The Restaurant Coach Podcast with Craig Shelton
In this episode of the Restaurant Coach podcast, host Donald Burns interviews chef‑consultant Craig Shelton, who weaves together personal anecdotes, culinary philosophy, and a sweeping critique of modern society. Shelton frames chefs as "Neo" figures battling an "Agent Smith"—the abstract, profit‑driven forces that seek to commodify and standardize food. He explains that the restaurant industry mirrors a larger cultural pathology he calls the "brain virus of modernism," where society has abandoned absolute truth and meaning, leading to a flat plane of insanity. Drawing on his dual life—decades in three‑star Michelin kitchens and extensive academic study—Shelton describes how the left‑brain’s predictive models dominate while the right‑brain’s attunement to reality is suppressed. He argues that this imbalance fuels exponential financial growth driven by private banks, which creates rising costs (e.g., 8% annual rent hikes) that crush restaurants. Shelton introduces key concepts: - Attunement – a sensory, dialogic relationship with ingredients, contrasted with merely "handling food". - Ontological starvation – the societal loss of real, meaningful experience due to mass‑produced, soulless food. - Service as ethical wing‑man – restaurants facilitate real human deals rather than staged experiences. - Opposite‑Day principle – deliberately doing the opposite of conventional SOPs often yields dramatic performance gains. - Historical grounding – he links the Enlightenment’s loss of belief in absolute truth to today’s abstraction, citing his classical education (Harvard Classics, Mortimer Adler) as a counter‑balance. Shelton shares stories (talking to tomatoes, blind‑folded steak searing) to illustrate attunement, and cites data (private banks create 97% of money, 12× global GDP in debt) to underline his financial critique. He positions chefs as the last custodians of reality, capable of restoring balance by resisting scale, embracing craft, and fostering genuine human connection at the table. The conversation ends with practical advice for listeners to seek the “red pill” of awareness, maintain right‑brain dominance, and protect the soul of cooking.
Chapters
And welcome to the Restaurant Coach podcast. It is the cure for the common restaurant. I am so honored to have back on the show again, a not only a good friend, but also one somebody I admire deeply in the culinary world, Craig Shelton. Craig is a chef consultant. If you, if, you know, if you follow anybody in the culinary world, Craig Shelton's kind of been there, been there, done it, and, and has written many, many books about it. And I asked Craig to come on the show because, you know, we text back and forth and he texted me this really interesting kind of theory he had. And his really interesting theory was like, you know, chef like Neo from the Matrix. Like, like the chef is like Neo and the agents are like coming after him and stuff like that. And how do you, how do you really, I mean, break free? I mean really cooking your way out of the Matrix is kind of like this whole theme you talked about. So I said, hey man, that is like, it's so wild and so deep. And so I just, I had to have Craig come on show just to talk about this thing because it is crazy. So number one, Craig, thanks for being here. I appreciate your time. It's good to have you here again, man. I, man, just love our conversations. They're so fun and so amazing and they just, they go down.
So we always have great conversations, that's for sure. Oh yeah, yeah. 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 for, 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 parallel lives, 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. And so 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 not that many. The thing we're going to talk about today. Agent. Agents. 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 feeling 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. It's almost as if the more educated. I'm a super highly educated guy, right? I went to Yale. La, la, la. Uh, but I. I noticed it from the very beginning, back in the late 70s and early 80s when I was, you know, at Yale, is that already I saw the symptoms of a detachment from the real world. In academia, in government, in institutions, in corporations. And it has only gotten exponentially worse. You see, we talk about the Enlightenment, this movement that happened 500 years ago with people like Francis Bacon and Immanuel Kant, who it's. They are presented as absolute heroes that they took power away from the churches, and that was a good thing because they were using it badly. But in order to do it, they committed the most heinous sin that you can commit, which is they took away the belief that there's actually truth and the belief that there's actually meaning in the universe. Now, we got away with it for several hundred years because. Because our forefathers were highly grounded in what's called the classical books, the books of ancient Greece, the books of ancient Rome, the books of the Renaissance period. And by pure accident, that's how I educated myself. From the age of 11 to 18. I read the entire Harvard classics and the entirety of the great books by Mortimer Adler. This is something. 200 books, you know, 300 books like these. Classics from a different age. When the brain was balanced, when the right hemisphere, which is capable of perceiving the truth out there in the world, is in charge. But the left is very useful for making models and improving things. So much of my work was inspired by this most brilliant man on the planet today, possibly Dr. Ian McGill. Crystal. We're so smart. He was an Oxford don in literature. Right. Which is like as high as that gets. That wasn't high enough. You know, he was such a purist that all he taught was poetry.
