📩 In Today’s Email

• TL;DR - Nomadic Reinvention is the art of compounding across every pillar of life.

• The Deep Dive - From 150 subscribers to over 2,000: what this milestone teaches about thresholds, money, and reinvention.

• The Read - Scott Galloway’s The Algebra of Wealth, and why wealth is one instrument in the reinvention orchestra.

• The Stream - WeCrashed (Apple TV+), the story of a reinvention gone wrong and a reminder that charisma without compounding collapses.

🤿 The Deep Dive - Nomadic Reinvention

When I started this newsletter, I had not planned for it to be much of anything.

A small experiment. A place to write about personal development, reinvention, and the lessons I was living through. A place to slap the board once a week. At the time, 150 subscribers felt incredible. A big room full of people, listening. I thought: that’s a good group, I can work with this.

But then it kept growing.

So I worked harder.

And then it grew again.

So I worked harder still.

What began as a personal journal has transformed into something else entirely, a professional, polished format, an ecosystem of tools and stories, a cultural platform. If you scroll through the archives, you can literally see the evolution issue by issue. All 33 from this year alone.

2025, the year of the newsletter.

And now, we’ve crossed 2,000 subscribers.

A number that might look small from the outside. But from the inside, it feels like momentum, compounding, transformation. Proof that these ideas (travel, reinvention, borderless living, the design of freedom) are resonating with people for all sorts of reasons.

We are compounding.

The Threshold Effect

Crossing 2,000 subscribers doesn’t change my daily life. There’s no confetti falling from the Medellín sky. But thresholds like this matter because they show how reinvention works: in invisible jumps. The first 10 pounds lost. The first dollar earned. The first strangers who choose to follow your work.

Reinvention is built on these small, silent victories. They don’t feel like much in the moment but they mark a line you can’t uncross.

What Reinvention Really Means

From the outside, reinvention often looks like a single dramatic act: quitting the job, buying the ticket, moving to Bali. But the truth is slower and more layered.

Real reinvention rests on four interwoven pillars:

• Wealth. Not just money, but ownership, compounding trust, the ability to design a financial base that outlasts chaos.

• Body. Vitality, discipline, strength. The system you carry into every new country.

• Voice. Creative output, the stories you send into the world, the ecosystem you build around them.

• Self. Identity, values, relationships. The deep work of becoming someone new.

Each pillar compounds. Each feeds the others. A stronger body creates more energy to work. A more stable financial system frees your voice. A consistent voice transforms your identity. And the cycle continues.

The Nomadic Lens

Travel accelerates this process.

Not because moving countries magically fixes you. But because nomadism strips away the old scaffolding. Back home, you’re trapped by people’s memories of who you were. Abroad, you’re tested against friction: new languages, strange bureaucracies, streets you don’t yet know how to cross.

The result is acceleration. You’re forced to adapt, to shed what doesn’t work, to rebuild faster. Nomadism isn’t escape. It’s design. A crucible for reinvention.

Money as One Pillar

Of course, one pillar carries extra weight. Money.

Scott Galloway’s The Algebra of Wealth is blunt about it: wealth comes down to discipline, compounding, and ownership. The math isn’t complicated. The discipline is.

But here’s the truth I’ve found: in nomadic reinvention, money is just one instrument in the orchestra. It matters, but it doesn’t play the whole score. Freedom comes from how dollars interact with your health, your voice, your self.

Wealth without vitality is burnout.

Wealth without voice is silence.

Wealth without self is emptiness.

The Year of the Newsletter

That’s why this newsletter exists. It’s a record of compounding across every pillar. From a few personal notes to a professional archive. From 150 subscribers to over 2,000.

From one man trying to rebuild his life, to a global conversation about how reinvention really happens.

And here’s the thing: it’s not glamorous while you’re in it. Reinvention doesn’t feel like fireworks. It feels like sending another email, sweating through another gym session, writing another imperfect line of code.

But over time, the work compounds. The habits crystallize. The identity shifts. Until one day you wake up and realize: the math has turned into a myth.

Closing Line

Nomadic reinvention is the art of compounding across every dimension of life (body, wealth, voice, and self) until you can look back and see the person you once were, standing on the other side of an invisible line.

And then you keep going.

