The plan was drinks on Sunset Strip.
It was often drinks on Sunset Strip.

And occasionally, you have heard the words, “Vegas, Baby.”

Yes, the iconic lines from the classic LA film, Swingers. We were living like that. Everyone was, whether they will admit it now or not. At least everyone in the two big LA creative industries, movies and music.

Somewhere between the drinks on Sunset Strip and tomorrow’s breakfast, Vegas can happen. The lights, the dings, the constant “did you know” about oxygen being pumped into the casino. That 4am logic that makes complete sense… until it doesn’t. I’d been in that world long enough to know how it works. Film. Music. The industry that runs on access and proximity and the performance of being exactly where things are happening.

Which is why when my friend texted me four words this morning, I knew it was the next newsletter.

Dubai is Vegas East.

He was in the record industry in LA while I was in the film industry. He had his own 4am. Those musicians put us filmmakers, well, most of us (at least we had Robert Downey Jr), to shame. But he knows the machinery. And from his vantage point. Dubai is legible immediately.

Another desert. Another mirage.

There’s a type that emerges from that environment.

You’ve seen him. Maybe you’ve followed him. He chooses cities the way other people choose filters: for what they do to the image. He moves constantly but nothing deepens. He has access without connection. An audience without relationships. A life that looks, from the outside, like he figured something out.

What he’s actually done is remove every variable that makes life real.

And then he broadcasts the result. Clips, threads, frameworks, “life” coaching. Crypto schemes. We all know have heard of the rented Ferrari guy (that guy, btw, is currently facing over $100 million in fraud allegations). A performance of masculinity recycled from the same tired material. The usual, uninspired hatreds, the same targets, nothing new, because genuine creation requires genuine presence, and he abandoned that a long time ago. The women in the content are doing their own transaction. Everyone is selling something, or even each other. Nobody is actually there.

This is the polluted water. Not Dubai specifically. Not any one city. The entire digital environment that rewards performance over value.

For those of us trying to find something real in that current, it’s a lot to swim through.

I have one painted fingernail.

Right ring finger. Has been that way for about a year. I get asked about it constantly. But other travelers, by strangers, by my piano teacher her in Medellin, who noticed it mid-lesson and said she thought it was cool and was going to do it herself. She said that before she even knew what it meant.

That moment is actually the whole point.

The Polished Man is a charity. One painted nail, worn by men, to start a conversation about ending violence against women and children. The nail is odd enough that people ask, and in this way, the word is spread. And something real passes between two people who might not have spoken otherwise.

My piano teacher is Colombian. I’m a Texan in her city, still learning Spanish, and even more poorly, piano. But I’m showing up every week to try and get better. She noticed something on my hand and we talked about it. She wants to do it, too.

I’ve been thinking about what ATN is actually for.

Not the newsletter mechanics. The spirit of it. Why Texas is in the name even though I’ve been in Medellin for years, and most of my adult life was spent in California. Even though Texas as a brand can be easy to misread.

I’m not claiming anything to do with politics. I’m claiming the ethos.

The “friendly” state. The handshake. The come-on-in neighborly vibe I believe it still has. The version of Texas that doesn’t ask where you’re from before it offers you something. That version is real. That is the version I grew up in, and it’s the operating principle I try to bring wherever I go.

Which means learning the language even when it’s embarrassing. Paying fairly. Staying long enough for people to stop treating you like a tourist. Understanding that you are a guest and conducting yourself accordingly. Building something that gives back to the city hosting you rather than extracting the lifestyle and moving on when the exchange rate shifts.

The gringo who takes and leaves is a known quantity here. Medellin has seen enough of them. What the city responds to, and what any place responds to, is someone who shows up as a neighbor.

Which brings me back to Dubai. Another oil giant like Texas.

It’s worth saying Dubai is extraordinary in its own way. A city that willed itself into existence in a generation. Whatever you think of the model, that is not nothing. But its entire brand was built on one promise above anything else… safety. Stability. A place where money could land and stay and multiply. Where the future felt guaranteed, if you could just get there.

The drone attacks haven’t destroyed it, far from it, but they’ve pierced something. The image of invulnerability, which was always doing a lot of the work, had taken a hit it didn’t see coming. Rumor has it influencers are being paid to paint a rosy picture, or at least encouraged not to say anything bad. And that part of the world if quite serious about their “encouragement.” The question is if we can trust it. Can they control the influencers? Those who have nothing but sand to stand on, will be easy.

It has taken a hit it didn’t see coming. For a city whose value proposition is essentially none of that bad stuff happens here, that’s not a minor crack.

A mirage doesn’t have to disappear to make everyone disbelieve it. It just has to flicker.

Is it a mirage or will it last? We will see.

Digital Nomadism is still one of the greatest opportunities available.

But it’s a multiplier, not a gift. It takes whatever you are and scales it. Bring ego, that compounds also. The freedom is real; what you do with it is the whole question.

My friend saw Dubai in four words. My piano teacher saw something worth having in one painted fingernail before she knew the reason.

The new question isn’t whether you escape the system.

It’s whether you show up as a neighbor when you get there.

Don’t Escape. Design.

🇪🇸 Spain
Spain’s digital nomad visa just got a little tighter: the 2026 minimum wage reset pushes the solo income floor to about €2,849/month, so borderline applicants need to recheck eligibility before filing.

🇹🇭 Thailand
Thailand is again moving toward cutting visa-free stays from 60 days back to 30. For Americans using visa-free entry as a soft nomad base, that would mean more extensions, more friction, and less room to improvise.

🇮🇹 Italy
Strategic baseline: Italy remains one of the cleaner live EU investor-residency plays, with entry points starting at €250,000 for an innovative startup, €500,000 for an Italian company, €1 million in philanthropy, or €2 million in government bonds.

🇦🇪 UAE
The UAE is reportedly preparing case-by-case leniency on tax residency rules for expats who left during the Iran conflict, a real signal for Dubai-based operators worried about losing low-tax status because of disrupted day counts.

⚠️ Middle East
This affects movement now: the Iran war is driving Gulf airspace disruption, route changes, fuel spikes, and warnings of higher fares and possible shortages, so anyone routing through the region should expect more expensive and less predictable travel.

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

There’s a pressure that doesn’t come from the outside world. It comes from the expectations we build around ourselves, and those placed on us by the “powers that be” with their own agendas.

Things that don’t truly matter and unfortunately it often can take life or death situations to realize this.

Atmosphere lives inside that pressure.

Set in Houston, Texas, against NASA’s early space shuttle era, the novel follows Joan Goodwin, a physicist who leaves a stable academic life to train alongside astronauts preparing for missions that feel equal parts myth and machinery.

Like many “space” stories, the mechanism hinges on one important situation, or snafu. Reid writes with more calibration and focus on relationships than the usual of this world, or out of this world.

Every scene feels precise. You feel it in the training rooms, in the internal struggles, in the slow way ambition reshapes a person over time. There’s a line that sums this up: “We think we want the vastness. But what we’re really searching for is control within it.”
The real subject is what happens when the margin for error disappears. When your body, your mind, your history all have to align, or break.

The modern version of space might just be autonomy. A life with no guardrails, no inherited structure, where every decision carries more weight because nobody handed it to you.

Pressure, Reid seems to argue, is the medium. The thing you shape yourself inside of, not the thing you escape.

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.