Okay. Oh, wow.
Yeah. The connoted, not the denoted so another level of, you know, rarity.
Yeah.
He got so pissed off with the abstraction that was going on in literary theory, Got so pissed off with the identity policy, said, fuck it, I'm going back to school. He, when he went to medical school, got a medical degree and became like, the foremost authority on the brain in terms of how the right brain difference from the left brain.
Okay.
And wrote a book, a couple of them, but the most important one is Magnus Opus is called the matter with things, My opinion is the most important book written in the last 200 years. It affects every single thing, everything. And how. What is reality? It just affects it. So jumping ahead, what we live in is the. Our nation was created in 1776 when the Enlightenment was already over. Already over 200 years old.
Yes.
However, our forefathers were all highly, highly schooled in the classical, what we call the classics. They got that classical education. So they were brought up believing that there is such a thing as absolute truth, There is such a thing as meaning in the universe. Most of them were deists, meaning they didn't believe in the depiction of God as this anthropomorphic, you know, human, like, you know, man up there angry and all this, but they believe with every fiber of their being. There was not a single forefather who said the rights are not inalienable. 100% of our forefathers said all of these rights are inalienable, meaning they come from absolute truth, from how we are created by the creator, whatever that might be in specimen.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, I just wrote an essay on why the Our U. S. Constitution must be interpreted through the ontology of the Declaration of Independence. It's almost like a computer. The constitution is the software and the Declaration is the hardware and bios. Neither by themselves can work.
Right. They need to be. They need to be. Need to be layered back to this thing.
Okay? So all along, as you know, Donald, my focus is unique in all consultants because I'm not looking to simply say, here's how you fix your food cost, or here's this. There's so many people doing that, and you're the best, and that's your domain, and I love you for it. And, you know, what you do is amazing for people. But the one message above all I'm trying to bring to people is we have been brainwashed to think, yes, that if there's a problem in your restaurant, it's automatically your fault.
Yes. Okay?
And that is part of the brain virus of modernism. Modernism starts on the flat plane of insanity. What I call It, It's. It's a plane that's flat defined by zero percent belief.
Yeah. Yep.
In meaning and zero percent belief in beingness or ontology. So the two things, okay, truth. Truth doesn't exist. We have to make up our own truth. And meaning doesn't exist. We have to make up our meaning. And the most fascinating thing is that every single one of the political movements, whether it's Marxism, whether it's libertarianism, they all suffer from this same foundation of zero. Zero.
Yes. Okay.
And it hurts the soul. Take with over time. In America, we were highly religious with a lot of. So that substituted for a general agreement. And then suddenly 60s, we started giving up to a large degree. A large part of the population started giving up attachments to forms of faith, whatever they might be. And the thickness kept on growing. So what I'm talking about here is a ton. When you evacuate the sense of there's absolute truth and there's some sense of absolute meaning, this creates a vacuum in the mind, whether this person or an institution or a culture entire or a civilization entire. And what ends up happening is something has to fill it. And in neoliberalism, this very sick pathological form of capitalism that we have now, it is so sick that it's not even capitalism anymore.
Yes.
Because markets no longer determine price. The quantity of money created by private sector banks, independent of the Federal Reserve, is determining most prices and most wages. So what ends up happening is something is substituted, which is capital growth. Just let cell. What is cancer? Cancer is a cell that has lost its ability to read the bioelectric field and know what it's supposed to be. In other words, it's a cell that has lost its sense of self. It's lost its identity. And in that moment of losing its identity, it reverts to a strategy of survival, which is exponential reduction.
