The Power of Storytelling in Science: Making Complex Topics Accessible | Bryan Quoc Le | 594

Have you ever thought about Reddit as a place for the practice of thought leadership? If you're like me, you might not have. Today I want to explore how thought leadership often starts in unexpected places and how it can lift you early in your career. My guest today is Dr. Brian Cuoclet. He's now a food scientist, a food industry consultant, and the author of 150 Food Science Questions Answered. Brian's entry into thought leadership practice came through Reddit. We'll talk about how he built a community while still in graduate school, how it led to an offer to write a book, and how that book influenced his career journey. So Let's take a look at Reddit and talk about thought leadership, filling gaps, and creating communities. I'm Bill Sherman. This is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Let's begin. Welcome to the show, Brian.

Thanks for having me. Really appreciate the opportunity, Bill.

So I want to start with a little bit of an origin piece for you in terms of in grad school you had a project that you were working on that wound up being the through line into thought leadership for you. So my question is, what was that side project in grad school?

Yeah, so basically I was in my third year of graduate school and I was quite bored. And so I decided to, I decided to do a little bit of volunteering for a nonprofit organization called the Institute of Food Technologists. And they had a little blog that they needed help with. So I started contributing articles to it every so often, and I, I started to really enjoy that. And over time, I actually gained a lot of more leadership positions in that. And then I started running the blog, and then eventually that led to a publisher recognizing, you know, some of the articles I'd written and, you know, the traction I was building and the metrics I was building on the blog. And eventually they, they offered to see if I'd like to write a book on food science.

So, and so this happened soon after you received your PhD, not mid-career, that a publisher came looking for you, right?

Funny enough, it was actually before I received my PhD. Really? I actually got— I got the offer to write a book right in the last year, right before I was finishing up my dissertation. So it was actually quite a wild ride to have to write both the dissertation and the book at the same time.

Okay. So you're ABD and under contract writing a book, and this was in 2020, wasn't it?

That's right. That's right.

So this is how you spent your pandemic in some ways, right? You know, just full-on writing.

Yeah. All that extra time went to good use. You know, and it was, I luckily had the blessing of my wife who was very encouraging of me to do my dissertation during the day and write my book during the night and on the weekends. So I, I thank her for her, her sacrifice.

So a couple things I want to explore on the book. You mentioned that the publisher sought you out because of the blog work on that, and so you weren't thinking of writing a book at this point, right?

No, I mean, I was really just thinking, oh man, I maybe 5, 10 years down the line, maybe I have some experience under my belt. I'll pitch something. Maybe, you know, give it a try, the good old college try. But yeah, just out of the blue, they found the blog. They saw that I was, you know, building up quite a bit of an audience because I was, you know, optimizing the blog, you know, and this is all my spare time. I wasn't being paid to do any of this. It was just for fun. Yeah, this is how bad it was as far as trying to get away from doing the PhD work. And so, yeah, I was doing keywords and all that sort of thing.

Well, and I've heard many a story of PhD candidates who have found different ways to distract themselves rather than writing the dissertation. Getting a publisher to pursue them is a new one for me. And my question is, did they have a topic in mind for you or did they say, hey, we'd like you to write a book? What might you write?

Yeah, so they actually, they had it structured in a sort of a question-answer-response way, uh, where they had formulated the first 75 questions, kind of gathering it from different surveys. And then for me, I just had to finish the other 75 and answer all the questions that were compiled. So they, they had a structure in mind, and they, I think it was based on outline that they had a lot of success with, with their previous books. So it was kind of a plug-and-play scenario.

And so in this case, this is a book written for a popular audience, you know. And so you entered the world of science communicator and science translator. Was that sort of what you were thinking you'd do post-PhD, or Oh my gosh, I had no idea what I was going to do.

Honestly, it was just kind of playing around with the things I really enjoyed. And I honestly never thought I'd be a writer. I was that kid that really struggled at English class, you know, and I can attest to all my— I'm sure my English teachers are surprised that I have even written a book. So it wasn't on my radar, but I You know, over time you realize there are a lot of skills that you can build up if you just apply yourself. And that was one of the things I really developed was as I was writing more blog articles and really getting into the nuance of like, how do I translate this information that's very verbose, very technical, and turn it into something that's readable? It became sort of a craft I developed, and it really started with me trying to explain things to my wife. She's not a scientist, she's a psychotherapist. And she has a strong humanities background. She loves reading. And I had the challenge of like, how do I explain things to my wife? And eventually I cracked the code, so to speak.

Well, so there's a journey there, right, in terms of taking academic literature and translating it for a lit review and doing your study for the PhD and then being able to say, how do I turn this into something that's accessible for a generally educated layperson, right? Where they have a wide array of knowledge, but not the technical specialty.

