You’re Trapped in a System You Didn’t Choose — Here’s How to See It | Tom Bilyeu

This is how people lose everything. They mistake feeling right for actually being right. If you don't have a mental model for built-in error correction, your life is going to be a mess and you won't even know what's going wrong. When I was young, I was obsessed with getting rich. Once I got rich, I became obsessed with formalizing the approach I used so I could apply it to every area of my life and I realized three things early on. One, striving to be right is a trap, but finding the right answer to a problem is a must. Two, humans are way more likely to do what feels right versus what actually works. Three, to succeed, one must have an error correction model that overcomes ego and emotion. I named the process that I came up with for dealing with these three fundamental laws of human nature, The Physics of Progress. Worked for everything. My businesses, my marriage, my health, my physique, everything. But over the years, I've realized a mental model isn't very useful if it's only about personal success. That's why my YouTube channel has evolved so much over the years. Focusing only on personal development, my channel risked becoming spiritual entertainment, something that makes people feel good while they watch, but ultimately shies away from taking on the most difficult problems we all face. When COVID hit, I realized that I didn't understand how the world actually works. So, I started running the process on the most important, most complex issues of our time to see if I could gain an advantage by understanding things like finance, the economy, politics, world affairs, future tech, and the other topics that I now cover. Plenty of people told me that I should stay in my lane and stick to business and mindset, and I'm sure there are plenty of people that will tell all of us to just listen to the experts. People have appointed themselves experts who are not experts. But thinking for yourself is the only way to not be manipulated and led down a path to hell with or without good intentions. We are living in arguably the most transformational time in human history. We're nuclear-armed, politically divided, able to bring entire species back from the dead, and AI is racing towards becoming a god. Things are changing so fast, it's dizzying, and whether we're talking about politics, economics, global conflict, or artificial intelligence, we are constantly being spun, lied to, and manipulated. And if you don't have a model for truth-seeking and error correction, you will get wrecked. Most of the time you won't even realize it's happening. So, I began to evolve my thinking and my channel along with me using a simple algorithm for approaching the complexities of life at this moment. The algorithm has five parts. One, recognize you're trapped in a distorted frame of reference, and the only way out is to run experiments and think from first principles. Two, map out cause and effect. Three, seek disconfirming evidence and taking information from a wide variety of sources. Four, judge the correctness of something by the results it delivers. Five, remember you're having a biological experience. We all might be divine creatures, but we are still an easy-to-manipulate chemical processing plant. All right, that's the framework. It allows me to set aside my ego and emotions and run the scientific method recontextualized for life and business whenever I'm struggling with something new. It's never going to guarantee that I'm immediately right about something, but it stops me from getting stuck in a fail state because I'm not focused on being right. I always have a way to correct my thinking based on results. Let me walk you through why I believe your life will be better if you adopt the same algorithm. The results speak for themselves. I believe all persistently successful people use some variant of this algorithm. Early in life, I was lazy. No one thought I was going to be successful, not my mom, not my best friend, and certainly not my now father-in-law. And to be honest, they were right to doubt me. At one point in my 20s, I was laying in bed 4 to 5 hours a day every day. I was terrified of discovering that I wasn't capable of winning. I thought success was about talent and I was worried that if I actually tried and failed, I'd have to accept that failure was my destiny. Then I hit rock bottom, no money, no direction, no self-belief, and I was ashamed that I wasn't becoming the man I promised my fiance I would become. But then I had a single thought that changed my life. Maybe I'm not permanently stuck. Maybe I'm temporarily stuck because I'm wrong about how humans work. The idea that I latched onto was brain plasticity, that people can learn and get better at any age. That's when I stopped worrying about whether I was talented or already right, and I focused on getting better just a little bit every day. The compounding effects of that decision improved my life across every metric a thousandfold. It's also how I limit my susceptibility to spin and manipulation. Now, I haven't found it's possible to completely eliminate the effect of spin and lies, but learning to think critically and not be