Yes.
And this is exactly what's happening in our economy. Exponential growth is the cancer. Because we don't have personal identity, we don't have corporate identity grounded in truth. And this is Agent Smith. Agent Smith is saying the only good is doubling capital every seven years or sooner. That is the only good. Because there is no truth. And everywhere you turn in the world, Agent Smith, private equity is trying to root out CRAFT and get rid of it. Yes, because CRAFT resists scale up.
Yep.
Everything must be systematized. Everything must be robotized. Everything must be commodified.
Yep.
And you guys, are you chefs out there and the restaurateurs who still actually cook. But you know what I say all along there's cooking and there's handling food.
Yep. Totally different.
Completely different things. Totally different. Cooking is when you have attunement. What is attunement? Attunement is you don't living only in your head. You are actually a story. I was working for chef of the Century. I wanted to make a good impression. I was young. Coca say the tomatoes, he says, which, you know, Donald is just pack them up.
Yeah.
No, I couldn't do that. I wanted to make good impressions. I used my wristwatch. I timed everything. I. You know, the exact size, little X on the take out the boiling the water exactly the same six seconds into the ice, the same 30 seconds. Peel them, dice them. Two millimeters precisely. A goddamn Swiss clock, you know, okay. And I was so proud of myself. And then the chef comes by while he looks over and he bends way down like he was looking at precious jewels. Glasses exist, that. And then he says to me, craig, you're not talking to your tomatoes, are you? And he walks away. The fuck talking to my tomatoes. But it took me some time to understand that what he was saying is when you're cooking, every one of those tomatoes is a separate life.
Yes.
With unique personalities. Every one of those tomatoes is somehow slightly different from the other or considerably different ripeness, texture, that the other. And if you cook them like commodities, you're just food. You're just handling food. You're not cooking. Cooking is when you are totally immersed in a dialogue with the food. It's telling you how to cook it. You're listening. A great chef. I used to teach all my cooks how to sear a steak. With your eyes closed, right? You listen. What's going on? I said, what. What is that hiss? And finally they'd say, well, it's the water evaporating under it, right? Turning into air. Air bubbles. And the air bubbles are popping out the side. That's right. Wait until you tell me when you can hear the tone drop. And then they're good. Turn it. Now, blindfolded, they turn it over. Open your eyes. Perfection. Perfect. That's attunement. Okay? Everything in our society is trying to erase attunement. To serve this God.
Yeah.
Of compound interest or this mathematical. This abstract mathematical formula, right? This is what we work. This is the God. Remember the movie Apocalypta?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Right. There's the scene where they're all painted blue. They're going to be sacrificed. Human sacrifice. They're brought up that. Damn that ziggurat, that. That pyramid.
Right?
They're gonna do this, they're gonna do that. It's. It's horrific. Right? That's exactly the metaphor I see for finance capitalism.
Yeah.
And the thing of it is that people aren't malicious. They're just not woken up yet. I'm trying to be Morpheus. I'm trying to everybody that red pill and saying there is a whole world outside of your own head that we have been trained to lose all perception of the status quo. The civilization that we now have wants to keep you in this flattening of non existence.
Yes.
So chefs are Neos. Every time that you resist commodification, every time you open a restaurant, say it. We are not gonna. I used to tell my chefs, my cooks every single day, this. My maximum was this. I never want to see you cook the same dish the same way twice. Never. That's the antithesis of cooking. Every single time you cook that dish. I want you to approach it as a new puzzle. What did I learn last time that I can apply this time? How can I do it better? What else are we doing? Either. We're either going to go. If you're just doing. If. If you're promoting consistency, then you're obeying Agent Smith.
Yes. Yes.
If you're saying to your. To your workers, I don't want scripts on the floor. I want you to be you. Each one of you is a unique individual who has a special. All of when I took scripts away, when I said, I'll train them, I will train the out of you. You will not subject matter cold. Then you freewheel. Freewheel. I don't want to regulate you. I don't want to take the human. I don't want to be Agent Smith. I want to be Morpheus. I want you to be able to come out of the pod and experience the true life that is out here. So that's my. My explanation of it.
