90-Second Brain Capture

We're going to kick off with one question. Where and when does influence begin? Most people think it's when we start talking.

This is absolutely dead wrong. Influence starts before language and obviously starts in the nervous system, not the conscious mind. And there is a window at the start of every interaction where the person across from you is essentially unguarded.

their critical thinking hasn't fully come online. So, they're operating on instinct, pattern recognition, and vibes or feel. And that window is roughly 90 seconds.

There's a specific order of operations happening in the brain during those first 90 seconds. And if you match your behavior to that sequence, then you're not fighting the nervous system. You're writing it.

So, let me walk you through this 90 second control map. And I want you to think of the first 90 seconds of any interaction as four intervals. And if you miss one, the ones that follow get exponentially more difficult.

So, you hit them in order. And by the time you're at 90 seconds, the other person is not deciding whether or not to trust you. That's already been made.

That decision is done. and they didn't make it consciously. So, interval one is the 0 to 10 seconds and this is the authority imprint.

This is the shortest window and it's the most important. In the first 10 seconds, the brain is doing one big thing. It's categorizing you.

Friend or threat, leader or follower, someone who matters or someone who doesn't. Those are the three big filters that we have in our brain. First 10 seconds.

So all that's making a decision based on almost zero information, which means that thing is relying almost entirely on non-verbal data. Your posture, stillness, composure, what your eyes are doing, the pace that you're moving at, whether or not maybe you look like someone who needs something from the interaction. That's a big one.

That's maybe the biggest of all time. Does this person look like they need something from the interaction? So the authority imprint phase is not about dominance.

All of this is about congruence. When you walk into a room or enter an interaction looking like a person whose internal world is already settled, you're not scanning for approval. You're just adjusting to the room.

The brain across from you categorizes you as authority. This happens before you say a word. The categorization is already in motion.

10 seconds. The first tool is something called controlled stillness entry. This is the first tactic.

So most people will enter an interaction with some kind of movement. They're adjusting. They're settling into their seat.

They're smiling. They're nodding. And what do we use smiles as?

Most of the time we use smiles as tools, not because we feel happy. We use a smile because we want to be seen a certain way. We want them to react a certain way.

We want to be polite. But your definition of politeness is just inauthentic communication and deception. All of that signals one thing to the brain.

This person is calibrating to me. They need something from me. And the second somebody realizes any of those things, you've been categorized as lower status without them, that other person even knowing it.

So the controlled stillness entry is the opposite of that. You enter with stillness, minimal movement, subtle posture, relaxed face, unhurried eye contact, and you don't ever rush to fill the space. And the effect is immediate.

The other person's brain registers a pattern it associates with authority. And there's one nuance here. Stillness does not mean rigid.

Rigid looks like anxiety. Controlled stillness looks like a person who is just so internally stable that they don't need to move. They don't need to move.

Then we get to interval two. This is about 10 to 30 seconds. And this is called the novelty break.

Let's say you it's been 10 seconds. You've got the imprint forming. They've categorized you as somebody worth paying attention to.

And now the brain does something very interesting. It starts listening for confirmation. Is this person actually what they appear to be?

This is where most people will completely destroy it because what they do is they act normal. They say the expected thing. They follow the social script.

That person's brain goes, "Okay, boom. Predictable. I can relax now.

I already know what this is. " The second the brain relaxes, you've lost the window. It's gone.

So interval 2 is about breaking expectations. This can be just a pause where there shouldn't be a pause. That's novelty.

a shift in your tone that doesn't match the words, a sentence that doesn't land where that person expects. So, what you're doing is spiking novelty. And novelty does something pretty specific in the brain.

It triggers an orienting response. It's not because you asked it to, it's because it had to. It has to do this.

So, so far, we're not giving the brain a choice. And this is 30 to 60 seconds. I call this phase identity softening.

So this is a moment where identity starts to become flexible. When somebody's in a state of focused attention and it's combined with a little bit of uncertainty, which is exactly where they are right now, their sense of self loosens a little bit. They become less attached to their default positions of everything.

