A three-star Michelin chef spent decades working 18-hour kitchen shifts while reading philosophy and theory, developing a systems-thinking approach that traces problems to their root causes. He's fiercely loyal to the dishwashers and cooks who do the real work, and dismisses managers who hide behind abstractions instead of understanding how kitchens actually function.
Well, you know, my, my entire life I've led two lives. Yeah. One during the day, right? I was in the three star Michelin world for 35, 40 years, whatever. You know, just those 18 hour, 20 hour, 22 hour days. But I also very academic, so most of my nights were spent reading and writing. It's unusual. I've almost lived like two parallelized one shoulder to shoulder, right? With the, with the blue collar workers, the dishwashers, the cooks. They are my peeps. I feel a deep, deep loyalty to the working man, to the, to the blue collar guy. And I've spent an equal amount of my life in the world of academia, books. I've read almost 10,000 books in my life. The work that I do, you know, there was first order thinking, second order, third order, fourth order, right? So everything I see in the restaurant industry, I see, I see the connections all around the world, in every domain, not just in restaurants. When I talk about problems, I'm not looking for the surface level. I'm looking for the cause beneath the symptom and the cause beneath that cause. And at the bottom, there are things we call generators. They are the cause of all of the symptoms. Okay. And they're. And they're not that many. The thing we're going to talk about today, Agent, the guy we love to hate, Agent Smith. And, and the thing is, if you're a chef, this should register you yourselves as truth. You may not know how to put it in words, but there is this thing you're fielding you your entire career. There's something truly up in the world where the suits like Agent Smith live in a different world. And it's an imaginary world. It's a world of abstraction. It's a world of mathematical functions and models that each decade have less and less relationship with the real world.
If your restaurant only works because you work 80 hours a week, it doesn't work.
