Your brain is running simulations. Are you feeding it good material?

I’VE SAT THROUGH DOZENS OF TABLE READS. There is a specific kind of magic that happens when a group of actors sits around a long, perhaps laminate table with cold brew and starts to breathe life into a script. For the writer, it’s a moment of pure, terrifying joy.

As the words leave the actors’ mouths, the “film” begins to render in real-time. You feel the rhythm. You hear when a beat is sour. You realize, with a sudden thought, that the character you’ve lived with for six months would never actually say that phrase.

It doesn’t feel “right in the mouth.” So you lean in, pen blurring across the page, self-correcting the DNA of the story on the fly.

What I didn’t realize was that back then, our brains were doing exactly what they evolved to do. That is, running high-resolution simulations.

As it turns out, your brain is the most sophisticated production studio in the world.

Neuroscience tells us that we have two primary “producers” in our heads: the Prefrontal Cortex and the Hippocampus.

Think of the Prefrontal Cortex as your brain’s chief operating officer. It’s the one setting the global strategy, thinking three scenes ahead, and making the tough calls.

The Hippocampus is your Head Librarian, back in the stacks, retrieving memories and filing away new information so you can use it later.

When these two are on the same team, they enable you to run mental simulations. It’s more than daydreaming; it’s a literal interplay where you envision different outcomes before they happen. Humans might be the only creature capable of this, even though certain animals like elephants, crows, and octopuses have also shown evidence of this.

Whether you’re rehearsing a difficult conversation or visualizing the flow of a new business venture, you are conducting a table read of your own life.

There’s a reason why doing something new, like learning piano as an adult or navigating a new city, feels like a workout. In the world of neurobiology, this is called “Productive Struggle.”

When you task yourself with something challenging, your brain starts to produce a substance called myelin. Myelin is like high-speed insulation for your nervous system. It coats the neurons to speed up transmission. Every time you struggle to find the right word in a foreign language or that right note on the piano, you are literally adding more insulation to those neural pathways.

You are upgrading your brain’s hardware to make it quicker and more efficient.

The “sour beat” you feel when you make a mistake? That’s not failure. That’s your brain recognizing an error (usually within one second) and insulating itself so you don’t make it again.

The struggle is the point.

Traveling to a new landscape or even a new country is an aggressive exercise in brain optimization.

Every time you land somewhere unfamiliar, you are forcing your COO and your Librarian to collaborate under pressure. New directions, new languages, new social codes, new transit systems. All of these physically build a new neural architecture. What is often called culture shock is really brain construction.

This makes all of us accidental neuroscientists, even if we don’t have the vocabulary.

But you don’t have to move to Medellin, Colombia, to get this effect.

The brain doesn’t care whether the productivity is geographical or intellectual. It isn’t concerned with arbitrary borders. It just shows up. It responds to challenge, full stop.

Learning one verb in a language you don’t speak. Planning something slightly beyond your current capability. Sitting with a creative project long enough to feel genuinely lost in it. These are all table reads. These are all simulations your brain is running, insulating, filing, improving.

“Don’t Escape. Design” was never just about where you live. It was always about this: the deliberate engineering of a life that keeps your brain in productive struggle. That keeps the COO and the Librarian talking.

The most important thing to remember is that your brain is on the team. It has always been on your team. It is hardwired to learn from every mistake, to self-correct, to build faster pathways through the places you’ve already stumbled.

All you have to do is give it good material to work with.

Run the table read.

The Memo: Digital-nomad visas are now structural policy tools, not experiments. Governments are actively competing for mobile talent and capital. At the same time, several countries are tightening compliance, income checks, and tax scrutiny.

Golden-visa routes are splitting: some shutting down, others getting richer-only.

🇪🇸 Spain - Digital Nomad

Applications remain strong in 2026, with Spain now the most in-demand EU nomad base. Income threshold holds around €2.8K/month and residency can convert long-term after 5 years.

🇹🇭 Thailand - Long-Stay Reform

Thailand is expanding long-stay categories targeting remote workers and retirees, signaling a shift from tourism to longer-term economic residents.

🇦🇪 UAE - Talent Residency

The UAE continues widening long-term visa access for skilled professionals, reinforcing its zero-income-tax positioning for mobile founders and operators.

🇵🇹 Portugal - Golden Visa Aftermath

Real estate remains excluded from Portugal’s Golden Visa; fund routes continue but processing delays persist into 2026.

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

I picked this up on a whim at my favorite Medellin bookstore (Panamericana) and burned through it in two sittings.

Oz Pearlman is the world’s most sought-after mentalist. He is an Emmy Award winner, America’s Got Talent finalist, and the guy who has read Tom Brady’s mind on national television. His catchphrase is “I don’t read minds, I read people.” Those seven words are essentially the entire book, and it’s a good one.

While he doesn’t give away any major tricks (spoiler, but not so spoiler if you know magicians), what he does offer is in many ways more important. He has built a practical guide to human connection. How to walk into any room, read what’s really happening, and influence outcomes without anyone feeling manipulated.

It’s like if Dale Carnegie spent twenty years performing at Super Bowl halftime shows.

There’s a section where he walks you through how to say the alphabet backwards, and after reading that, I remembered it easily. My favorite trick of the bunch was reversing Martin Luther King, Jr’s name for the “JKLM” section.

He’s also a world-record ultramarathoner who holds the record for most laps run around Central Park in one day, which tells you everything about his relationship with mental discipline.

The book is fast, generous, and practically useful. Exactly what this type of read should be.

For me, few things have been more personally validating than the recent science confirming that video games do not rot your brain.

Au contraire.

A Stanford study published in Nature Human Behavior found that children who played Pokémon actually developed entirely new dedicated regions in their visual cortex.

Which brings me to Fallout, one of my all-time favorite game franchises. And the show, which, somehow, does it justice.

Set in a post-nuclear American wasteland, it’s essentially a modern western. Lawless frontier, morally ambiguous characters, survival logic. A civilization stripped to its bones.

Ella Purnell is remarkable as the lead, an optimist raised in a vault who is dropped into these dangerous badlands.

The most indefinable, almost mystic thing for a show to capture is “tone.” Video game adaptations are notoriously bad at this. But this one catches it, understanding the original games were always about dark comedy and the absurdity of human nature.

If you played these games, you will feel it immediately. If you didn’t, you’ll still be hooked by episode 2.

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.