So their internal script like I'm the kind of person who blank gets quieter. So what we're softening is I'm the kind of person who we're just taking neurology of the brain and weaponizing it. So the brain can't maintain a rigid identity while simultaneously processing brand new novelty high authority input.

Someone has to give and what it gives is the grip that they have on who they think they are in this interaction. The grip instantly loosens. So, this is the interval where what you say starts to land super different in their head cuz you're not talking to somebody with their walls up anymore.

But why? Why did the walls soften? You didn't tear them down.

You made the walls irrelevant. And this is where language starts to really matter. Whatever you say in this interval right here carries disproportionate weight.

So, a very wellplaced identity statement. something like, "You know, you seem like somebody who already knows this, but hasn't had anyone say it out loud to you ever. " That lands 10 times harder at the 30 to 60 mark than it would at the beginning of the conversation because the architecture is in place.

And then we get to interval 4. This is 60 to 90 seconds. So by the 60-second mark, if you've run everything correctly, you're in a position that most people never reach after hours.

So you've got authority. you have attention and that person's identity is softened enough to receive a little bit of direction. So now we elevate.

We're shifting the interaction from this person is interesting to this interaction is important. So we move from capturing attention to capturing meaning. And the way that we do that is by doing something that almost nobody does this early in a conversation.

We give them something absolutely real. You say something that has actual weight, something that signals this conversation is not going where you thought it was going to go. It's going somewhere way better.

But this could be a statement of like uncomfortable truth, an observation about that person that's more perceptive than it should be at 60 seconds. What you're doing is is raising the stakes of the interaction. And when you raise the stakes while you're holding your authority, the person across from you leans in big time.

And all of this is because the nervous system reads that combination as this person sees me and they're not afraid or judgmental of what they see. When you get a brain to say they see me and they're not judging, this is one of the rarest and most beautiful experiences that a person can really have. person across from you is leaning forward.

Their critical mind is trailing behind instead of leading and the terms of the interaction have been set by you. That's the 90 control map. The map is sequenced to be the way that the brain processes incoming social data.

That's why the order matters. If you're not getting capture in the first 10 seconds, it's almost always because of two things. you're moving too fast or smiling too early.

Both of those signal the exact same thing. You need something from the other person. What does that mean?

It means you offer nothing. So, if you haven't done the internal work, the external tools are not going to save you. They're going to expose you.

And the other common failure is where we do the novelty stuff. People either skip it and go straight to normal conversation or they overdo it and they've come across as just a weirdo. So the sweet spot is a very subtle pattern disruption.

So now if we get through those four phases, we have this big open window that we've created. What do we put in there? I think this is where every sales trainer I've ever seen in my life, every persuasion trainer gets everything wrong.

They think language is about persuasion. Good language works by resonation, not declaration. So every sentence that we deliver, it's either aligning with what's already running inside that person's head or it's bouncing off.

There's no middle ground. The part of the brain that you're trying to reach is not this logical analytical language part. It's the narrator.

You want to reach the narrator. This is the voice in their head that's constantly telling them who they are, what's happening, and what it all means. So if your language syncs with that narrator, it matches the story that they're already telling themselves.

And when that happens, nothing you say gets evaluated. It's automatically absorbed because it's inside of that little narrator voice. That's what installation is.

I'm not sticking somebody into a new thought process. I'm becoming part of their stream that's already flowing. So persuasion is always a negotiation.

You present some argument, you hope the other person accepts it. There's resistance built into that model. Installation is way different.

It bypasses all that negotiation entirely. When you install something, maybe an identity, direction, an emotional state, it doesn't go through the front door of someone's critical thinking. It goes through the side through the nervous system.

It goes through the part of the brain that doesn't ask any questions. I'm going to go through five classic linguistic weapons here. Before this, I want I want to give you one principle.

The more a weapon sounds like a casual observation about the world, the less resistance it generates. Direct aim creates detection and detection automatically creates resistance. And it it's less than a second.

