renewable but includes Schengen access.

5. 🇵🇭 Philippines: Rolling out its digital nomad visa soon. One year, renewable, requiring proof of remote income, health insurance, and a clean record.

🤿 The Deep Dive

THE YEARS I DISAPPEARED AND CAME BACK MORE DANGEROUS

(How I turned myself into a ghost in Medellin and emerged as something entirely new)

Everyone thinks they know what nomad life looks like in Medellín, Colombia.

Rooftop bars (azoteas). Dating apps pinging like slot machines. Co-working spaces buzzing with MacBook symphonies.

Bright-eyed Founders counting their Ks by the month, pitching, pivoting, ghosting, hustling in AirPods toward some exit that never quite comes.

But that was not how I lived.

I lived like a monk. 

The afternoon sun pressed against blackout curtains. Outside, motos snarled and reggaeton echoed off hollow brick walls.

But in my room, it was quiet as a monastery, the windows stuffed with sound absorbers, wood frames packed with organic fiberglass, professional grade sound destruction, learned from music producer friends back in Los Angeles 

My body ached from pushups. Seventy-something per set now. Not exactly an Olympic feat, but months earlier, I could barely manage ten.

I drank green tea as if it were sacred, because maybe it was. It certainly was for Daniel in The Karate Kid.

No sound but the ticking of an old yellow clock I bought in the extreme and rare case of an early morning dentist appointment.

Otherwise, as Alexa reminded me every morning, “There are no events scheduled for the rest of the day.”

Glory be.

No calls. No noise. No obligations but the ones I invented and the relentless pressure to carve out a new life worth waking up for.

THE DISAPPEARING ACT

Picture this: a Murphy bed I built by hand, a hot pot that cooked the same meal on repeat for months, lean ground beef with one tomato, one onion, and a head of garlic.

A red college fridge with an Edgar Allan Poe magnet in the corner. Books stacked like fortress walls.

And at the center of it all, the Titanic, the crown jewel of my obsessive LEGO collection, built piece by piece on long, feral nights when I needed to remind myself I could still make something whole.

You know that meme? A mattress on the floor. Stacks of books. A Kalashnikov. 

All a man needs.

Trade the rifle for the Titanic and that was my life.

The books fed my mind. The bricks kept my hands steady. The bed was for dreams.

Sometimes you need to build something beautiful while you rebuild yourself.

A bonsai tree would have been cheaper but the Titanic worked.

No bars, no restaurants, no parties. No dating app… adventures. I said no to everything that glittered, and chose only what burned. The loneliness was real. The discipline was brutal.

I was not trying to “find myself.” I was tearing myself down so I could come back stronger.

Another six months in that cave, another six months of cave, then another six, then another six. A drop in the pan.

THE DIGITAL GUILLOTINE

This was not some trendy social media detox. I did not touch a feed for years. Not because I hated it but because I refused to let it own me.

My friends will tell you. They joked about taking bets on my disappearance. And yet, to borrow from Twain, the rumors of my demise were greatly exaggerated.

I erased the clutter, shut out the noise, and for once just stopped being a consumer. Cold turkey. Nothing to scroll. Nothing to buy. 

Days became ritual. Coffee, Colombian of course. Water. Writing. Pushups. Meditation. A gratitude practice whispered into the dark. Real food. Sunlight. Five in the morning, four thirty in the morning, five thirty the next day, repeat. Candles lit, binaural beats. Protein. Sleep. Wake up. Do it again.

I went to bed before the loneliness had a chance to slip in. I woke before the city remembered it was hungry. This was life in pure form. This was deep work.

In the few years we have left before the robots do it all for us, deep work is what separates us, alongside love and family, from a life drained of meaning.

Deep work made me want to sleep because the next morning waited like a lover I could not wait to touch.

A SPARK IN THE DARK

It was not all grey discipline. There were sparks too. Anyone who knows me knows I love video games. I will argue with anyone on Twitter who says they destroy lives. Anything can ruin you if you do too much of it. Even chess.

Ask Bobby.

Some games are not just games. Some are art. Stardew Valley is art.

Created by Eric Barone, known as ConcernedApe. He drew every pixel, composed every note, coded every mechanic himself.

