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📩 In Today’s Email

• The Deep Dive: No toilet. No fridge. No cash. Just a sweaty floor, an expired can of peas, and a blue teddy bear that saved me. This is what it looks like when the safety net snaps, and what brought me back.

• The Read: The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler. A field manual for high-agency living. Forget hacks. This book teaches you how to build the mental machinery to do hard things when it matters.

• The Stream: Skote Outdoors on YouTube. Off-grid love story meets IRL Minecraft. Building a goat shelter becomes an unexpected lesson in freedom, rhythm, and contentment with the soul.

• TL;DR: This week’s theme: the real safety net isn’t money or systems. It’s people. Build your life accordingly.

📢 Newsletter News

1. Philippines: Launching a new Digital Nomad Visa in June 2025. One-year renewable visa for remote workers earning foreign income. No local employment allowed. Good Wi-Fi, low cost of living, and beach access included.

2. France, Spain, Germany (Schengen Zone): Expect delays for digital nomad and long-stay visa applications across much of Europe this summer. Embassies are overloaded and under-staffed. Apply early, or risk derailing your plans.

3. Remember, Rio’s AI alter ego, Birdbrain GPT, is live and learning.

🤿 The Deep Dive

There I was, laid up in bed. Everything around me broken or breaking. My immigration appointment just days away, and I could barely stand.

The toilet tank had cracked and flooded the bathroom in neon blue water. One of those drop-in tablets I enjoy for a little bit of color in my morning routine. It looked like someone had murdered a Smurf.

Some virus had taken hold. Rumor had it one was going around. Maybe COVID. Maybe dengue. Maybe just the universe deciding to knock me down a peg.

I didn’t go to the doctor, of course. I am a man. And we are, historically, stupid about these things.

The fridge I bought on Facebook Marketplace had died again. There went my savings on buying a used fridge. I fell right into the trap I warn everyone else about regarding Facebook Marketplace. I’d already paid to repair it once.

Now fixing it again would make it cost as much as a new one. So I had no fridge, no working toilet, and just enough energy to flop to the tile floor when the bed got too hot.

The TV droned on in the background, 24-7. YouTube’s algorithm spinning out the parade of apocalyptic thumbnail videos in autoplay.

War. Collapse. AI stealing jobs. Political chaos wrapped in emergency fonts and influencer panic. The world was going to hell, and I was sweating through it in silence.

Then my new credit card got flagged for fraud. It had just arrived, and because my software tools (like for this newsletter) charge from the U.S. and I live abroad, it tripped all the wrong wires. Schwab said the card needed to “learn my habits.”

It sure wasn’t learning fast enough.

So I couldn’t take out cash.

Couldn’t use Rappi, the delivery service, to get food.

And the pantry was looking a little bleak. Out of date can of peas, anyone?

For four days, I barely moved.

No work. No income. No momentum. Just heat and helplessness.

This was, one might say, a “low.” The kind they don’t romanticize.

I missed my newsletter deadline. The business froze. Doubt came to roost.

All my talk about “pushing through” when you’re tired or sick sounds noble until you’re actually tired or sick. Until you miss deadlines. Until the algorithm starts to feel like a personal attack.

Until you start asking questions most digital nomads don’t admit out loud:

"Is this freedom, or just failure with better scenery?”

And then, something shifted.

Friends began to show up.

With food.

With vitamin C.

With electrolyte drinks and quiet understanding.

Even with good old instant Quaker grits from the USA.

Grits for grit.

One friend came with her daughter. The little girl brought me a handwritten note saying I was their best friend and told me not to feel sad or bad. She gave me a little blue teddy bear.

The bear sat on my bed like a tiny messenger of hope and joy from the future. A reminder that everything breaks, but when it does, you don’t have to do it alone.

I’m the one always preaching independence. Location freedom. Living without a safety net.

But here’s what I forgot.

We are a social species. Our victories come in teams; our defeats should, too, because that’s when you find out who really shows up.

Connection is not an accessory. It’s the operating system.

Being strong doesn’t mean doing it all yourself.

It means building the kind of life where support can still reach you.

It means being the kind of person who shows up. So that when you fail, someone else shows up for you.

Our real safety net is each other.

Because sometimes the fridge breaks.

The toilet floods.

Your card gets frozen.

Your body collapses.

And what saves you?