If the aim is dissociated, it's invisible. Weapon class number one is embedded commands. It should be a directive disguised as an observation about the world.

And the disguise is what matters. The conscious mind in your head hears somebody describing some pattern. The unconscious mind hears an instruction.

And the instruction arrived without a target because it wasn't aimed at somebody. that gets processed like it were the person's own thought. So, as an example, you might say, you know, some people pick up on things really quick and they just reach this point where they notice how fast everything can make sense.

So, on the surface, I'm talking about other people and that's dissociative language, right? Some people out there, if you listen to what's embedded this point, it's that's a hidden time anchor like right here, right now, this moment. And then we said, notice how fast everything can make sense.

That's a directive the brain can process whether it was aimed directly at that person or not. Does the unconscious filter by a pronoun? Never.

So another example is, you know, I think there's a thing that happens when people who really get this, they start to just feel it land before they can even explain why. Again, who am I talking about? Other people.

People who really get this. But the listener's brain, the subject's brain is doing two things simultaneously. Consciously, it's evaluating whether it belongs in that group.

Unconsciously, it's already running the command. Feel it land. So, the key with embedded commands is that they should never sound like commands.

The moment that a person feels addressed, the moment that the sentence points at them, the conscious mind will wake up and start evaluating. And evaluation is the enemy of installation. This is negative dissociation.

Negative dissociation is when you describe what most people do in a way that creates some kind of separation between the crowd and the person you're talking to. The key is to never complete the dissociation. You leave a gap so that person can fill it themselves.

So you might say something like, you know, it's it's kind of wild when you think about it. Most people go through their entire day on autopilot and they never question the script that they're running and then every once in a while you meet somebody who's just awake and you can tell immediately what happened there. I described the default state autopilot which made the script get reduced.

Then I described the exception to that. Somebody who's awake but I never said who that exception is. So the other person walks right into it cuz everybody wants to be the exception.

Everybody wants to be the one who's awake. And the last line, you can tell it immediately. That line's doing two jobs at one time.

On the surface, it's kind of making an observation about rare people, but the phrase you can tell is a hidden directive. We're telling them to recognize it. Scarcity whispers.

So, what we're talking about here is a calm observation that implies impermanence. So, it triggers loss aversion without urgency or pressure. It just reminds the nervous system that this moment has weight to it.

And the dissociation principle applies right here just like it did in the last thing. The less it sounds like it's about this person like our language is aiming, the better it is. The harder it hits.

And you might just say something small about to trigger this scarcity. You might say, you know, I think there's a thing that happens sometimes where everything lines up. the right information, the right timing, the right readiness.

And people who've experienced that always say the same thing afterwards. I almost missed it. So I'm telling a story about other people, about a pattern I've observed, a pattern I have observed, but every element is landing in real time.

Everything lines up. The right readiness, all of this is employing them. And if you want to make it even more simple, I almost didn't want to include this tonight.

I went back and forth on this. That was me doing it to you just now in real time. That's another scarcity statement.

So, the key with these scarcity things is tone. You have to sound like you're sharing something. And you saw me kind of look down a little bit.

The delivery is almost reluctant. Like you're not sure you should be saying this. Reluctance always signals authenticity.

There's no exception. And authenticity signals what? Value.

So the fourth class of weapons is identity installation. So you're describing a type of person, maybe a pattern that you notice somewhere and the subject, if the identity is aspirational, they step into it on their own. So the direct identity installs if you're doing them directly you might say you are the kind of person who blank they work but they're very detectable and the brain knows it's being addressed and the language is being aimed so there's a moment of evaluation am I that is this flattery what do they want from me and that is friction so dissociated identity installs will bypass that entirely something as simple as saying, you know, I think there's a certain kind of person who maybe hears something like this and they don't just understand it.

They feel like, you know, it re they feel it rearranged something like their operating system just got a little update that they didn't know they needed. What am I talking about? A type of person, right?