I love how you talked about how, like, you know, you mentioned earlier, I mentioned in that article you sent me is that, you know, most modern jobs just feel fake.
They are. They are fake. And I'll tell you why. Okay. What most people don't know because we were all taught the opposite of the truth. We were all taught that banks are just middlemen. They collect savings from patient people. They lend those savings out at higher interest to impatient people. It's the perfect lie that was invented about 120 years ago. Before that, everyone who was a serious thinker knew that banks are the primary money creators in our economy. Not the Federal Reserve. The money that the Federal Reserve creates is reserve money. It cannot escape the bank to bank settlement ecosystem. No one can. No bank can lend out reserves. It's a lie. It's only used to settle between banks. Okay. Commercial banks, private sector commercial banks create 97% of all the money in our economy.
True.
Now that's an interesting statistic. But what that statistic doesn't tell you is the degree to which they grow the money supply. Private sector banks double the money supply on general every six to seven years. This is why house prices double even though wages fall.
Oh wow.
Yes, this is why. This is the primary reason. Primary why. Education is cost. Tuition is rising exponentially even though family income is sliding.
Sliding. Yep.
Okay, I once said it like this to understand what I'm talking about. Imagine a parallel world in which.
All.
Asset prices are fixed by law. They cannot move. House prices fixed, tuition fixed, medical fixed. Okay. Insurance fixed. But every year you get an 8% pay cut. Compounded. But yeah, now all of a sudden everybody was like that's, that, that's, that's criminal. That's exactly the system we live in. Except it's inverted.
Is vendor. Yes, it's definitely set.
Prices skyrocket not because of value, not because of of supply and demand, but because of quantity of money. It's a pure Ponzi scheme. And it has been allowed to go on for so long, since 1694 is when it really started with the bank of England's creation after 30 years war. And all this won't go into the whole history. But the fact is right now the finance industries combined have 12 times as much debt financial obligations as the entire GDP of the world created out of thin air. These obligations on obligations are just paper constructs. This world of models, okay? There's no way in hell it can ever be paid. Can you imagine dollars? And it's so unbelievable. Okay, when you, when you look at things, how much you can refer to GDP, but that's not really the issue. What percentage of GDP can go to debt service? Maybe not even 10%. Yeah, so we're already talking 12 times GDP, but that's 120 times what is available for debt service. That's how out of control everything is. Because when you live in a world of models, yes, here's the thing. When you don't admit that there is absolute, that there is objective truth, then you no longer have any feedback mechanism to test if your assumptions are leading you far farther away from reality. So what ends up happening is each year institutions, governments, corporations are invested in A model that is running away from reality. And there's no feedback loop, there's no self correction mechanism. And when you live like Agent Smith, you don't care about what happens in the real world because you don't even admit it exists.
Right. You're trapped in the Matrix.
You're trapped in the Matrix. There you go. That's exactly it. You're trapped in the Matrix. So what I'm trying to show is that that is the generator function behind the major generator functions that is making it. Again, you're a restaurateur. It's the same thing as I described before. How much can a restaurant actually raise? Its price. Prices, I mean, 1% a year. And, and your customers are freaking out. They're freaking out.
Freaking out.
You have your, your, your wages fixed, but your rent is rising by 8% compounded a year by that. I mean, that's the average for commercial property, you know, over the last hundred years. But if you're in a city, it's rising faster than that.
Yes.
Okay. It's the same thing as you said. Your rent will be stable, but every year your customers will pay 8% less compounding. See, it's structural.
Yes.
And this is the thing I'm trying to get people to realize. Yes, you have to do whatever you can do to stay alive. But you're not going to get the solution until you start looking outside your four walls. All you can do is stay alive within the four walls. Outside the four walls. You got to take the red pill. You got to find a Morpheus like me who can give you a red pill so that you can finally wake up out of the cocoon and really start to see. Because once you see it, once you read my books, yeah, you will see patterns. That's like the old expression, once seen, never unseen again. And see it, okay? And that doesn't matter. I can look at any industry, any industry whatsoever, any institution. And I see it now because my mind has, you know, been so trained to look for this stuff. Okay. I mean, for example, I, you know, in the, in the restaurant book, there's this one.