Not hustle. Not systems. A friend with soup. A kid with a teddy bear. A neighbor who checks in even when you go dark. A mother who, bless her heart, listens to you complain and be negative and still comes back with light and wisdom.

We get by with a little help from our friends, said some philosophers. You have to accept that.

The real safety net isn’t a salary or a passport or a backup plan.

It’s kindness.

It’s being a good person and trusting that the right people will return the favor.

That is how you build a life on the move. That’s how you make freedom real. Not by going it alone, but by weaving quiet connections everywhere you land.

🤓 The Read

This might be the most important book we’ve ever recommended.

Not just useful, imperative.

The Art of Impossible is a masterwork. Not a pep talk. Not a self-help slogan in hardcover. It’s a full-blown manual for doing hard things in a world that rewards comfort. If you want to build a life without a safety net, this is the blueprint.

And if you’re serious about becoming a high-agency nomad, it might be the single most essential book you’ll ever read.

Kotler doesn’t deal in cliche. He’s an obsessive researcher and practitioner who’s chased peak performance with the same intensity most people reserve for survival. He studied Pynchon’s mindwarp Gravity’s Rainbow under one of my favorite writers, experimental fictionist John Barth.

(tl;dr: have as many arrows in your quiver as you can).

He is a mix of scientist, surfer, and slightly unhinged monk.

And you feel that in every sentence.

This is not a book of hacks. You learn how to turn curiosity into passion, purpose into flow. And flow? It isn’t mystical. It’s mechanical. Trainable. Kotler lays out the triggers, the states, the rhythms. He shows you how motivation, learning, creativity, and recovery interlock like gears.

More arrows for your quiver.

Gratitude. Dopamine management. Writing in the “non-time” early hours when the world is still and the mind is unguarded.

Stop at the peak of your energy. Like Hemingway or Gabriel Garcia Marquez did, so the momentum becomes your partner.

Stacking novelty. Recovering deliberately. Taking real risks and using them as fuel.

The core idea is simple. Your safety net isn’t a paycheck or a parachute. It’s your mindset, your mental fitness, your ability to focus, reset, and create under pressure. That becomes your edge. That becomes your freedom.

What Kotler has discovered, and what this book delivers, is a way to engineer the extraordinary. You don’t need to be a genius. You need a protocol.

And here’s why this matters for ATN readers.

If you want to live a life of borderless creativity, if you want to escape the algorithm, if you want to build something original in a world addicted to comfort and repetition, this book is your training ground.

Read it. Study it. Then apply it until it changes how you move through the world.

This isn’t self-help.

It’s self-construction. And this book is it.

🍿 The Stream - Skote Outdoors (Youtube)

When I get sick of the algorithm trying to weaponize my amygdala (another day, another thumbnail screaming) I turn to something slower. Quieter.

Saner.

There’s an entire YouTube genre I’d call “Minecraft IRL”: a man, a dog, a few tools, and a ticking clock until winter. No talking. No music. Just saws, hammers, and the hiss of a kettle over a fire. You watch as he builds shelter from scratch, one log at a time.

One of my favorites? Skote Outdoors.

This guy (a “skote,” which I assume means a guy from Nova Scotia) heads into the woods with his pup, restores a run-down old house into something beautiful and survives off-grid. Eventually, his Virginia girlfriend, Kelly, joins him.

Then goats.

And Starlink.

Conversations about AI robots and chainsaws. It becomes a love story, too, just set against snowdrifts, illegal 3-wheelers, and gravity-harnessed water delivery.

What I love is how intentional it is.

They’re not “escaping” the world. They’re designing a life without noise. It’s still nomadic, just rooted. Minimalism with muscle. Shelter as art. Freedom with structure.

There’s no safety net out there. If he injures himself with a chainsaw? The hospital’s hours, snowmobiles, boats, and pickup trucks away.

And yet, it’s modern: solar panels, digital editing, and high-speed internet beamed in from space. A reminder that you don’t have to die in a school bus in Alaska to feel wild. You just need to decide.

As a filmmaker, I’m floored by their work. The quick cuts. The editing rhythm. The camera angles. None of it feels accidental. Every clean frame probably took ten re-shoots in the cold.

It’s a silent masterclass in content that funds a lifestyle, if you’re willing to do the work and get the shot.

Skote Outdoors is peace. With stakes.

And baby goats with dog personalities.

🛤️ Outtro

Reinvention isn’t just about where you go—it’s about how you create.

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

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

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

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See you next week. Keep moving. Keep making.