But the listener is already checking, am I that type? And if the identity is 10% ahead of where they see themselves, it's aspirational, but it's not really close enough to feel true. The formula, describe the identity as a type that exists in the world, make it aspirational, but 10% ahead of where they see themselves and never ever ever close the loop.

Let them close it. Emotional ignition triggers. The first four, they work on three main levers.

Thought patterns, identity, and perception. This one's going straight to the body. So, an emotional ignition trigger is a sentence that forces them to feel something before the conscious mind decides whether it wants to.

And the dissociation principle is critical for you to be doing here. You can never talk about the person. If you make all the mistakes, this is the one that will ruin you if you accidentally talk aim your language at the person.

So, let's say I'm a sales person. I want somebody to feel certain about something. And I say, you know what?

Take a moment to think about the last time you felt completely certain. You know, the language is directed. It might still land, but there's going to be some friction.

a dissociated version. You know, there's this thing that happens, and I'm sure you've seen this, where somebody gets hit with this moment of just total certainty. Not like intellectual certainty, like the kind where every cell in their body just agrees.

And when it happens, you can actually see it on their face. It's like watching somebody remember who they are. That is the good language.

I'm not aiming language. Same emotional target, which is certainty. And then we had sematic activation, the body.

But I'm describing something that happens to other people. We've got those five weapons. Every one of them is built to be pretty damn invisible, aimed at the world instead of a person.

And if I stopped here, you you'd have a lot of linguistic firepower. When I say weapon chain, this is two or three sentences stacked in a sequence where each one opens the door for the next one. So the order is engineered.

The first weapon chain is identity install, emotional ignition, and then embedded command. There's a certain kind of person who doesn't just like hear information. They absorb it like it enters their brain through a different door.

That's the identity install. The next one, emotional ignition. This is the moment where something lands so deep they can actually feel it reorganizing the way that they think like something just shifted physically into place.

Emotional ignition. The body's starting to become aware. I'm still describing other people.

If you lead with the embedded command, it's already started. Started what? There's no identity to start.

There's no body activation. There's no feeling that has begun what you're talking about. It sounds vague as hell.

The brain shuts all the hatches down because it feels weird. If you lead with ignition, like people describe this feeling where something shifts into place, it's mildly interesting, but it's floating. There's no identity telling the listener who is about to have this experience.

So, the ignition fires, but it really doesn't attach to anything. Identity first. It tells the brain who is about to feel this.

Then we have emotional ignition. It gets the body involved. And then we have the command is the third thing.

It lands while the door is open. So you're matching the brain's processing order. What's the brain's processing order?

Categorize, feel, accept. We're just weaponizing it. Another weapon chain.

Scarcity, negative dissociation, and identity. So scarcity. What I'm about to walk through is something that most people will go their entire career without ever hearing.

And it it's not because somebody hid it somewhere. It's because they never end up in the right room. That's a scarcity whisper.

Attention gets a little sharper. The brain registers. Well, this is rare, valuable.

Maybe there's something here worth listening to. That's a negative dissociation. Two groups, people who wouldn't.

We want them to choose one side, right? And then we get into the final, the identity install. But there's this other group and it's a small group, but it's kind of like where something like this doesn't stay on the surface.

It gets under the skin. It changes the way that they walk into a room the next day. It changes the way they look at people and they know it the second that it starts to happen.

They can feel it. That's the identity install. So I never said, "And that's you.

" We're not using pointed aiming language. So the listener is now deciding whether they belong in that group or not. And if the description is aspirational, close enough to feel kind of true, then they step in.

That's scarcity, dissociation, and identity. So each one of those things is creating conditions for the next one. And then we have weapon chain three.

This is emotional, then scarcity, and then identity. This is built for moments when you need somebody to commit to a relationship, direction, a decision, high stakes, one-on-one. So the first the emotional ignition part, it's like something inside just goes quiet and all the noise just drops away and there's this clarity.