Oh, yeah.
I talk about a ton of myths, fallacies, like for example, the idea that service is about creating an experience. And I completely disagree with that.
Okay.
And that's because we got to look at why people really go to restaurants. And restaurants were designed in imitation of stately homes. Stately homes were designed to conduct the business of state, which is why they're called stately. In other words, treaties were negotiated at these dinner Tables of the aristocrats, supply chains, warfare plans, everything under the sun. Like that done at these tables upstairs, downstairs. The brigade system started there.
Yes.
You know, military inspired, of course. But the upstairs, downstairs, the whole, you know, front of the house, back of the house, the team effort. All designed to put the host's guests in the right psychological frame to be able to listen fairly, to give the host's proposal a fair listening.
Yes.
So I've always taught my staff. The most important thing to realize is that you're not important. And what you have to say is not important. Until you become an ally to the host, that is. There's a deal going down on every single table.
Oh, yes. There truly is. Every night, every table.
Even when it's a solo person.
Yes.
There's a deal going down with the space, with the restaurant. I have a transaction with this restaurant in mind. Maybe it's psychological, maybe it's relational. One of the things in my newest book, which is my Magnus opus, is going to 1250 pages, approximately. And it's a. The big, big picture book. A unified philosophical system for those who know what that is in philosophy. Along with a blueprint print for the renewal of civilization. And we used to say about the service, there is a deal going down on every table.
Yes.
When you train your teams in terms of we're here to achieve an experience. That's commodification. Instead of saying, we're here to figure out the best we can with only ethical means. What is the deal that's going down on the table? What is it? Is a man trying to save his marriage? Is it a business deal?
Okay.
Is it a first date? What is it? And we are supposed to be the wingman. Only ethical things. Right. But to be the wingman, now, you're creating insane value, right?
Yes.
You know, Raglan, in my restaurant, we witnessed $5 billion a year of deals being. Being, you know, signed and sealed at the tables.
Yeah.
You know, for those pharmaceuticals and other companies, you know, flying in with helicopters, things like that. And we were told by one CEO of a major pharmaceutical one day I was. I had prototyped a. A CRM. You know, customer relations. Early on, Access just came out, this Microsoft database program. And I attempted to write some programming. It was a disaster. All I could track was sales by our 100 or 200 biggest customers. And I just. I'd give up. I realize I'm not qualified for this, but let me know if you see any patterns that are interesting. And lo and behold, few couple months later, they called me to the office. So you got to see this, boss. I said, what is it? I said, our number one customer just tripled overnight the amount of business they're doing and it's holding steady. That's interesting. I'll bet there's something going on over there. And lo and behold, about 10 days later, it was a Saturday night and I'm doing what of my rounds? And I went out to the cigar room and there he was, having just finished. I went over And I said, Mr. X, I want to just. Chairman X. I want to, you know, congratulate him. He says, what for? And I said, well, listen, I got to tell you about this computer system and this program and this and that. And he says, yeah, I use computers too. And I said, yeah, but you know, I. I saw what happened. There must some be. Must be some amazing deal cooking over there because you're tripled your volume with us. He says, sit your ass down, Craig. Okay, sure. He says, you think you're the only guy who measures shit? I said, no, sir. He says, I'm the chairman of the board and the CEO of the number one corporation in the world. Yes, sir. I measure everything. And we just conducted a two year study of our business entertaining return on invested dollars. I said, what does that mean? I don't look at my business entertaining as an expense. I look at as an investment.
Yes, definitely.
And what we found, and we don't know how the fuck you do it, Craig, use that exact. But when we entertain our guests that the Ryland in. We close our deals more often. Significantly more often. And we close our deals more rapidly, saving money, and we close them far more profitably. So I have no idea what the hell you're doing. That's your proprietary technique. But I authorized a tripling spend of spend because it's so effective.
Yeah.
