Writing scripts 3

February 17, 2026

When you watch enough content about faces, you start noticing a pattern in why it works. Someone points at a face, breaks it down into specific features, bone structure, soft tissue, skin quality, hair density, proportions, grooming signals, and shows you how each of those features sits on a gradient that your brain is already using. Whether something reads as masculine or feminine, young or old, dense or sparse, familiar or unfamiliar, healthy or unhealthy, threatening or non-threatening. All of those gradient readings pile up into a reaction, and that reaction produces a response, whether you feel attracted to someone, whether you trust them, whether you want to hire them or avoid them or protect them. And if you zoom out far enough, those repeated responses become behavior. Dating outcomes, job offers, how strangers treat you on the street, who gets authority and who does not.

The chain looks like this:

Subject and its specific, observable features
Gradient pairs those features sit on
Reaction those gradients produce together
Response that reaction leads to
Long-term behavior that builds from repeated responses

And you can enter from any point. Start with the subject and walk forward. Start with a long-term behavior people already recognize and trace it back. Start with a reaction people already feel but cannot name and investigate both directions from there.

Now here is the thing. When you look at this chain carefully, you realize that gradients exist in every domain, responses happen in every domain, and long-term behavior accumulates in every domain. That is not specific to faces. That is just what happens whenever a person encounters any subject at all. The contents of each column change completely depending on what you are talking about, but the fact that those columns exist does not change.

So when you move this to a different domain, nothing carries over directly. You are not borrowing the face gradients or the face responses. What you are doing is building the chain fresh for the new subject, finding what the relevant gradients actually are in that domain, what the reactions actually look like, what the responses and long-term behaviors actually are for the people involved. The structure is the prompt, not the answer.

But there is something else worth adding here. Not every subject has enough readable features on the surface to run through gradients cleanly. Some subjects are harder to point at. The reaction is still happening but it is not coming from something observable, it is coming from what the subject carries with it. Its history. Where it came from, who made it, what it was associated with, what moment or movement it belonged to, and what it meant to people before you ever encountered it. That history feeds into the subject before any features even register, and it does a lot of the work that features alone cannot do. It also makes the reaction less predictable, because different people have different relationships to the same history, so the same subject can produce completely opposite reactions depending on who is in the room.

So the fuller chain, especially for subjects that carry a lot of context, looks like this:

History
Subject and its specific, observable features
Gradient pairs those features sit on
Reaction those gradients produce together
Response that reaction leads to
Long-term behavior that builds from repeated responses

Take music as an example and you can see both sides of this working at once. On the features side, you have tempo, pitch, timbre, vocal texture, dynamic range, density of instrumentation, how much silence or space there is, whether the melody is predictable or surprising, how the song is mixed, how much low end there is versus high end. Those features sit on gradients like fast versus slow, dense versus sparse, bright versus dark, smooth versus rough, familiar versus jarring, controlled versus chaotic, intimate versus distant, tense versus resolved, energetic versus still. Those gradient readings produce reactions that are quite physical, your heart rate changes, your body wants to move or it does not, you feel alert or drowsy, safe or unsettled, like you are in a crowd or completely alone. Those reactions lead to responses, you skip the song or you replay it, you send it to someone, you associate it with a memory, you feel understood or alienated, you want more from that artist or you never go back. And long term, the music starts shaping your identity, you go to shows, you follow the artist, certain songs become markers of who you were at a certain point in your life, and all of it shapes your taste going forward.

But then there is the history side. Take punk. If you strip it down to just its features, fast tempo, rough vocals, sparse instrumentation, those gradients alone do not explain the reaction it produces in people. A big part of what you are reacting to is what punk represented, who it came from, what it was pushing against, what it cost the people who made it. Someone who grew up with that history in their bones hears punk completely differently from someone encountering it fresh, even if the sound is identical. The features are the same, the gradients are the same, but the history is doing its own work underneath all of it, and that work lands differently depending on the person.

For example finance:

History

How money has worked across different eras
Who controlled it and who was excluded
Major crashes, bubbles, scandals
How financial systems were built and who they were built for
What certain assets, institutions, or behaviors have meant across time
How attitudes toward debt, saving, risk have shifted culturally

Subject and features

An asset, a market, a financial product, a person, a company, a decision, a system
Price history and volatility
Who owns it and in what proportion
How liquid it is
What backs it or gives it value
How accessible it is to ordinary people
How it is regulated
Who is selling it and how hard they are selling it
What the incentive structures around it look like

Gradients

Safe versus risky
Accessible versus gatekept
Transparent versus opaque
Stable versus volatile
Short term versus long term
Understood versus misunderstood
Legitimate versus suspicious
Simple versus complex
Old versus new

Reactions

Fear or excitement
Feeling informed or overwhelmed
Feeling included or shut out
Trust or suspicion
Urgency or patience
Shame around past decisions
Hope about future ones

Responses

Buy, sell, hold, or avoid
Research further or disengage
Tell someone else about it
Change your relationship with spending or saving
Feel motivated or paralyzed

Long-term behavior

Build wealth or lose it
Develop financial literacy or stay dependent on others
Change your class position over time
Pass habits and attitudes down to people around you
Shape how the next generation thinks about money

For example of a channel talking about startups: