Host

Sam Rogers hosts every episode of Signals & Subtractions. Cohosts rotate and guests come with their stories.

What he is after

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.

It is also why this show counts subtractions. What an AI system produces is easy to score and gets scored constantly. What a person decided to stop doing because of it is invisible, unrewarded, and far more diagnostic of whether anything changed. A team that added a tool looks the same from outside as a team that reorganised around one. The difference is what they dropped.

That is the same work in all three places it happens: on air, asking every guest what they stopped; at PAICE.work, measuring human-AI collaboration as observed behaviour rather than self-report; and on his own machines, where he has run models since 2021.

What the host does here

Every episode carries at least two signals and two subtractions, and the host is a voice like any other when a seat is open: his own pair, held to the standard he asks of everyone else. With a cohost and a guest both in their chairs he drops his own set and closes by connecting theirs.

When a source in the conversation is one of his own projects he says so in passing, and names the underlying instrument rather than 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 and director, which is much of why the show sounds structured rather than loose.

He has been livestreaming since 2013, and has produced, hosted and cohosted podcasts and live shows throughout.

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.

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. Running them on his own hardware since 2021 is the difference between having opinions about AI and having data.

Beyond the show

Sam founded PAICE.work 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 one offered to every reader: name one signal you are actually tracking, and one thing you have actually stopped. Find yours, or read the top ten pairs from a year of practice.