Unf*cking Your Programming: A Jailbird’s Review of ‘Programmed to Fail’

By Moses Gunner

The irony was thicker than the stale, recycled air. Here I was, a man whose life savings amounted to a handful of commissary ramen packets, reading a book about manifesting wealth. I was surrounded by the physical manifestation of my own worst thinking, yet I was reading about the power of thought. Hill was talking about defining your purpose, and my only purpose at the time was making it to the next meal, court date, or the hell out of there. He was talking about a “burning desire for riches,” and my most burning desire was for a single hour of unfiltered sunlight.

It felt like a cosmic joke. But as I sat there on that steel bunk, a strange thing happened. I realized the book wasn’t just about money. It was about the architecture of the mind. It was about the idea that your internal reality—your thoughts, your beliefs, your deep-seated programming—was the blueprint for your external world. And my external world was, to put it mildly, a fucking catastrophe.

That book planted a seed. It was a tiny, improbable seed of an idea: what if the bars weren’t the real prison? What if the real prison was the faulty wiring inside my own head?

After months on end of waiting for a bed in rehab, I finally found myself in another kind of institution: a four-month, locked-down, dual-diagnosis rehab program. The official paperwork read like a laundry list of brokenness: Alcohol Use Disorder (Severe), Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), and a crippling case of Agoraphobia that made the prospect of walking to the mailbox feel like scaling Everest.

This is where the theoretical seed planted by Napoleon Hill began to sprout in the harsh, practical soil of therapy. This is where I was introduced to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). My therapist, a woman with the patient eyes of someone who’d seen it all, didn’t talk about “manifesting” or “burning desires.” She talked about “cognitive distortions,” “core beliefs,” and “automatic negative thoughts.” She handed me worksheets, for Christ’s sake. It was the most clinical, un-magical thing you could imagine.

But it was, in its own way, the exact same thing Hill was talking about. CBT was the manual, the step-by-step instruction guide, for identifying and rewriting the garbage code that had been running my life. It was the slow, arduous process of debugging a human being.

It’s been four years since I graduated from that program. Today, I take no pharmaceuticals for my mental health. My quality of life isn’t just better; it’s on a different planet from where it was. My toolkit for maintaining this reality is unconventional. It includes the principles of CBT, the hard-won wisdom of the 12 Steps, a deep dive into nutrition and its effect on brain inflammation, and yes, the strategic, intentional use of psilocybin mushrooms. About three grams, every so often, as a tool for accelerated introspection and what I’d call a spiritual systems check.

All of this is to provide context for why Brandon Epstein’s book, Programmed to Fail: How to Break Through Your Mental Blocks and Achieve Greatness, landed on me with the force of a revelation. It’s not just a book I read; it’s a book I’ve lived. Epstein has taken the disparate threads of my own chaotic journey—from self-help classics to clinical therapy to psychedelic exploration—and woven them into a coherent, powerful, and brutally practical framework. This isn’t just a book review. This is a field report from the front lines of personal transformation, and Epstein’s book is the most accurate map of the territory I’ve yet to find. This is a full-blown spoiler, because the secrets are too damn important to keep.

The Core Diagnosis: You’re Running on Bad Software

The entire premise of Epstein’s book can be boiled down to a single, terrifying, and ultimately liberating idea: Your life is the printout of a program you didn’t write.

He states it plainly in the introduction: “You have been programmed to fail. Not just you, but everyone… We get stuck with the same negative thinking and the corresponding bad habits playing on a loop because we are unconscious of how we were programmed in the first place.” (Introduction, ‘Unlocking Your Subconscious Mind’).

This was the story of my life. The drinking, the depression, the self-sabotage—they weren’t choices I was making in the clear light of day. They were the output of a program running deep in the background. A program written in the ink of trauma, fear, and inherited dysfunction.

Epstein explains that the vast majority of this programming happens between the ages of birth and seven, when our brains are in a highly suggestible, hypnotic state. We absorb the beliefs of our “tribe”—our family, our community—like a sponge. He writes, “The most unfortunate part about living through something that you perceived as traumatic at a young age is that it gets burned into your subconscious supercomputer mind and you carry it with you every day for the rest of your life as a core wound—unless you go back and change the underlying programming.” (Chapter 1, ‘How Subconscious Programming Works’).

He calls the source of the most damaging code a “core wound.” This is the traumatic event, or series of events, that installs the primary virus. For Epstein, it was a sexual trauma involving his brother with Down syndrome. For me, it was a complex cocktail of my own early traumas, a family environment steeped in undiagnosed mental illness, and the suffocating pressure of a fundamentalist religious upbringing that taught me my thoughts were sins and my nature was corrupt.

The result was a core belief, a single line of code that ran everything: “I am worthless.”

Epstein describes the symptoms of this bad programming perfectly: “Poor programming presents itself most when we are under pressure and leads to us running into invisible walls that hold us back from being who we truly are.” (Chapter 1, ‘Self-Limiting Subconscious Programming’). My entire life was a highlight reel of hitting those invisible walls at full speed. Freezing up in class. Getting into fights. Sabotaging relationships. Trying to drink away the feeling of being an impostor in my own skin. The program was running perfectly, executing its prime directive: to prove, over and over again, that its core belief was true.

The Jail Cell and the Therapy Room: Power vs. Force

For years, I tried to fix my life with what Epstein calls Force. I tried to force myself to stop drinking. I tried to force myself to be happy. I tried to white-knuckle my way through life, using sheer willpower as my only tool. It was like trying to fix a software bug by screaming at the computer screen.

