📩 In Today’s Email

• TL; DR: Stop drifting. Start building. Punk rock code and the tools to bankroll your freedom.

• The Deep Dive: The only two paths that actually bankroll borderless life — Create or Code. Inside my live experiment: WhereBot and the punk rock spirit of Vibe Coding.

• The Read: Ultralearning by Scott H. Young — attack your next skill like MIT in a year

• The Gear: Cursor — your AI copilot for tiny, rebellious coding sprints.

• The Stream: Somebody Feed Phil — Tbilisi, khachapuri, and why your next city is more than a visa stamp.

• The Squeeze: The Terminal — neon green cold brew for late-night code sessions as a new entry in ATN’s mocktail series.

📢 Newsletter News

1. WhereBot
   My first Vibe-coded tool for ATN. The first (beta) version of WhereBot is live for ATN readers. Answer a few quick questions and get your city match. One less excuse. Enjoy!

2. Visa News
   🇸🇮 Slovenia is launching its first digital nomad visa this November. Non-EU nomads can stay up to a year and bring family too.
   🇭🇷 Croatia has extended its digital nomad visa from 12 to 18 months, with an extra six-month extension if you apply before it expires.
   🇳🇿 New Zealand now lets tourists work remotely for up to 9 months under a new “working tourist” rule.
   🇦🇪 UAE just jumped to #2 globally for digital nomad friendliness thanks to faster permits and stronger digital infrastructure.

🤿 The Deep Dive - Vibe Coding

All over the internet, if you search “how to bankroll your new lifestyle,” you’ll find the same tired lists: ghostwriting on Fiverr, selling Canva templates, “become a VA.”

Most of it is noise. A few bucks here and there. Not enough to buy you freedom, just enough to keep you distracted.

At A Texas Nomad, we play a different game. High-agency. Clear design. Real stakes. We don’t want you scraping by, we want you thriving.

So let’s get real:

There are only two modern ways to bankroll a borderless life that actually matter, and both are wide open today if you’re willing to start:

1. Become a Creator

2. Build Tiny Software (Vibe Coding)

The creator economy is enormous. The joke is everyone’s a creator but the real number is tiny, maybe 1–2% are actually making things. The rest watch. If you think you’re too old, here’s the truth:

YouTube’s fastest-growing audience is people over 40. People are tired of plastic 20-something coaches who’ve never buried a father, lost a house, or reinvented themselves. They want grit, scars, and receipts.

We’ve covered the Creator path before, and we will again.

But today, meet the newest kid on the block: Vibe Coding.

Rick Rubin called it the punk rock of coding. You don’t need a CS degree. You need curiosity, Deep Work (Cal Newport) and Ultralearning (Scott Young). AI copilots like Cursor mean you can sketch weird tools at midnight that once took a team of devs and six months of burn rate.

This week I tested this myself. I put my LEGOs away and picked up code. I’ve built fun nonsense before (a Blade Runner calendar, a Mars–Earth Zoom call time sync) but now I wanted something for us.

So I gave myself a one-week stake: Build a real tool for the ATN community.

Meet WhereBot.

WhereBot asks you a few simple questions and tells you the best place to launch your next world adventure. Whether you’re solo, traveling with kids, looking for love, or chasing a better visa, WhereBot gives you a head start.

It’s messy. It’s raw. It works. Version one covers 17 cities and it’s free for ATN subscribers. This is Vibe Coding in action: ship fast, get feedback, improve, repeat.

I’ve been posting the Build in Public on X. People jump in to help, fix bugs, share ideas. That’s the real leverage: you make tiny software once, then it works for you forever.

In the future, we’ll go deeper into the Creator path: how to turn your story into income without becoming another fake guru slinging hustle courses for $99.99.

For now, pick your lane: Vibe Coder or Storyteller. Start today.

AI is where the next class of wealth will come from, bar none.

🤓 The Read

Before Ultralearning was a book, it was an experiment.

Scott H. Young didn’t just write about learning fast. He turned his own brain into a lab.

He finished MIT’s entire four-year computer science curriculum in a year without paying tuition or setting foot on campus.

He taught himself four languages in twelve months using raw immersion, stacks of flashcards, and the same spaced repetition that Duolingo feeds you now.