Somehow you're doing something the opposite of everyone else. And that at the end of the day, has been my experience is that when a civilization lives in this flat plane.
Yeah, yeah.
Of denial of truth, of meaning. You will eventually arrive at a place where in every industry and every institution. I'm not saying we're there yet, but almost every. You will arrive at a place where almost everything that is believed to be true is the opposite of the truth.
Truth.
This is actually the best news I can bring, which is simply this. Nine times out of ten, my clients, after they've been with me a year or two, you know, they finally trust. These are radical ideas. I'm saying. Okay. And then I, you know, I started speaking Recently I put out a funny little essay and, and it was all about Opposite Day. I don't know if you saw it, but it's, it's based on that episode of Seinfeld.
Oh, yeah, you know, right.
What's his name again? The short guy.
Yeah. George.
George stands a short balding visit.
Yeah.
All this, you know, no job and you know, my terrible everything. Every decision I've ever made is horrible. Right? Every decision you ever made is wrong. Why don't you just do the opposite? And it starts off like that. And he orders an opposite lunch from what he usually does on a beautiful woman. Woman talks as life suddenly goes so. Right. Because he does the opposite of everything he's been trained to do. And I'm telling you, it may sound like an exaggeration, but those clients who've trusted me and have actually taken any SOP and then gone and done the exact opposite, 9 times out of 10 it dramatically improves the bottom line. And the top line.
Yeah.
I have one client of mine who listened to everything and he rebuilt a restaurant according to all the principles. He's been enjoying 30% compound annual growth, top line and bottom line for the last seven years.
Wow. That's unheard of.
Unheard of.
Unheard of.
Doing the opposite. Just like George Costanza who ends up, you know, being a manager for the, the New York Yankees. Right. With Steinbrenner. Once we understand we've been brought up with a mind virus called modernism.
Yep, yep.
With no self regulating, no self correcting gizmos. Okay. Like gyroscopes in a submarine. Keep it from hitting the rocks, from hitting the reefs. We've lost the gyroscopes. Civilizationally, governmentally. Institutions, corporations, families, individuals.
Yeah, it's like you mentioned before. I think, I think you mentioned it like. It's like a deprivation tank.
It's like a deprivation tank. What is the one most horrible punishment that they can give you in prison?
Solitary.
Solitary. And that's not even sensory deprivation.
No. That's just isolation.
Yeah. Most people can't handle a sensory deprivation tank for even an hour. They lose their, their mind. Yet we are voluntarily selecting that every day decision to throw out truth and meaning was not a scientific. This is the thing I'm trying to say. Modernism pretended to be scientific and rational, but they did the single most irrational, unscientific thing you can possibly do, which is to remove the ontology. The sense of what is real and the sense of what is true. Remember this? The statement it's only a social construct.
Yes.
Is Itself a social construct.
Yes.
As long as you maintain that all truth is relative and meaning is subjective, then your statements no longer have any meaning or truth.
Right.
It all implodes in itself. And the soul of every human being living in that system has a massive vacuum. Some people trying to fill it with money and compound interest. This idea of I will serve a formula, a mathematical formula. Other people, it's manufactured personalities. Others, it's attention in these, in the digisphere. What we are experiencing worldwide is. It's 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.
Yes.
It'S every. Every kind of science we have is pointing to the same truth.
This is.
This universe is not composed of material. That is what 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 that I'm bringing up, as esoteric as it may sound, boils down to reality. Cooks, chefs, restaurateurs are 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 centurion 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.
He does not lie.
He does not lie.
So, Donald, there, you know, what kind of questions would. Would you like to.
So if chefs are like number one, you know, we have to waken up. So that's the first step, awaken. So once they're awakened, what would you say is like the next step they need to do to start freeing themselves from this matrix?
Okay, here's the thing. Attunement is an every moment possibility. Yes. That means, just like I said earlier, you have a choice. Every time you cook that veal scallopini, am I just going to go through the motion or am I going to have a non. Am I going to. To try to truly participate in a. Okay, I'm going to explain something that may help. Right brain, left brain. Only what we know about neuroscience, you know, I'm very highly trained. The brain is a filter.
