You’re shaped by Environment.

You Didn't Choose Who You Are. You Can Still Design Who You Become.

My dad and I got into it on the podcast this week — the kind of conversation that starts as research for an episode and ends with both of us questioning our own lives a little.

The topic was free will. Or more specifically, how little of it we actually have.

I've been sitting with this idea for a while now, mostly because of a book called Determined by Robert Sapolsky. His argument is simple and kind of brutal: you are not just you. You're the sum of your genetics, your hormones, your childhood, your culture, the room you're standing in right now. Every decision you think you're making freely is really just the next domino falling from everything that happened before it. You didn't choose the thought you just had. It arrived because of everything that came before it.

That's uncomfortable to sit with. But it's also useful, because it changes where you put your effort.

The map is not the territory

Before we get to the main idea, there's a second piece worth mentioning — something we covered from a writer named Stuart Chase, who wrote a book called The Tyranny of Words. His whole point is that the words you use to describe your life aren't the same thing as your life. You can say "it's one mile to my house" and think you know the trip, but the map doesn't show you the potholes, the dead ends, the red lights. The label isn't the thing.

Same goes for how you talk about yourself. "I'm lazy." "I'm not a gym person." "I'm just not disciplined." Those are labels, not facts. And once you believe the label, you stop looking at the actual terrain — the stuff that's really in your way.

Jacque Fresco and the idea that changed the whole conversation

The main guy we talked about this episode is Jacque Fresco. If you don't know him, he's been compared to a modern Leonardo da Vinci — self-taught engineer, industrial designer, spent his life building a concept for a completely different kind of society called the Venus Project. He died in 2012, but the core of his thinking is what we built the episode around.

Fresco's argument is this: human behavior isn't fixed. It's a product of the environment — the physical space and the social space you exist in. Design the environment right, and you get a completely different human being. He wasn't talking about motivation or mindset. He was talking about engineering.

That reframes everything. It's not "why don't I have the willpower to go to the gym." It's "what did I build around myself that makes going to the gym hard."

The proof is everywhere once you look for it

My dad moved from Brazil to Maryland because a friend of his sister's mentioned an opportunity, and he took it — no long plan, just a door that opened. Years later he ends up in Portugal. I ended up in Hawaii. Neither of us really "chose" the starting point. We reacted to what showed up. But once we were in those places, the environment did the rest of the shaping.

He said something on the podcast that stuck with me: "I'm 100% sure I'd be a different person if I was still in Brazil, in the environment I was living in." That's not a knock on Brazil. It's just true. Different rooms build different people.

There's a story I heard recently that makes this even more obvious. There's a country called Dagestan, in Russia, that produces an absurd number of elite Olympic wrestlers. A Cuban Olympic medalist went there to train and figured out why almost immediately — the city has no police, no clubs, nowhere to go and mess around. So what do people do instead? They work, they train, they marry. Since everyone there can fight, everyone treats everyone else with respect. The environment isn't motivating anybody. It's just built in a way that only produces one kind of outcome.

You don't need a whole country to do this. You need a room.

Where I think the free will conversation actually matters

Here's the question I kept coming back to on the podcast: if none of this is really our choice, what allows someone to snap out of autopilot? What lets a person suddenly go, "I don't like where I'm headed," and actually change?

I don't think I fully answered it. But here's where I landed. You can't make a big decision until you've made the smaller ones that set it up. Some jumps are impossible for people right now — not because they lack willpower, but because they haven't built the conditions that make that jump possible yet. So the move isn't "decide to be different." The move is small: leave your gym shoes by the door instead of your phone charger. Leave your shoes on instead of grabbing the remote. Fifteen minutes a day of something, until fifteen becomes an hour.

My dad picked saxophone back up recently — something he hadn't touched in years — because he started hanging around musicians again. That's the whole mechanism, right there. Change what surrounds you, and the behavior follows without you having to force it.

The Tarantino Method

I've been using something the last week I've started calling the Tarantino Method, based on something Quentin Tarantino said in an interview. Before he was a director, he had a friend a few years older who he thought was the coolest guy alive — until that friend turned 30 and just kind of gave up. Got bitter. Told Tarantino he never built anything for himself in his twenties and now he felt like he'd lost his shot. That scared Tarantino straight.

So here's the method. You sit down and you write out everything you're doing wrong. Not how you'll fix it. Not "I need to be more positive." Just the actual, honest, specific list of what's broken. Every area of your life — career, money, relationship, mindset, fitness, personal growth, whatever categories matter to you. Get all of it down with zero solutions attached.

Then, and only then, you go back through it and write the actual fix next to each one. Not vague stuff. Tangible. Not "eat better" — "I don't have food ready after I work out, so I skip the gym because I hate how starving I feel afterward. Fix: meal prepped and in the fridge before I go."

That's design. That's not willpower. Nobody successful is running purely on willpower — they built a system so they don't have to rely on it.

Bringing it back to the body

This is exactly what we're doing at Gravity Trained, just applied to movement. We're not trying to get you to consciously remember to fix your posture every second of the day. That's not sustainable and it's not how the body actually learns. We're trying to build the neurological and structural conditions so the better pattern just starts happening — automatically, without you commanding it.

That's the whole idea behind our Awareness, Autonomy, Automation framework. First you get shown the actual problem. Then you're able to apply the fix on your own, without someone pointing it out every time. Eventually it becomes automatic — you're not thinking about it at all, your body just moves that way now.

Same principle as the gym example. If a gym feels intimidating, you'll avoid it — that's not a discipline problem, that's a design problem. If your training space feels like it belongs to you, consistency shows up on its own. You don't fight your way into good habits. You build a room that makes the good habit the obvious one.

The takeaway

Stack these three ideas together and you get a full model for how change actually works: biology sets the mechanism, language sets the frame, and design sets the conditions. None of it depends on willpower.

There are no bad people. There are bad environments. That's not a moral statement — it's a design statement. And it means the most useful question you can ask yourself isn't "what's wrong with me." It's "what did I build around myself, and what needs to change about it."

You didn't design the environment that made you who you are today. But you can design the one that makes you who you're becoming.