In other words, if I were working on a new programming language (just as an example), and could go hire Anders Hejlsberg as a consultant, well, that -is- going to be a mega cheat code. The amount of experience he'd bring to bear to even a 30 minute call would be insane. He would save me months or even years in mistakes and bad directions, and lead me straight to the core of whatever I wanted to do.
That's the thing - he's not talking about hiring a generic "cake consultant". With that in mind, it'd be much easier to find those people - you'd know them by their achievements.
You don't necessarily need to hire someone like Anders to pick their brain.
A lot of people who are not huge in the zeitgeist (and also are not assholes) are surprisingly reachable.
Funnily enough, I've chatted with Anders about programming language design -- I got the impression he thought my ideas were terrible.
For a while, you could just email Noam Chomsky and he would respond.