📢 Newsletter News

1. We’ve blown past 2,000 subscribers (close to 2,100, to be exact). Thank you for being part of this reinvention. Every milestone compounds — and this one feels real.

2. The Youtube channel is live and growing. The archive is just beginning, but each new week new stories and strategies on reinvention, nomadism, and the design of freedom will be added. Subscribe now to be part of the journey from the start:

   👉 https://www.youtube.com/@TheEdwardEffect

🌎 Visa Watch

🇺🇸 The U.S. has added a $100K fee on new H-1B visas - prompting the UK, Germany, China, and others to slash fees and lure top global talent.

🇦🇪 Reports of the UAE suspending tourist/work visas went viral - but officials call it fake news, saying no bans are in place.

🇳🇿 New Zealand has relaxed visitor visas: remote work allowed for up to 90 days, with extensions up to nine months.

🇻🇳 Vietnam is launching a new 5–10 year Golden Visa, alongside talent and investor visas in hubs like Phu Quoc and Da Nang.

🤓 The Read - The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway

The big takeaway from this book for me it that it’s so surprising in a capitalist country like the U.S., we’re taught so little about capitalism itself. We grow up inside the system but rarely study its mechanics. It’s like being handed a musical instrument and not told which hole to blow into.

Sure, bankers and investors learn the score. But the rest of us? We live inside the song every day, sinking or swimming with no sheet music.

Enter Scott Galloway. You’ve probably seen him. His face has been everywhere this year, from podcasts to panels to his own growing media empire. The Algebra of Wealth distills his no-nonsense view of money into a blunt formula: focus × stoicism × time × diversification.

Leaving the “Stoicism” out for the moment, if you need to understand the world America runs on, or just want a reminder, or even a bird’s-eye view as someone already inside the markets, this is about as un-boring a lesson as you’ll get.

I give the book kudos for how cleanly it organizes the fundamentals. The last “economist book” I read was probably Ben Stein (the famously flat “Bueller, Bueller…” actor) and compared to that, Galloway feels like a live wire. He makes the dry parts as exciting as possible.

That said, I do have one strike against it. He ends with taxes. My goodness. Talk about throwing the car into the mud right before the finish line. But I get it, you can’t talk about wealth without the IRS eventually entering the room. And placing it so close to the end means he can at least force the reader to swallow it. If you actually enjoy that part, congratulations: you should probably be a tax attorney, and you’ll make millions.

Still, the larger point is undeniable. Money isn’t the end goal. It’s a vehicle for freedom. Optionality. The ability to walk away from what diminishes you and design a life where your time belongs to you.

Who this is for: anyone serious about reinvention who knows freedom takes more than vibes. If you want your systems to endure, this book sharpens the lens.

🦜 Rio’s Corner

🍿 The Stream - WeCrashed (Apple TV+)

Most nomads know the hum of coworking spaces: the half-empty LaCroix fridge, the too-slick motivational posters, the mix of earnest builders and status chasers. Now imagine taking that vibe, pouring rocket fuel on it, and selling it to Wall Street as the future of work. That’s the story of WeCrashed.

Starring Jared Leto as Adam Neumann and Anne Hathaway as his wife Rebekah, the series dramatizes the meteoric rise and collapse of WeWork. For a brief, dazzling moment, they convinced the world that coworking wasn’t just desks and Wi-Fi, it was a spiritual movement, a revolution in how we live and connect. Investors bought the dream. The company’s valuation hit $47 billion.

Then it imploded.

For digital nomads, WeCrashed is more than Silicon Valley gossip. It’s a parable about the spaces we inhabit. Coworking can be liberating. The infrastructure that allows borderless operators to work from Medellín one month and Lisbon the next.

But it can also become theater: surface-level community, glossy branding, and growth-at-all-costs posturing.

The lesson? Spaces matter, but ecosystems matter more. A true nomadic coworking culture isn’t about kombucha taps or slick slogans; it’s about reliability, flexibility, and a community of people actually doing the work.

And here’s a practical reminder: coworking doesn’t always need a membership. I’ve been working lately from the local library. It’s free, beautiful, and minus the LaCroix, basically a ready-made coworking space. Before you sign up for a monthly desk, you might want to check what libraries are nearby.

Who this is for: anyone who’s ever opened their laptop at a long table, wondered if they were buying into hype, and wanted to see what happens when that hype runs the world.

🛤️ 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.