Broke, living in Japan, supported by his girlfriend while he sat in his own cave building a whole universe one night at a time.

For. Years.

When he released Stardew Valley it did not just sell millions. It gave millions of people quiet nights in front of pixel fields and small digital farms and gentle rains.

It gave them peace.

Eric Barone is the king of deep work. If you need proof that this is real, look at him. He is still at it, working on Haunted Chocolatier. There is a trailer from three years ago. No release date. When will it come out? I have to laugh.

Deep work takes what it takes.

WHEN YOU COME BACK

So here I am now, above ground again. The podcast is rolling. The videos are rolling. The novel is two-thirds done and alive in my bones. I have a film crew again. I have friends again. I am social again, but only by choice.

I did not just disappear. I did not find myself. I built myself.

Sometimes you have to ghost the world for a while to come back more dangerous than you were before.

All hail the king of deep work. All hail the quiet cave that lets you find the pieces worth carrying back.

Go lose yourself for a while. When you return, make damn sure the world cannot ignore you.

🤓 The Read

Cal Newport’s Deep Work is a stealth weapon for an age addicted to neon dopamine.

He’s a Georgetown professor with an MIT Computer Science pedigree, but don’t expect a stiff academic sermon.

Newport writes like some stranger in overalls, leaning on a fence, chatting about the weather while chewing straw. Then you find out he builds real rockets on the weekends.

His books are easy to read, but they land with real force.

Here’s the core: the ability to focus for hours is the last unfair advantage. Deep work makes your brain bulletproof.

Long, undisturbed stretches strain your neurons to fire faster and cleaner by layering up myelin, that fatty insulation that turns your mental wiring into a high-speed line. More myelin, more horsepower.

Want to stand out? Get deep or get drowned.

Four Rules and How to Actually Use Them.

1. Work Deeply - Treat focus time like a mafia deal. Book it, protect it, show up.

2. Embrace Boredom - Put the phone down. Sit still. Let your brain remember it was built for big thoughts.

3. Quit social media - Delete one app for 30 days. If you really miss it, fine. You probably won’t.

4. Drain the Shallows - Kill the pointless meetings. Batch emails. Say no more than yes.

Quick Hit.

Pick one hard task. Block 90 minutes tomorrow. For me, it’s my novel. Every day. Even Christmas. Phone off. Wi-Fi off. Do the thing. When your brain stops jumping tabs and actually locks in, you’ll feel it. Pure horsepower humming back online.

Focus is a skill. Attention is currency. Deep work teaches you how to mint it. Get quiet. Get sharp.

Make the shallow world irrelevant.

🍿 The Stream

If you ever wondered whether a game could be about not escaping but designing, this is it. It starts in a cubicle and ends on a farm you build by hand.

A life rewritten, pixel by pixel.

Eric Barone. The mind behind it.

Many of you know I’ve been obsessed with video games my whole life. They’re some of the cleverest, most artistic acts of human creativity we have. It more than annoys me when productivity preachers on X tell people to quit playing.

Play them. Binge them. The good ones make you sharper and more imaginative.

 It is backed by science if you need a permission slip.

What actually rots your brain is not games but the amygdala-hijacking round-the-clock propaganda cable news that keeps you addicted to outrage and fear. This is also backed by science.

There’s your argument for more video games, kids, served of piping hot. Use it!

The ones who warned games would rot our brains are the same ones mainlining the real rot every day and night.

The only fox in your life should be Sonic’s sidekick, Tails.

Good games wire your brain for flow and problem-solving. Spatial reasoning, pattern recognition, grey brain matter (that’s the good, Einsteiny stuff), neuroplasticity. Myelin strengthening… all of it!

Especially Minecraft. Especially Lucas Pope’s work, Return of the Obra Dinn.

Zelda.

And now Haunted Chocolatier. Barone’s next one. A ghost story dipped in caramel.

Barone’s life is a manual for building your own exit hatch that is not about escaping at all. It is about design.

🛤️ Outtro

Reinvention begins not with where you land, but with what you make.

Every place is a blank page. What you write there? That’s your legacy.

If this newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a friend, a fellow explorer, or anyone rewriting their life.

This community grows through real connection. One story, one share at a time.

If you enjoyed this, share it.

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