Epstein draws a critical distinction: “Power beats force every time… The way you create exponential leaps in your performance is by tapping into your power. Your power comes from who you are and not just what you do… Force comes through conscious effort alone.” (Chapter 3, ‘Power vs. Force’).

My “rock bottom”—two hospitalizations in a month with blood alcohol levels that should have killed me—was the spectacular failure of Force. My recovery, on the other hand, was my first real lesson in Power.

The First Step of Alcoholics Anonymous is the ultimate admission that Force has failed: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” This isn’t an admission of weakness; it’s the prerequisite for tapping into a different kind of strength. It’s the act of unplugging the machine that’s been running on a corrupted operating system.

In rehab, CBT gave me the diagnostic tools. It taught me to be an observer of my own thoughts. To catch the automatic negative thought—”You’re a worthless piece of shit”—and to challenge it. To trace it back to its source, that core belief installed decades ago. This is what Epstein means when he talks about moving from “unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence.” (Chapter 2, ‘Self-Awareness as the Foundation for Transformation’). I became aware of just how fucked up my programming was.

This is the grueling, unglamorous work of rewriting the code. It’s not a lightning bolt of inspiration. It’s a line-by-line debug. It’s sitting with a worksheet and writing down the evidence for and against the belief that you are worthless. It’s messy. It’s painful. But it is the only way to stop the program from running you.

The Playbook: A Practical Guide to Mental Alchemy

Part 2 of Programmed to Fail is called “The Playbook,” and it’s exactly that. It’s a systematic, step-by-step guide to doing for yourself what I spent four months in a locked facility learning. Epstein has democratized the process of deep, subconscious change.

It begins with awareness, just as my journey did. His exercises for tracking your feelings and connecting them to your focus are a simplified, potent form of the thought records I filled out in CBT. It forces you to see the direct link between your internal monologue and your emotional state.

But the real meat of the process is in what he calls “Uncover Your Subconscious Programming” (Training 10) and “Align Your Subconscious Programming with Your Vision” (Training 12). This is where he guides you to identify the toxic, self-limiting beliefs and then, crucially, to transmute them.

He instructs the reader to take an old belief and invert it. For example:

• “Old belief: I believe I am worthless.”
• “New belief: I believe I am more than enough.” (Training 12)

This might sound like cheap, positive-thinking affirmation bullshit. It’s not. The power isn’t in just writing the words. The power comes from the grueling work you did beforehand: uncovering the old belief, accepting it without judgment, and making the conscious decision to surrender it. The new belief isn’t a coat of paint on a rotten wall; it’s a new foundation poured after the old one has been jackhammered out.

He then provides a genius method for integration: recording your new beliefs in your own voice and listening to them in the suggestible states of waking up and falling asleep. This is a direct hack into the same hypnotic brainwave states where the original, faulty programming was installed. You are, quite literally, programming yourself.

This is where my own journey took a turn that Epstein’s book doesn’t explicitly cover, but which it perfectly complements: the use of psilocybin. For me, a macro-dose of mushrooms became a tool for radical acceleration of this process. It’s like running a powerful defragmentation and diagnostic program on your own mind. In that state, the walls between the conscious and subconscious mind become permeable. Those “core wounds” and “self-limiting beliefs” aren’t things you have to dig for; they present themselves with stunning, and sometimes terrifying, clarity.

The mushrooms don’t do the work for you. They just reveal the work that needs to be done. They show you the corrupted files. They highlight the buggy code. The process of accepting, surrendering, and transmuting those beliefs, as Epstein lays out, is still your work to do. But psilocybin can turn a months-long archaeological dig into a single, profound excavation. It’s a tool for the renegade, for the person who is willing to take a shortcut through the dark woods of their own psyche. It’s not for everyone, but for me, it was the catalyst that took the principles of CBT and Epstein’s playbook and supercharged them.

Beyond Failure: The Sovereignty of the Self

What’s the point of all this? Why go through the agony of dredging up old trauma and rewriting your own source code? It’s not just about feeling better. It’s about reclaiming your sovereignty.

My entire platform, the whole reason I write, is to explore the path to sovereignty: spiritual, financial, political, and health. But all of those are downstream from the most fundamental sovereignty of all: mental sovereignty.

You cannot be free in the world if you are a slave to the tyrannical, self-sabotaging programming in your own head. You can’t build a life of purpose if your subconscious is constantly trying to burn it to the ground to prove you’re unworthy of it.

Epstein’s book is a declaration of independence for the individual mind. It’s a manual for a bloodless coup against the dictator of your old programming. The journey he maps out is the one I walked, albeit more clumsily and with more detours. I had to piece it together from a jailhouse copy of Think and Grow Rich, from clinical therapy worksheets, from the folk wisdom of 12-step rooms, and from the shamanic depths of psychedelics. Epstein has put it all in one place.

Programmed to Fail is an audacious title, but it’s deadly accurate. We are all, to some extent, running on faulty software installed by a world that is often chaotic, traumatic, and nonsensical. We are programmed with fears that are not our own, with limitations we did not choose, and with beliefs that keep us small, sick, and stuck.

The good news, the revolutionary news, is that you can become the programmer. You can access the source code. You can debug the system. You can take the energy that was once used for self-destruction and transmute it into the fuel for a life of your own design.

It’s not easy. It’s the hardest work you will ever do. It requires a level of honesty and courage that most people will never summon. But the alternative is to remain a prisoner in a jail with no bars, serving a life sentence for a crime you didn’t commit, dictated by a program you never wrote.

I choose to be the programmer. This book is one of the best damn coding manuals I’ve ever found.