Readings
The stuff that shaped how I think. Not a syllabus. A shelf.
YOU++ is built on a thesis: the person who knows how to think will always outperform the person who knows how to operate a tool. These are the books, papers, and ideas that inform that thesis. Some are famous. Some are obscure. None require a CS degree.
Logic and Computability
The core idea is simple: some questions have no correct answer, and computers can't tell which ones those are. That's it. Everything below is different ways of arriving at that same point.
Charles Petzold — The Annotated Turing (2008) START HERE
Petzold walks through Turing's famous 1936 paper line by line, in plain English, with context and examples. Covers Church's result too. If you want to understand why computers have limits — and what those limits mean for AI — this is where to start. No math degree required. The ideas are simple. The original papers just made them look hard.
Douglas Hofstadter — Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979)
The book that made self-reference and formal systems (rule-based frameworks for reasoning) fun to read. Dense, playful, and still the best introduction to why "intelligence" is a harder word than it looks.
The originals (for the curious)
These are the 1936 papers that started it all. Church proved some problems can't be solved by any step-by-step process. Turing proved the same thing a different way. Between them they drew a line around what machines can and cannot do. That line hasn't moved. Church was my professor at UCLA — this is why I care about this stuff. But start with Petzold. These papers are dense, and the ideas inside them are simpler than the notation makes them look.
Thinking
Daniel Kahneman — Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
System 1 and System 2. The fast pattern-matcher and the slow deliberator. AI is the best System 1 ever built. You are the System 2. This book explains why that division of labor works.
George Pólya — How to Solve It (1945)
A math book about problem-solving that isn't really about math. Understand the problem. Devise a plan. Carry out the plan. Look back. That's it. That's the whole workflow. Pólya wrote the YOU++ playbook eighty years early.
Writing
Stephen King — On Writing (2000)
Half memoir, half craft manual. The best advice in the book: "Write with the door closed. Rewrite with the door open." Applied to AI: draft with the machine, revise with your judgment. The door is the boundary between generation and evaluation.
William Zinsser — On Writing Well (1976)
Clarity, simplicity, brevity, humanity. Every principle in this book applies directly to prompt engineering (writing instructions for AI), which is just writing for a very literal audience.
Technology and Society
Fred Brooks — The Mythical Man-Month (1975)
"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Brooks understood that the bottleneck in building things is communication and judgment, not labor. AI changes the labor equation. It does not change the communication equation.
Vannevar Bush — "As We May Think" (1945)
Written before computers existed in any meaningful sense. Bush imagined a machine called the Memex that would augment human thinking by managing associations and references. He described the AI assistant eighty years before it existed. He also understood that the human stays in the chair.
Philosophy
Philosophy Break
Pop philosophy done right. Short, clear articles that explain big ideas without assuming you took the class. Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, free will, consciousness — all written for adults who are curious, not academics who already know. If YOU++ had a philosophy department, this would be its library. We link to it regularly.
The Craft Problem
Michal Malewicz — "Vibe Coding is Over" (2026)
A designer with 25 years of experience watching the same pattern repeat: people with no fundamentals use faster tools to produce more garbage. AI didn't create this problem. It multiplied it. His line: "The tool is just a multiplier. If your base is zero, multiplying it by any number still gives you zero." Same church as YOU++, different pew.
This list will grow. If you have a recommendation, the contact is in the book page.
Disclosure: This page was generated by Claude (Anthropic) under Bill's direction. The reading selections and commentary reflect Bill's perspective and experience. He reviewed and approved every word but did not type them all.