Rebecca Kukla: belief

Transcript context

…What’s your model of the process of where good places are distributed? I live right in the middle of DC, not in the suburbs, and I actually find DC proper a totally fine but not especially inspiring place to find food. There’s a lot of very medium food in DC. DC’s an interesting city because most of the interesting food is way out in the suburbs. I don’t drive, so for me to get out to the suburbs, it’s a whole project, but really, if I want good food, that’s what I need to do. I think that in the city of DC itself, there is so much pressure to cater to the common denominator because mostly you have people having meetings, constantly having meetings, and they’re meetings where nobody wants to offend anybody else because they’re trying to make a political deal, or they’re trying to settle a case, or it’s whatever it is. So they want the food to be adequate and respectable but intrude minimally into their experience. And if you want to find good food, you have to get away from all the meetings, and you have to get out into the smaller ethnic enclaves in the suburbs. I’m not sure how much you want me to say about my process of finding food, but for me, it’s this really complicated balance of reading user reviews, knowing which user reviews . . . I have a good sense for which ones should be written off as ignorable and which ones are worthwhile. I find that places that have too many user reviews are usually bland, and places that have too few are not as good a bet. So you want to maximize the right number of user reviews of the right kind, and you want to make sure that the food is appropriate to the ecology of the neighborhood it’s in, that it’s not an Ethiopian restaurant in a Thai neighborhood, or whatever it may be. Those are less likely to be good. Yes, it’s a complicated calculus for me, but I find eating in DC itself just fine. But I get more excited when I get to eat in other places. Let’s try a question about game theory. How well would polyamory work if everyone did it? Would it work better or worse compared to now, where a relatively smaller number of people are doing it?…

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