(Hint: Anki is still better for heavyweight learners, but Duolingo is more fun, and has a bird mascot - don’t tell Rio he’s no fan of owls)

Scott’s core idea is simple but brutal: you don’t drift into mastery. You attack it.

Ultralearning is about going deep and getting ruthless with your time and focus. One of his sharpest truths: ignore feedback that doesn’t fit the vision. If you bend for every critic, you drift off course.

He also kills the myth of passive practice. Flashcards alone don’t cut it. You need spaced repetition that sticks and direct practice with real stakes. I used to grind Anki decks to push Spanish into my reptilian brain.

The classroom didn’t do it. Relationships helped, as long as she didn’t speak English. But trust me, pillow talk only goes so far. At some point you need to say more than “What do you eat for breakfast?”

Another key is rapid feedback. The faster you see what’s broken, the faster you fix it. That’s why I’m building WhereBot live in Cursor and posting my mess in public. Six days of messy beats six months of quiet overthinking every time.

If you want out of gig scraps, Ultralearning is the mindset. Read it. Mark it up. Pick something hard and attack. Then show us what you make.

🍿 The Stream - Somebody Feed Phil: Season 8

What’s travel without food? Somebody Feed Phil is pure appetite on screen.

Phil Rosenthal is your goofy uncle who lands somewhere new, finds a plate, and shovels it in with wide-eyed joy. He laughs with strangers, hugs chefs, and eats like the world is a buffet made just for him.

Watching him unhinge his jaw and dance happy jigs should be enshrined in the food traveler’s hall of fame.

This new season hits places that matter to ATN, also. He drops into Tbilisi, one of the first 17 cities inside WhereBot. He tears into khachapuri, toasts wine with locals, and drifts through that warm Georgian chaos that traps travelers for months.

It’s the reminder behind vibe coding and ultralearning. We don’t build tiny tools just to sit behind screens forever. We build so we can stand in new kitchens, wander back-alley bakeries, say yes to food we can’t pronounce.

Put Phil on. Take notes. Let him remind you your next city isn’t just a visa stamp. It’s a hot plate waiting for you when you land.

The Gear

If you’re going to dip your feathers into Vibe Coding, you need a tool that matches the spirit: raw, fast, and willing to get messy with you. Cursor is that tool.

Think of Cursor as an AI-first code editor, your tiny rebel sidekick that never rolls its eyes when you type dumb questions at 2 AM. You don’t need to be a software engineer. You don’t need to write perfect syntax. You just need to try.

Stuck on an error? Highlight it and ask. Want to build a new feature? Talk to it like you’re explaining it to a slightly drunk friend. It’s not magic, but it’s punk rock magic compared to waiting six months to find a developer.

When I started WhereBot, I had no clue how to hook different pieces together. Cursor let me break the problem into tiny chunks, screenshot them, and throw them at AI until the pieces stuck. It’s not pretty, but the point is it shipped — and that’s the vibe.

If you’ve got an idea, a rough napkin sketch, or just curiosity about how the internet works under the hood, try Cursor. One messy afternoon with it will teach you more than a month of passive tutorials ever will.

Ship tiny. Ship weird. Get it wrong. Do it again.

That’s Vibe Coding. Cursor makes it possible.

The Squeeze - The Terminal

Your late-night fuel for building weird, tiny tools. The Terminal is cold, sharp, and neon green, like the Matrix code flowing while you work.

Why green? Because every coder knows that blinking green text means you’re alive inside the machine. It’s your own drinkable terminal window.

The Terminal

• 1 cup cold brew green tea (chilled)

• Juice of half a fresh lime

• ¼ cup coconut water

• 1 teaspoon honey or agave (optional, for a touch of sweetness)

• Ice

• Fresh mint leaves for garnish

How to make it:

Pour the cold brew green tea over ice. Squeeze in the lime. Add coconut water and stir in honey if you want it a bit sweet. Shake or stir well. Drop in a mint leaf. Watch the green swirl while you run another line of code.

Sip it at midnight. Stare at your messy build. Keep typing. Keep shipping. Green fuel for your next launch. Now, if only we could get Keanu to take a picture with it.

🛤️ 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.

Ask Birdbrain GPT (Powered by Yours Truly, Rio)

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