trapped by others or my own past thinking has been life-changing. Here's how it works in five easy parts. Do not skip part four as that is the most important. All right, part one, your frame of reference is a lie. Like a fish lives in water and never questions it, you live inside of a frame of reference and never question it. Your frame of reference comes from three things. One, your biology. We're all different, we have innate personalities. Some things about us will truly never change. Two, your beliefs. Three, your values. Every human being is born into a specific time and place and that alone is going to wildly influence your frame of reference. This is why each generation acts differently than those that came before or after them. Your frame of reference is not accurate. Your beliefs aren't accurate. Your values aren't accurate, but they are yours and they distort everything you see. This is why people can look at the same thing and walk away with two completely different sets of facts. Much of our frame of reference is inherited. You obviously inherit your biology, but you also inherit your beliefs and your values from your parents, from your school, from the culture around you, what you watch, play, listen to, your traumas, the cultural events happening around you. They all shape how you see the world in profound ways and no time period will ever shape you more than your childhood. This is just a fact of how the brain develops. Few people realize that their frame of reference isn't the truth. It's just programming. We never question our frame of reference because it feels so true. It feels right. It feels like we're simply acknowledging objective fact. And as I stated earlier, it is a law of human nature that we do what feels right far faster than we do what works. To quickly define what I mean by works, I will simply say works means to do what leads you towards fulfillment and fulfillment is anything that you love doing that uplifts you and those around you. Now look, that's simplified, but it should ensure that you can track what I'm getting at. If you wanted to change your frame of reference, you could, but it's hard and most people will never do it. That's because changing your frame of reference requires you to take control of your biology to the extent that you can and to edit your beliefs and values. But given that most people confuse their frame of reference with truth and rightness, even if they knew they could change their frame of reference, they wouldn't want to. Also, life is extremely complicated. We need shortcuts so that we don't have to think through every problem again every time we come across it. You've likely developed a method already for dealing with jerks at work, getting cut off, filing your taxes on time, paying your bills, stubbing your toe. Look, all of those things are a pain, but you don't hem and haw endlessly trying to figure out what to do. Similarly, you've got a take on whether God exists, if it's a sin to have sex outside of wedlock, the best way to spend money, whether dogs or cats are better, and the perfect place to go on vacation. Even if I could scientifically prove that cats are better than dogs, I know some people just aren't going to make the switch. I know I'm not. Cats are a menace. It doesn't matter what is true. It matters how it feels and if you've locked in your answer already or not. So, what do you do? You live out a worldview that was given to you by people who didn't design it intentionally and who probably aren't even winning. At least that's what most people do. But, it is a trap and the only way out is thinking from first principles. You stop asking, "What do people say about this?" and you start asking, "What is actually true from a cause and effect level? What's functionally effective in the real world?" That's how I try to think. Let me show you what this looks like in the real world. Take Trump's trade war with China. On the surface, to some it looked like a bold economic play. To others, it looked like mass chaos from a maniac. But, underneath it was a battle of assumptions about supply chains, domestic manufacturing, and geopolitical leverage. If you assume that the US could decouple cleanly from China without pressure or backlash, you weren't thinking from first principles. You were running someone else's narrative, as we all often do. Or, you could look at Trump's immigration policy. Whether you loved it or hated it, the deeper question that we should be focusing on is what problem are we trying to solve and what are the long-term second and third-order consequences of the proposed solution? If you're reacting based on your tribe, left or right, you're not solving a problem, you're going to bat for a team. You're signaling and signaling isn't going to get us through the next 20 years of systemic pressure. Let me give you guys a historical example of what happens when you don't focus on solving problems based on what's actually happening. Napoleon, one of the greatest military minds of all time, conqueror of Europe, inventor of modern warfare, but when he invaded Russia in 1812, he brought summer uniforms, no winter plan. He assumed the campaign would be over in a few weeks as so many of