Yes.
What scientists have determined is that if the brain tried to process all, all of the information coming at the being, the human being, the brain would basically boil from too much energy expended for all those calculations. We have to filter out 99.9% of all the information. Now, how do we do that without say, killing ourselves? We're constantly. Prediction mode. I can ignore everything except this, says the brain. It has, it's working on a model, a sort of holographic model. Did you ever see a couple psychiatrists did this video and they say to you, you watch the video and there's two teams. Oh, the gorilla with the gorilla.
Right, the invisible gorilla.
Yeah, the invisible gorilla. Your brain doesn't see a man walk.
Walking right through the middle of the scene, waving his hand, stopping in the middle. Yes. Yeah.
And this is because your brain is given a mission which is leave out all the information that doesn't correspond with the predictive model.
Yes.
That we didn't predict. The gorilla didn't see it. Okay, so what's important about this is that's left brain activity, primarily the right brain. So how is it, if we're only working on what's predicted. Okay, think about this. If our brain were only able to operate in terms of what is expected by filtering out everything unexpected, how long would it last as a species? The first time something unexpected happened? Like a lion, right? Yeah. This is why all animals have a bilateral brain, so that they can have two kinds of consciousness. One is the spotlight. That is the left brain, which controls your right hand, which is why most people grab with their right hand. That's for hunting. That's how I get my lunch, says McGilchrist. But the right brain is for how I make sure I don't become somebody else's brunch lunch. So that's the point is one is a spotlight. That's the left brain. The other is a floodlight. To put it more simply, or more powerfully, rather. The right brain is what's on the alert for the unexpected. The right brain is what actually understands what reality is. The left brain is almost entirely involved in representation, not reality. Now, as a society, we've chosen over the last, as a civilization for 500 years to progressively shut down our right brains.
Yeah.
And live only in the left brain. Nothing that is important to the human being is understandable by the left. Not love, not art, not aesthetics, not relationship. The left doesn't understand relationship, only the right.
Yep.
But we know that at the most fundamental level, the subatomic level, there is only relationship before there is any matter.
Yes. Okay.
So this is why every day we can make a big difference in recovering sanity. The other name I have for that flat plane where your philosophical, what we call your metaphysics, or your. Your base assumptions, the root, the first assumptions of your whole thinking System, if they're 0, 0, it means zero objective meaning and zero objective truth. The reality of that is you can only become more and more progressively insane. So I call it the plane of insanity.
It is the plane of insanity with.
No feedback loops, with no self correction given gyroscopes. Whether it's a person, whether it's a town, whether it's an industry, whether it's a nation, if that's your substrate, sooner or later you are progressively going more and more and more insane. And anyone who's not honest, I mean, anyone who's. Who is honest with themselves, will say, I see it all around me. But the level of insanity is just skyrocketing.
Yes.
Both sides of the aisle in different ways, but it's. It's just a detachment from truth. Now, there are some people, some groups that have not bought into it. Like the Amish. Different. But what I'm talking about is the role that chefs and cooks, rescue tours, waiters can play, because we deal with the sensorium, that whole complex of senses.
Right.
I studied this physiology of the senses with Gordon shepherd at Yale, who his entire adult career was considered the number one mind on this subject in the world. And to understand how your own senses work Right. Like, think about this. If I was to. If you were to ask me, Donald, who are the two professional groups, the most miseducated on dietary science? Doctors and chefs.
Exactly.
And who are the two groups that most misunderstand how the sense organs work? Doctors or chefs. And part of the reason for that is insanity. Growing grows as you get more educated.
That's true.
Because the base of zero. Zero.
Yeah.
You know what I find is typically the more blue collar in a certain regard, the less detached from reality. There's almost as many exceptions as rules here. But. But it's a strong enough correlation to make the statement.
Okay.
And chefs in particular, you know, a plumber's working with. With. With feel. Not that much sound. Not that much. You know, but chefs, restaurateurs, were working with the entire sensorium, all of the senses, all of the time.
It's kind of. It's what I think you describe it as like cooking in the being.
