Host
The one seat filled every episode.
Every voice brings a signal and a subtraction. The host also connects them.
Sam Rogers hosts every episode of Signals & Subtractions. Cohosts rotate and guests come with their stories.
What the host does here
Every voice on air brings one signal worth watching and one subtraction worth making, and the host is a voice like any other: his own signal and his own subtraction, every week, held to the same standard he asks of everyone else. When a source in the conversation is one of his own projects, he says so in passing and names the underlying instrument instead of leaning on the brand. You will hear that on air because it is a rule, not a courtesy.
How he got here
Twenty-five years, from an unusual direction. Sam started as a performer and producer, touring internationally as a writer, director, producer, and educator, which is a large part of why the show sounds structured rather than loose. Those years overlap two decades inside corporate learning, consulting for organizations including Google and Deloitte, and building the first YouTube Certified Online program at Google in 2013 alongside Lee Rodrigues, who now cohosts this show. Sam also has been live streaming since that time, and functioned as a producer, host, and co-host to multiple podcasts and livestreaming shows.
When consulting collapsed in 2020 he went in-house on purpose and went deep: analytics, Python, knowledge graphs, and the first genuinely useful language models. He has been running models on his own hardware since 2021, which is the difference between having opinions about AI and having data.
That is the whole reason this show exists in the shape it does. Almost everyone is measuring what AI produces. Very few are measuring whether the people working alongside it are any good at it, and that gap is where the week's signals keep coming from.
Beyond the show
Sam founded PAICE.work, which measures human-AI collaboration as observed behavior rather than self-report, and runs Snap Synapse, founded in 2004. He wrote Just Do The Thing, publishes his own AI usage as a daily record across every provider he uses, and writes at sam-rogers.com. He is on LinkedIn.
Try the method yourself
The discipline the host practices on air is the same one offered to every reader: name one signal you are actually tracking, and one thing you have actually stopped. Find yours with the same method cohosts and guests use, or read the top 20 pairs from a year of practice.