his previous campaigns were, but this one wasn't. Temperatures dropped to -30° F. Horses froze standing up. The French army didn't lose to Russia, they lost to bad assumptions. They lost to tribal thinking. They lost to not pushing back. Napoleon failed to update his frame of reference and 400,000 of his soldiers paid the price. We are all at risk of similarly catastrophic blind spots. Biology is ultimately our bottleneck. Here's something most people never account for. You are not a mind floating in a void. You are a biological organism shaped by chemicals, hormones, instincts, fear, and a whole lot more, and that matters. Your brain didn't evolve to make you happy. It evolved to keep you alive long enough to have kids that have kids. That's it. You crave status because it kept you in the tribe. You fear change because unfamiliar things used to kill us. You take things personally because it helped you detect threats and stay in good standing within the group. And this is why I say we all might be divine, but we are still chemical processing plants. You are being steered by systems that we often don't see or acknowledge, and that's why AI is such a game-changer. Artificial intelligence is going to reshape every aspect of society, job markets, political campaigns, even war, but most importantly, AI-driven algorithms will guide your attention and your emotions because it certainly understands your biology, and it's going to manipulate you with hyper precision by learning from biofeedback generated from your wearables. There will effectively be no aspect of your life that isn't influenced by something on the outside. And if you don't learn now to think for yourself, to challenge assumptions, you will be controlled. Don't get me wrong. AI is a miracle, and I couldn't be more grateful to be on this timeline where I get to engage with AI. But AI will not accidentally lead us somewhere wonderful. We cannot abdicate responsibility for our own lives. We must learn to think for ourselves, not by proxy with the elites, not by AI. AI is a tool, just as lawyers and politicians are a tool that can either make things better or far, far worse. The key is we have to learn to think for ourselves with a mental model that has built-in error correction and side-steps both ego and emotion. If you don't account for that, the tail is always going to wag the dog. You will always be a servant to your biology. You will always be easy to manipulate. Incentives outrank ideology. People can believe what they want, but if you show me the incentives, I will show you the outcome. Once you accept that biology shapes how we think, you start to see the world differently. You stop asking, "Why is that person doing something so stupid?" And you start asking, "What incentives are driving that behavior?" One of the most important things I've ever learned is this. People don't do what's right. Not even what they think is right. They do what they're incentivized to do. That includes you, it certainly includes me. You want to understand business? Follow the incentives. You want to understand politics? Follow the incentives. You want to understand yourself? Of each thing you do, ask a simple question. What am I really trying to get from this? Let's zoom out for a second. Why is inflation my obsession? And why is it so hard to solve? It's an incentive problem. People want things for free, but until humans will work for free, nothing nothing will come for free. Inflation, aka the act of the government printing money out of thin air, creates the illusion of getting something for free. Inflation allows the voter to demand the government to give them things for free like healthcare, and for the government to reach into your wallet and take money out without you noticing. If you don't believe me, watch my video on money printing and inflation. Or, if you really want to go deep, read The Creature from Jekyll Island. It is a about the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, and it will melt your entire brain. Humans want today to be easy, even if it makes tomorrow hard. Homer Simpson has a great line as he's being berated about how he's going to regret his bad choices, and he says, That's a problem for future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy. And that is the architecture of the human mind. We will gladly pay Tuesday for a burger today. Sorry, that's Popeye reference. I couldn't help it, but hopefully you guys get the point. Humans respond to incentives, and if we're not aware of how we're motivated, we are very easy to lead around by the nose. This is why we have three branches of government. They are meant to be in healthy tension, protecting us from the worst of our impulses. Tyranny arises specifically when one person is able to do whatever they think is best. The human mind is so intrinsically flawed that we need corrective mechanisms baked in to the very structure of our thinking. Don't get me wrong, the human mind is an absolute marvel, but we are best understood as emotional creatures, and rarely does what feels good end up being the most effective path to fulfillment or even accuracy. Hence, the need for religion, bibles, self-help books, technology, a government, and