It's almost like physical, like a settling of something. The story format keeps the conscious mind in observation mode, not defense mode. The thing about those moments is that they don't announce themselves.

They don't come with a label. You only realize what they were after they were gone. and and most people miss them entirely.

And now the identity, it's sad. But every now and then there's somebody who doesn't miss it. Something in them recognizes it in real time.

And those are the people who look back a year later and say that was the moment that really changed everything. So the fourth class of weapons is identity installation. You're describing a type of person, maybe a pattern that you notice somewhere and the subject, if the identity is aspirational, they step into it on their own.

The direct identity installs, if you're doing them directly, you might say, "You are the kind of person who blank. " They work, but they're very detectable. And the brain knows it's being addressed and the language is being aimed.

So, there's a moment of evaluation. Am I that is this flattery? What do they want from me?

And that is friction. Dissociated identity installs will bypass that entirely. Weapons class number five, emotional ignition triggers.

The first four, they work on three main levers, thought patterns, identity, and perception. This one's going straight to the body. So an emotional ignition trigger is a sentence that forces them to feel something before the conscious mind decides whether it wants to.

And the dissociation principle is critical for you to be doing here. You can never talk about the person. If you make all the mistakes, this is the one that will ruin you if you accidentally talk aim your language at the person.

So let's go down the devian escalation ladder. So here's the model. I think of devian as a ladder with five rungs on it.

Each rung represents a deeper level of social norm violation. So not in a destructive way. At the bottom of the ladder, the mask is fully on.

And your job as an author is to move somebody up this ladder so smoothly that they never feel the the rung shift under their feet. But first, a mask is not a flaw. We know that it's a survival mechanism.

You actually can persuade a person's mask. You can get that person's mask to nod and agree and say with the right things, but the mask is not the human. And decisions that matter, real big ones that you might be asking people to make, they come from underneath the masks.

So the question becomes, how do you get somebody to take the mask off without force, without naming it, without calling it out? Because the second somebody feels their mask is threatened, the brain triples down. The walls go up instantly.

You lose everything you built in the first two phases. Level one is D1. I would call this level harmless rule questioning.

This is the entry point. The lightest possible deviation from some normal conversation. You're just saying something that's slightly more honest than what most people usually say.

something that acknowledges some kind of reality everybody knows but nobody says out loud. Something like, you know, it's hilarious when you think about it. The amount of energy people spend pretending that everything is fine.

It's like a full-time job for some people. It's establishing a tone. It's signaling that this is not going to follow the normal script in any way.

So that honesty is on the table and the person across from you registers that big time. So D1 isn't really powerful on its own. It's a door opener, but its job is to establish this as a space where the mask doesn't need to be on so tight.

Then we move to D2. And in D2, we have shared social criticism. So we're not just acknowledging a reality, now we're critiquing one.

So you might say something like, "You know what's wild to me? How many people build their entire identity around what they think other people want to see? It's like they're performing some character that they never auditioned for.

We're not just saying people pretend they're fine. We're saying people build fake identities. There's a judgment in there and we're getting them to kind of adopt it and agree to it.

And when they do that, they nod or they say, "Yeah, exactly. " Something shifts in that exact moment. Now you're not just like two people in a little conversation.

You're two people who see the same thing that most people don't. That's the beginning of a bond that the mask cannot produce. Now we get to D3.

And in D3, it's a private truth. So D3 is the first run where it gets personal for us. So at D3, you shift from criticizing the world to acknowledging something about yourself.

So, we're going way out there and we're coming right back in here and we're still just as brutally honest. That's the trick. I'll be honest, like I spent years operating on a version of myself that wasn't even close to who I actually was.

And I the most embarrassing part was wasn't that other people like bought it, but and they did. The worst part is that I bought it. That's D3.

So, the depth is welcome. the mask can kind of come down a notch to the other person. And the mechanism here is when somebody hears a D3 admission, their brain runs a rapid calculation.

This is exactly what goes on in that person's head. This person just showed me something real. Do I match that or do I stay really tight to my mask?

