About Bill

A philosophy major who learned to type by accident.

The career

Forty years in advertising and technology. Started as a media buyer. Pivoted sideways into an internal technology group because the tools were more interesting than the meetings. Now an SVP of data engineering — six countries, a team of engineers who are smarter than him at the things they're smart at.

No CS degree. Philosophy major from UCLA, class of '89. The arc makes no sense on paper. Philosophy to media buying to broadcast to engineering to AI. But the thread is the same: figure out the problem, break it down, build the solution, move on. The domain changes. The method doesn't.

The family

Married to Lesley since 1997. Together since 1985, when they were both at UCLA. She is the reason for everything that works.

Two daughters. Zoe, the writer. Sadie, the artist.

His father, Gary, died on December 23, 2025. The memoir is Gary's elegy. The whole project — the book, this site, the AI workflows — started because Bill sat down after his father died and needed to write something true.

The neurodivergence

His brain transcodes incorrectly but optimizes to the correct result at speed. Wrong notation, right answer. Wrong path, right destination. It looks like chaos from the outside. From the inside it's a compiler with non-standard syntax.

Sadie spotted it years ago. Bill half-acknowledged it. In 2026 he filed the paperwork and made it official. Hidden disability. Not broken — just a different instruction set.

Why this site exists

Because Bill started using AI for grunt work, then for analysis, then for everything, and got more productive than the institution knew what to do with. People made fun. Then they got nervous. Then they got angry. So this site lays it all out — there's no secret, and if you think differently about AI, you'll probably get some benefit from it. Maybe not as much as Bill is. That's fine.

The thesis is plain: the pyramid is inverted. We taught people tools when we should have taught them judgment. The AI handles syntax. You handle the rest. If a philosophy major with no CS degree can do this, so can you. That's YOU++.