Right, right. Yeah, definitely, definitely. There's a lot of nuance there as far as, you know, you can't talk over a person, right? You know, they're just as intelligent as you. They have education and different skills and different, areas in focus, but you know, you're also trying to get the meat of it and trying to get it over, you know, the hurdle of, am I going to sit here and be bored by this guy talking, right? Or whatever he's writing.

Well, and I can see having your wife as sort of the sounding board and where you develop that skill. Respect certainly is something that you want to signal over the dinner table. Otherwise, that's just not going to go well long term of the Okay, eyeroll. I asked you a question and you came back and talked to me, you know, like I was a second grader. That just doesn't work, right? So the book comes out and is published. My question for you is, how has having a book published early in your career impacted your career? What doors have opened?

Yeah, it's really funny because even before I was done with the book, people were starting to hear that I was writing a book. You know, this is through the grapevine. I was telling my family, my friends, and eventually they were telling their friends. And, you know, through all this, I actually got my first client from my cousin who she knew someone that was working for a food company, a flavor company, and they wanted me to write. Some technical documents, you know, and I was like, oh, I guess this could be something I could do, you know, in the meantime while I'm trying to figure things out. And then, you know, eventually once the book got published, it just sort of had this snowball effect because it validated that I am this person that, you know, someone put the chips on the table for, you know, they said, hey, you know, like, here's some money, write this book. So there's that. And then the second piece is that they they could see that there is evidence that I had completed something. And so those two signals allowed me to convey a lot of value upfront to a lot of potential clients. I just email people and say, hey, you know, I, I wrote this book and, you know, I can do some writing if you've got anything on the table. And I ended up being able to get a lot of long-term clients in that first year just because of that.

So you open doors because of your ability to write, but you were also a food scientist. And so have you been doing lab work as well? And how has the ability to have the book as an asset for yourself impacted your career on that side?

Yeah, I mean, once I started kind of building up my name, people started reaching out to me for product development work, for research and development work. And somehow it was the fact that I had this knowledge base, but also that I could convey it and explain it, that became really valuable because people didn't want to work with someone that was going to, you know, use a lot of terms or be very technical and get into the weeds. They wanted someone that could explain things quickly. And succinctly. And I was able to do that because it was just sort of a natural way of speaking. I just learned that that was just the way I know how to translate things. And so people became more comfortable with the types of projects I could pitch. I'd say, hey, let's work on this. Like, I can do this, I can develop this product, you know, this is how I'm going to do it. And very, in very layman's terms, they'd be like, oh sure, that sounds great. You know, there's a lot of there's a lot of opportunity there. And so it was being able to deliver a lot of information in a very short amount of time in my proposals, in, you know, the small communications, in the emails, over meetings, and just make people feel really comfortable about the fact that they're in good hands because, you know, I wasn't trying to speak over them. I wasn't trying to, you know, over-communicate. I was just trying to get as much information as possible so that they could do what they do best, which is the business side, the marketing side, you know, whatever it was.

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I probably wouldn't be where I'm at right now. I don't know if I would be able to do this consulting, you know, this one-man show. I think I would've probably had to find a job or position because I wouldn't have been able to easily and quickly deliver, you know, that signaling, that messaging of this guy knows his stuff.

And credibility. So it was an early career enhancer for you.

Oh, absolutely. It was a catalyst for a lot of new opportunities. It just kept snowballing, you know, like the more credibility I built, the more clients I had under my belt. People began saying that I could do what I said I did, and there'd be testimonials coming out of the wazoo, you know, and just because of having that book. Under my belt, it just caught— we're all together.

So that's a great setup for the question I want to ask you in terms of when did you realize you were practicing thought leadership and getting pulled into this world?

Yeah, I think what happened was after I got my book published, it was crickets all around. So there wasn't a whole lot of— the interest came through that sort of word of mouth, but it didn't come through any, you know, active marketing or anything like that.

And Good Morning America wasn't calling.

No spot. Yeah, no, no, none of that. No, no, no news coverage, right? And so it dawned on me that I needed to amplify the message myself, right? And so I started actually reading up about books on thought leadership and about guerrilla marketing and, and, and, you know, building up a platform and that sort of thing. And I experimented with a lot of different avenues and different approaches. You know, I started with social media. Everyone starts with social media, right?

Yeah, it's a low risk, low end, low cost of entry.

Exactly. Exactly. But I am terrible at, you know, I don't like to post photos. I have no clue how to, like, build a story with very, you know, 6-second segments. It's not— it's not my thing.

But you would be the ideal person to be taking pictures of food in restaurants and then explaining what we're seeing, right? And from a food science perspective, that would be a totally different sort of food Instagram influencer perspective.