D1 and D2 work has to be done. If the tone has been set, they will match it. D4.

This is where you mention something taboo. This is where we name something that exists in some kind of shadow. We're just saying something true that lives underneath polite society.

Nobody tells you about success. There are days when you look at everything you built and you feel absolutely nothing. And you you can't say that to [ __ ] anybody because they think you're ungrateful so you just carry it.

That's D4. It's never offensive it or like some outrageous thing. But it's taboo in the sense that most people won't say this cuz it violates the script.

The script that said success is supposed to feel good. The script that says gratitude is the correct response to success. It's my belief that truth, even uncomfortable truth, creates a sense of safety that politeness can never even compare to.

Truth is so much more powerful than safety. Because politeness says, "I'm going to show you what's safe. " And you know what that means?

You're being if you're being polite only, you're fake. Then we get into D5. This is like an intimate internal reveal.

D5 creates asymmetry that the brain can't ignore. So when somebody shares it at a level like this, the listener's mask becomes very uncomfortable. And when it does, the other person shares something at D5.

This is what happens. You're no longer having a conversation. We're in a space that most people will never access with another person and it's maybe been what 15 20 minutes.

If you go from D1 to D2, that's easy. The gap is pretty small. Getting from D2 to D3 is where people start to stumble.

D3 to D4 is where I think it falls apart for a lot of people because their brain has a threshold between this is refreshingly honest and this is uncomfortably deep. And a lot of people can't make that distinction between those two things. If you cross that too fast or without some kind of permission, the mask snaps back on so hard on that person's face, you're going to hear it.

I developed something called a permission bridge, which takes that away. Permission bridge is a micro moment where you give the other person's nervous system like an unconscious signal that it's safe to go deeper. And it's not like a statement that you're making or anything like that.

It's a shift in tone, energy in your own body and your state that tells the brain that's sitting across from you. I'm not going anywhere and you're totally safe here. You have to be able to do that without saying words out loud.

So, let's say you're at D2. You've just shared a social observation. The person agreed.

So, the bond starts forming. Now, we need to cross into personal territory. The wrong way to do this is to immediately share some kind of D3 level truth.

You might say, "So, honestly, I spent years living a lie. That feels super weird, right? Why does it feel weird?

It's kind of what I was saying earlier. Why does it feel weird? It doesn't match the energy of the conversation.

That person's brain goes, "Wo, where did that come from? " And that kind of a guard comes up. So, the right way is you bridge these things.

The bridge essentially looks like this. You slow down, the volume drops a little bit, maybe just half a click. Your cadence changes a little bit.

Uh maybe just break eye contact like that for just a second. Look down like you're deciding whether or not you're going to say the next thing. And that exact pause, that moment of visible consideration is the bridge.

It is the nervous system hearing what comes next is going to be different and more real, and I'm choosing to share it. So it doesn't feel like a jump to a next thing. It feels like a natural deepening like the conversation's evolving by itself like conversations are supposed to.

And then you do the same similar thing uh with D3 and D4. You can't fake the permission bridge. You're not ever going to get good enough to simulate vulnerability with people.

And if you try, like if you perform like one of these downward glances or something like that, the nervous system is going to catch this stuff. You have to have done the internal work. You have to know yourself otherwise you're performing death.

>> Authorities are reporting a citywide manhunt underway. The world is breathing a fragile sound. No echoes here on sacred ground.

A quiet pose, a steady beat. The truth we feel in simple heat. Bare footsteps on hollowed ground.

A sacred rhythm we have found out. Oh, the world just breathes and I can feel it. A perfect promise.

Can't conceal it. Just shadows leaning on the light. Another beautiful quiet night.

The past is gone, but we remain washing over all the pain. A simple truth, a feeling pure, a soft connection to endure. Oh.

Oh. The world just breathes and I can feel it. A perfect promise.

Can't conceal it. Just shadows leaning on the light. Another beautiful quiet night.

Oh, it's quiet night. What makes forever? And the world just breathes.