A speaker argues reality is fundamentally information, not matter, and positions chefs as modern heroes who reconnect us to this truth through embodied work. Cooking preserves the soul in ways abstract institutions cannot. Donald Burns notes chefs don't become billionaires.
What we are experiencing worldwide is a diffusion of personality, a loosening, a glimmering shimmering. The thing around us, the matrix, is starting to shimmer our own. Everything that is a thing is a field, an information field of potentiality, a boundary and the interaction between the two. A rock could not stay a rock. No thing can be a thing without design. Every kind of science we have is pointing to the same truth. This universe is not composed of material. That is emerges, yes. Beneath that is information, boundaries and interchange of information. What this means is that there is design. You couldn't even have a rock if there wasn't design. Some code I use that quotes some sort of code is telling that energy to stay organized as a rock, okay? All of this stuff, as esoteric as it may sound, boils down to reality. Cooks, chefs, restaurateurs are our. One of our last hopes as a civilization of regaining attunement, regaining a connection to reality. You chefs out there, you are heroes like Neo, trying to wake up the world. You can't get away with abstraction. Cooking, it won't allow you. Just like Jesus was a carpenter. There's something intrinsically rewarding soul, satisfying and formative about working with your hands, growing things in the dirt, a planing wood with a plane, hand tools, interacting, the whole sensorium going into your brain and you're responding and having this conversation with reality. The models, the institutions, the governments have been captured by abstraction. You guys, Donald and me and you chefs and restaurateurs out there, we are the Neos, trying to wake people up. And I don't think you were even aware of it with words. I think you felt it, all of you. I think you all chose this field of cooking because in your bones you knew there was some truth here the world needs. So that's why I wanted to talk this way and salute all of you. Yes, because it's not a career that makes you a billionaire.
Typically, no.
You know, it's hard work in trenches. It's tough work, but the reward of it is you don't lose your soul. You stay.
What do you always say? You always say, the heat doesn't. The heat doesn't lie.
If your restaurant only works because you work 80 hours a week, it doesn't work.