Yes. And that's the thing when you know you have attunement.
Yes.
That you're living authentically.
Right.
Brain. Here's the important thing to understand. As McGilchrist said, the brain is not balanced when they're equal.
Yeah.
Right and left. The right must be in charge. The left must serve the right hemisphere in order for the brain to be in balance. Only happened three times in human history. Recorded one, Ancient Greece, Pericles. The great explosion of art, literature, philosophy, science. Aristotle. The next one was the real ancient Roman civilization. Virgil, Plutarch, all of that classical literature. And then the third time was the Renaissance.
Yes.
Dante, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, etc. Etc. Etc. The great exploration explosion of what happens when the right brain and left brain are working correctly together.
Okay.
This is what you can achieve in a restaurant. And almost nowhere else left.
I don't think there's anywhere left.
Almost nowhere left. If. If you can resist commodification, scaling and all of that, if you can say, I'm satisfied with one kitchen where we are going to cook our hearts out like a Dominique Creme. Right. Like a Grant Atches. Like a Thomas. You know, maybe two, maybe three restaurants. But it's going to be. It's never going to be mass production. Standardized. Ever.
Yeah, it's never going to be mass production. Never going to be a chain, a flood of 100 locations.
Never going to commoditize. The day I see you not talking to your tomatoes is the day you're fired.
I'm gonna start talking to my tomatoes. I'll tell you.
You know what I'm talking About right.
I do know what you're talking about. Yeah. Craig, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show, my friend. If anyone needs to get a hold of Craig, you can. Right there. You can get him at www.aon consulting a e o n consulting dot com. How many books. How many books you Write last year?
5, 4 or 5. Again, if somebody really needs to reach me, they probably should call you because.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Reach out to me and I can get you. If you really need a Craig right away. Just reach. Reach out to me. Download the restaurant coach.com and I'll make sure. I'll get your contact information on the Craig. I mean. And you got this Magnum's opus coming. You said it's a thousand pages. I thought this book was big. This is my biggest book. It's 525 pages.
Wow.
But your next one's a thousand. It's like twice this size.
It's 1200, almost 1300 pages.
Oh, my God.
I haven't read that one yet. I gotta get that.
All right. I said, hey, send me your address and I'll mail you one, my friend.
I'm gonna put a shingle on your roof, not take one off. But, you know, again, is there any last.
I mean, I think this is, like. This has been so great. I mean, you know, it's like you kind of said, you know, chefs are the guardians.
I want people to understand that the work they're doing is of almost a holy status. That last great hope to pull us back from the precipice as a civilization.
We are so close. I mean, I see it, too, and I feel it, too. Like, we're so close to people. Just like the. The commoditization and just the mass production is going to just pull the soul out of.
Can't you tell? Don, aren't you sick of going to restaurants where the food has been standardized?
It's so bad. I mean. Yeah, it just has no. There's no soul to it.
No soul to it.
Oh, no soul.
And you just, you know, you feel. I came up with a term, and it's called ontological starvation. Ontological starvation. We are a society that is ontologically starved. Where can you taste, touch, feel anything real, Anything that's not plastic, Anything that's not been, you know, mass produced?
Exactly.
Where?
Nowhere.
All right.
Yeah. Well, my friend, I want to say thank you again. Again. If anybody needs to reach out to Craig, you can hit him on his website. Or if you. I mean, you want to get a hold of him fast. Just, just email me, Donald. Therestaurantcoach.com I'll make sure that. Craig.
Yeah, I shut down the, the web the email on that because I've been in pure writing mode for the last.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like me. When I get into writing mode, I'm not done yet.
So until it's published, I'm offline. But if somebody has a real emergency, Donald.
Yeah. Get hold of me and I'll get a hold of Craig. That's the best way because we stay in contact all the time, so all.
The time we're best friends.
Yeah.
Donald, thank you for having me on.
Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure, my friend. I tell you, man, I, I listen these episodes like two or three times because I always get like two or three more gold nuggets every time I listen to it. So again, thank you for taking the time and, and again, I appreciate my friend so much.
My, my highest regards to all of your viewers.
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