The stamp came down harder than I expected.

I can’t help but be reminded of Indiana Jones anytime I get something officially stamped.

I don’t know why that surprised me. It’s a rubber stamp in a government office in Medellin, Colombia, operated by a woman who had made it clear from the moment I walked that my presence was, at best, a mild inconvenience. But when it hit the paper with that satisfying irreversible thud, I had my Colombian digital nomad visa. I had options.

I didn’t think about it in those terms at the time. I was mostly thinking about the wallet I’d left at home and how I was about to break the news, after a world-class level of convincing here that I did not need to return to the immigration office, once again, because they had forgotten some small detail. Luckily, she let me return to my apartment to get the money, and luckily in Colombia Notaries are as ubiquitous as 7-11s.

Looking at it now, I understand what the stamp actually means: I had joined a small but rapidly growing club of people who decided that one country wasn’t enough of a plan.

For most of American history, the logic ran the other way.

You came TO America. I mean, that’s what Eddie and Arsenio did. You built your backup plan inside America. The passport was proof of arrival, not insurance against departure. Other countries had political instability, currency collapses, and regimes that changed overnight. America had the dollar, the Constitution, and the general sense that whatever happened, the institutions would hold.

That story is getting harder to tell. A spring 2025 poll found that nearly half of all Americans, and two-thirds of people under 35, said they’d like dual citizenship. Citizenship advisory firms that barely had US clients four years ago now count Americans among their largest groups. One firm reported a 400% increase in American applicants in the first three months of 2025 alone.

There is even a Meta ad running right now, two passports side by side, which a caption that asks: "What if the chaos doesn’t stop?”

It’s not a travel ad, it’s an existential question.

You might have seen the ad.

It’s mine.

What strikes me, living in Medellin, is that nobody here finds anything surprising.

The Venezuelans who have old Spanish or Italian citizenship through ancestral ties didn’t get them because of a trend piece. They got them because their parents told them to. Because they grew up in a country where the idea that things could fall apart wasn’t paranoia. It was reality. The backup passport, for them, wasn’t a hedge. It was an inheritance.

Americans are arriving late to something the rest of the world has understood for a long time: that citizenship is an arrangement. And arrangements can be renegotiated.

The irony is almost too clean. For generations, America was the backup plan. The place where you fled when your country stopped making sense. Now Americans are doing what their great-grandparents did, scanning family trees for a grandparent born somewhere, Ireland comes to mind, born in the right place, or writing checks to Caribbean governments, or sitting across from a notary who cannot be bothered to hide her impatience. All in the search for the thing they thought they already had.

A door that opens from the inside.

This is between you and your risk tolerance, and probably an immigration lawyer.

My stamp, although just a visa, not full-blown citizenship, didn’t change the way I feel about my blue USA passport. I’m still proud of it. I’m not hedging against it or running from it. The Colombian stamp is just something I’m glad I have in my back pocket. Like knowing where the exits are. Not because you expect a fire, but because you’re the kind of person who was taught to look.

A document. Useful, powerful, worth keeping. But not a guarantee. The chaos may or may not stop. The more interesting question is what you’re building while you wait to find out.

There are many companies running ads that are in the exit business. I get it. But that is not what A Texas Nomad is. I’m in Colombia because it makes sense for me right now. It might make sense for you right now. Having a choice. And honestly, the choice is most of it, even if you never use it.

That’s the whole game.

🇯🇵 Japan
Japan is moving forward with a new 6-month digital nomad visa targeting high earners (~¥10M income requirement), a short-stay but clean entry option into a historically closed market.

🇧🇷 Brazil
Brazil is tightening enforcement on its digital nomad visa income rules and documentation, with more scrutiny on foreign income proof, raising rejection risk for loosely structured applicants.

🇲🇹 Malta
Malta remains one of the clearest EU residency-by-investment routes, with pathways starting around €150,000+ in contributions and property commitments, still viable but increasingly compliance-heavy.

🇵🇹 Portugal
Portugal is increasing audits on non-habitual resident (NHR) beneficiaries and foreign income declarations, signaling a shift from attraction to enforcement. If you’re using Portugal as a tax base, expect more scrutiny.

🔥 Middle East
This affects movement now: continued regional instability is forcing rerouted flights, longer travel times, and rising fares across Gulf corridors, especially impacting Europe–Asia routes.

Check your target country’s official immigration page for exact income thresholds and application windows. They move quickly.

There’s a version of science fiction that uses science as wallpaper. Then there’s Andy Weir.

Project Hail Mary opens with Ryland Grace waking up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is or why he’s there. Two dead crewmates. Millions of miles from home. The sun is dying (eaten by a microscopic organism called Astrophage) and somehow, this junior high school science teacher is humanity’s last shot.

What Weir does better than almost anyone writing today is make the science feel like the story, while sneaking it past you. Grace works through problems the way a real scientist would, incrementally, incorrectly at first, then not. You’re doing the math with him. You’re wrong with him. The teaching instinct baked into the character becomes the delivery mechanism for everything: Grace figures things out by explaining them, and so do you.

That balance between everyman and science man is the whole trick. Grace is not a superhero. He’s nervous, self-deprecating, genuinely shocked that any of this is working. But he’s also brilliant, and Weir never condescends to the reader by dumbing it down. You feel the relativistic physics. You understand why the Astrophage matters. The friendship that develops in the second half of the book (save the rock) works because Weir built enough credibility with you that you’ll follow him anywhere.
This is the best kind of science fiction. The kind that makes you feel smarter for having read it. And then wrecks you a little at the end.

Drew Goddard adapted The Martian for Ridley Scott. Now he’s back for round two with Andy Weir, and the result is one of the better big-budget science fiction films in years.

As we have already talked about above in THE READ, Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, and this is exactly the kind of role Gosling was built for. The quiet competence, the slightly baffled charm, the way he makes problem-solving feel like an emotional event. He carries nearly every frame.

The film is essentially the Grace show. In adapting the novel, Goddard stripped everything that didn’t live inside his perspective, and there was a lot. One of the challenges of adapting a novel is maybe about 10% of a novel will be used in a movie. One thing easy to show in a novel but impossible in a movie is a character thinking. In the novel, Grace is thinking and internal monologing a lot. Goddard found a way to interpret all of this for the screen.

Gone is the Antarctica sequence, where Stratt authorizes nuking the polar ice caps to release methane and buy Earth a few more years. It’s a wild, morally brutal set piece in the book, and Goddard has said publicly he tried to keep it but couldn’t crack how to explain it fast enough. So it went.

What you’re left with is a leaner film that works but the cuts are a masterclass in what adaptation actually requires. In this two hours and thirty-six minutes, Goddard saved the rock and the story.

It’s a remarkable job, and he will likely win the best adapted screenplay Oscar for it. That is my prediction from light years away from the next Oscars.

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.

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