📩 In Today’s Email

• TL; DR - Stop inheriting your world and start deliberately designing the physics of your life.

• The Deep Dive: The Architect Archetype -  how world-builders from Tolkien to DeepMind reveal the psychology of designing your own reality.

• The Read: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - a novel about building worlds to survive the ones that break you. 

• The Stream: The Thinking Game - A visual autopsy of how Demis Hassabis redesigned what intelligence could be, and what happens when one person’s blueprint rewires the future.

🤿 The Deep Dive - The Architect Archetype

There’s a question underneath every invention, every reinvention, every undertaking to bring something new into the world, every big move, every deliberate life change:

Who’s building the world you live in?

Most people inherit this world: The job they fell into, the city they grew up in. There is nothing wrong with this. Many of us have reached a comfortable place in the relative history of humanity where society has defined much of life, made easier with science and technology. While there is still room for advancement for much of the world, for the most part, life has gotten better overall for the vast majority of the human movement.

But some people reject the identity of circumstance. They look at the physics of their life: the rules, the norms, the terrain, the daily architecture, and say… “I’m redrafting this.”

It is this instinct I am naming now as The Architect Archetype.

It’s the instinct that drove Tolkien to build Middle-earth from scratch. That drove George Lucas to design an entire galaxy with its own history, languages, and mythology. That drove Demis Hassabis to build DeepMind and reshape what intelligence itself could be.

It’s what we call in the business of storytelling, “World Building.”

Think The 5th Element, think people who speak Klingon, think Hermitcrafters in Minecraft. Think Henry Darger, the New York janitor who vanished into his apartment to build 15,000 pages, child armies, shifting weather systems with its own moral physics, to no audience, creating a myth big enough to outlive him.

These are extreme examples, to be sure, but we can learn from them.

This is the same instinct driving you when you redesign your income, your home, your location, your body, your daily system, or your entire identity.

Same psychology. Different scale. Same archetype.

The Builder at Three Scales

Let me show you what this looks like at three different altitudes, from grand to personal.

Grand: Civilization Scale: The Thinking Game.

In Demis Hassabis’s story, the subject of this issue’s The Stream, you see the Architect at world-changing scale.

Hassabis didn’t just build a company. He built an entirely new category of intelligence. He + team designed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the systems that would eventually force the question: what happens when machines think better than we can?

He assembled a team. Raised billions. Set audacious, over-the-top goals. Built the infrastructure. Designed the rules.

And changed the planet.

Human: Tomorrow and all the other tomorrows.

In Gabrielle Zevin’s novel, you see the Architect at emotional-creative scale.

Her protagonists build video games. But they are really building worlds where meaning lives. Also, like Darger, with their own physics, mythology, aesthetics, and rules. Worlds that let people be someone else.

Worlds that become more real than reality.

The novel is about friendship, ambition, and grief. But underneath it all is the builder’s instinct: the need to create a world you can live inside.

You: Your life.

And then… there’s you.

You design:

• Your city base

• Your income engine

• Your health system

• Your daily rhythms

• Your social world

• Your creative output

• Your myth

• Your identity

That’s the architecture at the scale of one life.

It’s not smaller. It’s no less ambitious. It’s just yours.

Nomadism as World Building

Here’s what I’ve been arguing for now getting close to a year here at ATN.

Nomad life is not an escape. Its design. It’s architecture.

You don’t run from the default world. You design a new one.

Choose your base. Structure an income around mobility. Build health systems that translate across continents. Even if you have to be tied to an office or location, create opportunities and paths with other forms of life support.

Architect your days so every morning starts with what matters most.

This is what people are now calling “high-agency:” doing the most with what you have. Rejecting an inherited, just-go-about-your-day-as-usual, map, and redraw it from scratch.

This could be a simple as buying a cheap set of watercolors and fast painting what is right outside your window before your household wakes up. It could be as complicated as Darger or Hassibis. One neither better nor more noble than the other.

And when you do that deliberately, not reactively, not chaotically, but systematically, little by little, day by day, bird by bird, flower by flower, you become the architect.

Reinvention is Redrafting the World

Every real reinvention is a reset of the physics of your life.

New rules. New aims. New architecture. New tone.

When I moved to LA, I wasn’t running from Texas. When I moved to Medellin, I wasn’t running from LA, I was redesigning the constraints. New language. New social terrain. New energy.

There is a reason so many books and movies begin with a location change. Since The Odyssey. How some have boiled down every plot of every story to, as literature’s greatest world builder, (maybe) said:

Think, basically, every Clint Eastwood movie ever.

