Episode 2 · 2026-07-10
Find Your Signal, Find Your Subtraction
Solo methodology episode. What a signal and a subtraction actually are, and how to find your own, with or without AI.
Host Sam Rogers · 18 min
A choice this episode can help with
Which recurring commitments still deserve to exist?
Run it on your own work: Mandate Drift Inventory, one page, any model.
The signals
- Mandate drift. What wears us down is not The Big Project, it is the recurring drag of obligations that quietly drifted onto our plates. Nobody important sat you down and assigned the standing meeting, the weekly report, the inherited sync; a need existed once and the calendar commitment never left. It came straight out of a week of real change-management conversations, which is the whole test: recent, specific, first person. If a stranger could have posted it on LinkedIn, it is not yours yet.
The subtractions
- Kill the for-loop meetings. A recurring meeting is a for loop: it runs on a fixed count, and nobody asks at iteration 28 whether it still deserves to run. A do-while loop rechecks its exit condition every pass and stops when the goal is met; it writes its own ending. So the subtraction is not "cancel your boring meetings" (generic, hard to apply), it is convert for-loop meetings into do-loop meetings. I dropped three recurring Q3 meetings and delegated one up the org chart. Try it: open your calendar, and for each recurring event ask what its exit condition is and who checks it. No exit condition and no checker means it is a for loop running for someone else. Give it a return statement this week.
About this episode
This week host Sam Rogers goes solo to set the ground rules: what a signal and a subtraction actually are, and how to find your own, with or without AI.
Three news items that mattered most by Wednesday this week: Anthropic's Jacobian Lens (JSpace) cracking open the model's subconscious, the closing Fable 5 billing window (Claude tokens: use'em if you got'em!), and Microsoft's 2.5 billion dollar Frontier Company deployment unit as more proof that 2025's pilots are 2026's production.
This week's links:
- Anthropic: the Global Workspace (JSpace) announcement
- The paper: A Global Workspace in Language Models (Transformer Circuits)
- Video: JSpace and human consciousness
- Play with it: Neuronpedia JLens (Qwen and Gemma)
- GitHub: anthropics/jacobian-lens
- Microsoft: the Frontier Company announcement
The method, worked live by hand. A signal is recent, specific, and first person; if a stranger could have posted it on LinkedIn, it is not yours yet. A subtraction is something you actually stopped, past tense, made not planned, and it does not start as advice for other people. The mandate-drift signal and the for-loop-meeting subtraction turn out to be two sides of the same coin. Grab the home game at sigsub.show/find-yours.
Want to bring your own signal and subtraction? Find yours. Mentioned on air, unpaid: Harnessie.
Transcript
Read the conversation
Sam Rogers: Signals and subtractions. What to watch, what to drop every week
Sam Rogers: Hey, welcome to Signals and Subtractions. This is episode two. I'm Sam Rogers. Uh, typically we'll have a co-host and a guest. Today it's just me. I wanted to set some ground rules here for how I think about what this show is and what it's not, and specifically, what do we mean when we say signal and subtraction around here? Um, by the end, you'll be able to find your very own signal and subtraction with or without the use of AI.
Sam Rogers: But first, because AI changes all the time, news. For the longest time, AI has just been a black box. Like we know that stuff is happening. We see the outputs, but we don't really see what's happening underneath.
Put it to work
Which recurring obligation has no exit condition, and who is supposed to check it?
The newsletter
Issue 59 · Sunday 12 July 2026 · sent on Substack and LinkedIn.
One signal, one subtraction, one analogy, in five minutes. It draws on this episode but stands on its own. Every issue.
The takeaway
The method from this episode, handed over whole: one page with its copy-paste prompt and JSON schema. Every takeaway.