No graduate degree. No PhD. Dropped out of grad school at BU and never looked back. What I do have is a newsletter that just cracked #69 on Substack Tech Rising, a subscriber list loaded with researchers and domain experts, and a working theory about why technical audiences sometimes prefer reading someone who had to fight to understand the material. When you can't rely on credentials, you have to rely on clarity. Turns out that's the metric that scales. Here's what the data from my own growth actually showed me about communicating complex AI topics to mixed technical audiences.
Something weird is happening.
Pithy Cyborg just cracked the Substack Tech Rising list. Ranked #69. Which means real people, people who didn't have to, chose to show up and read what a grad school dropout from Boston University is writing about AI.
I'm still not sure how to feel about that.
Let me be honest with you.
I quit grad school. BU. Gone. Packed up whatever dignity I had left and walked out before they could formally document how lost I was.
And for a long time, that felt like a ceiling. Like there was a version of the conversation I wasn't allowed to join. The serious one. The credentialed one.
So when I started Pithy Cyborg, I kept waiting for someone to notice.
The imposter syndrome is real.
I'm not using that phrase loosely. I mean the specific, nauseating feeling of publishing something and then watching your inbox fill up with responses from people who have forgotten more about this field than you've ever learned.
My readers include PhDs. Researchers. Scientists doing actual important work. People whose credentials could eat my credentials for breakfast and still be hungry.
There were stretches where I almost stopped writing entirely.
Not because I ran out of things to say. But because I genuinely questioned whether I had earned the right to say them.
Then something shifted.
They kept writing back.
But not to correct me or to embarrass me like I expected. Rather, they wrote to engage. To push back thoughtfully. To say things like "this framing helped me explain something to my team" or "I forwarded this to my department."
People with doctorates. Forwarding my newsletter. To their departments.
I had to sit with that for a minute.
Here's what I think is actually happening.
The most credentialed people in any field are often the worst at explaining it to everyone else. Because expertise creates blind spots. You stop seeing what's confusing because nothing is confusing to you anymore.
What I accidentally built is a translation layer.
I'm not the smartest person in the room. I am almost certainly the least credentialed person in the room. But I can sit with a complicated idea until I understand it well enough to hand it to someone else without losing the point.
Turns out that's useful. Even to the PhDs.
What #69 on Rising actually means.
It means the newsletter is growing. Real growth, organic, driven by readers who share it because they find it valuable.
It means the format is working. Short. Direct. No jargon for jargon's sake. AI news made simple. That's all I'm smart enough to publish anyway, lol.
And it means the instinct to keep going, even when the imposter syndrome was loudest, was the right call.
The bottom line.
You don't need a PhD to have something worth saying.
You need to show up consistently, be honest about what you don't know, and trust that clarity is its own kind of credential.
I dropped out of grad school. I write a newsletter read by people far smarter than me. And somehow, improbably, it's rising.
I'll take it.
I'll keep watching and reporting what comes next.
Want to stay in the loop? Subscribe to my Substack for free: https://pithycyborg.substack.com/subscribe
Read past issues here: https://pithycyborg.substack.com/archive
Cordially,
Mike D
Pithy Cyborg | AI News Made Simple
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