That’s what Oppenheimer did when he built Los Alamos. That’s what Hassabis is doing building DeepMind.

And it can be done at the personal, human scale.

Same archetype.

What else are you here for if not to leave your mark?

Look around. Everything is set up for you. Sometimes to knock down, like ten pins lined up in a bowling alley. Sometimes to break apart, Shiva-style. Sometimes to build on. Stand on the shoulders of giants. Push the definition forward. Advance the work. Make things better for the people who come next.

The most important thing in life is to be deliberate.

How do I define deliberate? Sustained intentional effort over time.

Every reinvention starts the same way. You look at the world you are living in and say, “I could redraft this.

🌎 Visa Watch

🇬🇷 Greece - Named the world’s top place to retire in 2026, boosting long-stay residency interest among expats and slow-mad travelers.

🇪🇸 Spain - Updated guidance confirms faster processing times for the Digital Nomad Visa as regional offices add staff.

🇧🇭 Bahrain - Lowered its Golden Visa investment threshold, making long-stay residency more accessible for remote operators.

🇶🇦 Qatar - Expanded its Hayya-style entry program, now granting GCC residents easier multi-entry, 60-day stays.

🤓 The Read - Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW is one of those rare novels that makes you stop mid-page just to admire how cleanly a sentence lands. The writing is exceptional. Gabrielle Zevin has that quiet, surgical talent for observing people without announcing she’s doing it. And the relationship between Sam and Sadie, the tenderness, the resentment, the ambition, the losses, the way they dance in and out of platonia, is the book’s true engine. You follow them because they’re human, not because the plot demands it.

But here’s my honest take: as good as the novel is, there are moments where it presses too hard on its own cleverness, like it’s performing the idea of “important contemporary fiction.” Not on a Franzen level, but on a not-trying-to-be-Franzen-but-not-communicating-trying-to-be-Franzen level. You can feel the strain. The novel trying to hold up all the themes it’s juggling.

And yes… the shooting. I’m almost tired of modern fiction in this way, and Chekhov keeps sending me to voicemail, but: does every novel need gunfire to prove it has stakes?

The emotional fallout is real, but the shift feels like the book didn’t trust that the slower, smaller betrayals and misunderstandings were enough to carry the weight. Which is frustrating, because they were. The tension between Sam and Sadie, the guilt, the silences, the way they keep building and breaking worlds together, already had gravity. The crises lands like a structural shortcut, in a story that had already earned its crisis the hard way. Car wrecks. Amputations. Etc.

Something about the violence in movies and video games themselves that was wanting me to see the story of human importance and interaction behind the scenes, without the anti-fag bandana-clad rednecks in Venice beach, CA.

Still, when Zevin writes about world-building, game worlds, inner worlds, and shared worlds. The book hits a different register. Those passages are stunning. That’s where the novel breathes. That’s where it becomes something more than a story about game designers. It becomes a story about making anything worth loving. About the problems that come with actually being succesful, and how interesting that even with a level of success the personal stakes are so high it makes you question it all.

Very good novel. Sometimes brilliant. Sometimes trying too hard. But absolutely worth reading for the sentences, the emotional truth, and the reminder that the hardest worlds to build are the ones we live inside.

And as someone who loves the art of video games: hallelujah they’re finally getting their due in literary fiction.

Full recommend. Bonus material: awesome Japanese stuff.

🦜 Rio’s Corner

🍿 The Stream - The Thinking Game (Youtube)

Note* - that link is the entire film! If you want to know Google’s chess moves in defeating old school TV - there is one of them.

Demis Hassabis has the kind of backstory that feels invented. A child chess prodigy. A teen video-game designer. A neuroscientist by twenty-five. A founder building DeepMind as if he were quietly assembling Rivendell in London. There’s something almost mythological about him, not in the tech-messiah way Silicon Valley loves, but in the folklore way. An elf-character who slipped into the modern world somehow with a calibrated brain for the right place at the right time kind of action.

The Thinking Game captures that energy. It’s not really a documentary about AI. It’s a character study of someone who seems to have been preparing, since childhood, for a project too large for most people to fathom. The film moves through his life with the same stillness he carries into every room. The sense that he’s listening to multiple layers of reality at once.

What makes it perfect for this issue is the world-building. DeepMind isn’t just a lab. It’s an invented world: rules, physics, culture, ambition. You watch Hassabis not as a CEO but as an architect, someone designing a new intelligence the way a an Oxford professor designs a realm.

It’s thoughtful. It’s cinematic. And it’s a reminder that some people don’t just build companies. They build worlds.

He is our Oppenheimer.

🛤️ 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.

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