even AI itself. In 2018 and 2019, two Boeing Max 737 Max airplanes crashed, killing 346 people. Why? Because of a faulty flight control system. But here's the deeper truth. The system was faulty because of faulty incentives. Boeing had a North Star, beat Airbus to market. That single incentive created a cascade of shortcuts, secrecy, and failure. Nobody wanted to build a plane that crashed, but the incentive structure made it almost inevitable. And that's what happens when people optimize for the wrong thing and call it strategy. You have to judge a tree by the fruit that it bears and iterate quickly when things are going wrong. It is the only way to find out if you're thinking in an effective way. All right, here's why I seek disconfirming evidence. I know I am prone to thinking in the wrong way, so I always assume I'm wrong. I seek out disconfirming evidence because if I don't, I'll build my life on broken assumptions. And the higher I climb, the harder I'm going to fall. Here's how I actually live this. I run experiments constantly. I try things. I measure the results. I don't lie to myself about whether I'm making progress, and I make adjustments along the way. I expect to be surprised. I expect to be wrong often, and I don't need to be right. I just need to improve. That's why I'm not partisan. I do not want to be on a team. This is why I don't debate for sport. This is why I care more about frameworks than ideologies. I am absolutely terrified of dogmatic thinking because dogma leads to crystallization. You stop being nimble. This is why people say genius is a young man's game. This is why they say science does not move forward one insight at a time. It moves forward one funeral at a time. People get so trapped in their thinking, they're unable to make progress because they want to be right and they don't seek the things that show that they're wrong. The whole reason that this channel exists, the reason that I cover the wide range of topics that I do, is because this is such a pivotal moment. Because finding the right answer actually pays off massively. Because we're being manipulated and I'm chasing what works because I want to understand why the West is in decline because I want to know why there are so many conflicts around the world and why we're drifting toward a US-China Cold War and I want to know if we can stop it from going hot because I want to understand how money actually works, why we're being lied to about it, and how those lies are keeping billions of people trapped in a cycle of poverty because I want to know how to position myself and help you do the same. Not just to survive the next decade, but to avoid being bamboozled and to win. If you want to understand this channel, you need to understand my desire to make forward progress by mapping cause and effect. It's not about being right, it's about finding the right answer. It's not about fitting in or saying what people want to hear, it's about building something that lasts. It's no longer about building an audience, it's about engaging with a community and it's not about pretending that I know everything. I don't. It's about constantly updating my model of reality. That mode has served me incredibly well so far in my life and my hope is that the ideas we explore here together will help serve you as well. And if what I do does serve you, the channel will grow. And if it doesn't, the channel will die a rightful death. Either way, I'm grateful for your attention and I look forward to building something useful together. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Take care. All right, guys, we do lives every week, Wednesday and Friday, 6:00 a.m. Pacific time. Here is the brutal truth about scaling. Most entrepreneurs don't outright fail, they plateau. And if you're stuck right now, you know how true that is. It could be that your revenue flatlines every time you step away or maybe you're trapped in a commodity market that's racing to the bottom or maybe you're one of the lucky people who is navigating a very complex partner dynamic that turns every decision into a battle. These problems and a whole lot more can seem impossible until you break them all down into first principles. My partners and I use this thinking to grow Quest Nutrition by 57,000% in our first three years alone and scale to a billion-dollar exit. And now I'm teaching this framework to a select group of entrepreneurs who are ready to scale. Now, I want to be clear, this is not for everybody because I'm looking to work with serious entrepreneurs that already have an established business and a proven track record of execution. If that's you and you want to learn how to break through your biggest business bottlenecks using first principles thinking, be sure to apply now. Just go to impacttheory.com/scale or click the link in the show notes. Again, that's impacttheory.com/scale. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. You've done everything right. You went to college, you got a good job, you've worked hard and gotten promoted, but you're still living paycheck to paycheck. And the same is true for most of your friends, and all of you want to know why in the hell it seems to be impossible to get ahead.