Undersignal started with a skill I spent thirty years building: spotting deception, and not stopping until I had the truth.
My career has been in sales, negotiation, executive search, and recruiting, including time as a vice president at a Fortune 500. Across more than 15,000 interviews, I learned to read people for what they were really doing: the practiced answer, the topic they steered around, the claim that didn't survive a follow-up, the place they dropped ownership and redirected. I read it in behavior and word choice, always against context, and in a room I could push until I got to the truth. What my clients valued most wasn't a gut feeling. It was my ability to name what the gut was reacting to, and turn it into an honest call on whether someone would succeed in a role. Done well, it lowered their turnover.
The problem is you can't cross-examine a press release. You can't push a transcript, an article, or a public statement to tell you what it's leaving out.
The same mechanics I read in the negotiating and interview rooms run at scale across media, social media, public statements, blogs, and podcasts: leaning on emotion, casting companies and leaders as villains, rewarding outrage because outrage performs. Often the whole read collapses with one missing piece of context. A corporate layoff of 10,000 people reads as cruelty in the US and, in another country, as the decision that saved 70,000 jobs and the company itself. The outrage wasn't reading the event. It was reading the framing.
I'd push back in threads and hit the same wall: I could feel the manipulation but couldn't name the devices fast enough. So I built a simple tool to help me articulate them. Running real articles through it changed how I saw everything, including myself. I could spot the construction easily when it cut against me, and miss it completely on the issues I cared about. Over time I stopped taking a side. The mechanics don't care which team you're on.
A simple prompt only gets you so far.
Pointed at serious work, it drifts, contradicts itself, and hands you a number with nothing behind it. People making real decisions need more: a calibrated method, a defensible read, and analysis they can put in front of someone who will push back.
That is why I am building Undersignal. It reads the construction of a piece of communication the way I learned to read a person: the framing, the word choice, the emphasis, what's missing. It doesn't tell you whether something is true or claim to know anyone's intent. It shows you how the thing is built, so you can make that call yourself, and defend it.
Josh Matthews, Founder