That's funny. Yeah. I mean, my wife kept pitching it because we would just sit down and have dinner. Yeah. At a restaurant. She's like, you know, you should really post this on your Instagram. And I'm just thinking like, I'm so— I've— it's just, it's just not in me, you know, like, and I think I would, it would've been a real uphill battle to like make, to turn my personality into something that was presentable and, and would actually return on the investment of time and energy.

And from a thought leadership perspective, I often think about a 2x2 matrix. One, what modalities are easy for you and hard for you? Okay. And so if Instagram is a hard modality for you, the other axis is where's your audience? If your audience were there and that were the way that you had to reach them, then you find a way. But if there are other ways to reach your, your target audience, and that's a hard modality, okay, set that one aside.

Yep, yep. And, uh, you know, what ended up happening was that I accidentally fell into this situation where I, I began running a group on Reddit, um, because I'd spent so much time— it was just me, you know, again procrastinating and, you know, trying to find a way not to do my PhD. But I ended up just running this this subreddit group on food science, which is called r/foodscience.

Okay, so let's talk about who's on that Reddit group and sort of the conversations that happen there.

Yeah, definitely. You know, I've got— it started off with 10,000 members, um, and it's, it's grown over time in the last couple years to 34,000 members. And a lot of them are food scientists, you know, just people who want to volunteer their time and explain things to, you know, lay audiences. There's people who come in, they might be business people, they might be investors, they might just be, you know, random folks who are just really interested and passionate about food science. They might not even have a science background, but they'll ask questions and then people pop up and want to answer them and they come from the industry. And my goal is really to get out of everyone's way and try to manage these conversations so that, you know, people get the most value out of them. And because my name is always, you know, shooting up on the, you know, on the group as I'm posting and providing my own answers, people have reached out to me directly for projects. And I, and it wasn't something I thought, ah, this is where I'm going to get clients. I actually, for the longest time, I thought this is the worst place to get clients because it's not, it's so, it was such a personal project for me. I was not interested in and necessarily trying to maximize my time on that. It was just something I did for fun. And then now because of the, you know, the amount of things I do for the group, I have people refer me, I get, you know, industry professionals that say, hey, check out, talk to Brian, like he's a consultant, he knows what he's talking about. And so there's a built credibility in there as well in that space. And of course my book has played into that, so.

Well, there's building a personal brand, creating a community space, nurturing it and supporting it, and creating a space which allows both the accredited professionals as well as a lay audience to come together and have a conversation. That's a special space to create and to get the professionals to want to come and go, yeah, let's go read the questions in the comments, because mostly on the internet that's sort of like the rule not to do is read the comments.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

So you've been building and nurturing communities, you've been taking scientific concepts and making them accessible. I want to ask you a question. Where is this going? What's next? What's the next level?

That's, you know, there's been, there's a few hills along the way. I've tried to, you know, step up and see beyond. But I think it's all just sort of, things just come to me. And I take the opportunities where I can. Ultimately, for example, I'm talking to this filmmaker who, you know, he's won an Emmy in the past and he's really interested in doing a documentary about flavors. And I'm like, yes, please. Like that. I love that because I'm, I'm in that space. I want to, I want to convey that to a general audience. And, you know, I, it might, who knows what will come out of it. But for me, it's just about the, the creativity and the adventure of trying to do, you know, this work of being this independent consultant and creating a message and creating these stories for people.

So you mentioned creating a platform, and one of the things that we see in thought leadership is often to be known for a perspective or an area of expertise, which is how we define a platform rather than, you know, a technology platform. Have you landed on your platform yet in terms of what you want people to know and refer you for?

Yes, yes, absolutely. I am the guy who knows savory flavors. If you need— yeah.

So, you know, back to your dissertation work.

It is. Somehow I managed to come full circle. It took me a while, but I, I managed to build it up. You know, if you need to know anything about umami, I, I'm the guy because I've got hundreds and hundreds of papers that I again used to procrastinate from my PhD. I've now given me value in the market space. So people now come to me for that, that kind of advice.

Fantastic. And that— what I love about that is within the world of food science, it is specific, it is clear.. And it, it answers the Ghostbusters question of who you gonna call and why. And this is why I pick up the phone to talk to Brian rather than one of 100 other food scientists. Yep.

Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely.

So is there a cookbook in your future?

Gosh, you know, I've, I've been playing around with the idea. Maybe, maybe I just have to sit down and think about how to, how to spin it in a way that's that works in my favor, you know, because a lot of the time cookbooks are a huge, huge use of time and energy. And, you know, you have to understand how you're going to use that to sell your services. And I want to make sure I stay in my lane. I realize that, you know, if, if I'm able to just maximize my messaging in the best possible way, it might be a cookbook, it might be another book, We'll see. We'll just have to see.

Well, whether we see you at a film festival or on the bookshelf or on Instagram, I want to thank you for joining us, Brian, today and having a conversation about your work and thought leadership.

Thank you so much, Bill. It's been a pleasure.

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