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STORIES by Lea Thau

Altruism

STORIES by Lea Thau

Lea Thau

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.76.4K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2013

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Does true altruism exist? Here are three stories that say yea, nay, and just maybe. 

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to strangers from KCW's independent producer project and storycentral.org. My name is Leah Tao.

0:16.8

A couple weeks ago, we had one of our strangers no more parties here in Los Angeles.

0:22.7

And whenever we have these parties, I come up with some scheme to get strangers to talk to strangers.

0:28.7

So at this party, everyone was handed a question at the door, and one other person received the same question, and then they had to find each other.

0:36.6

And once they did, we had

0:37.7

some volunteers who ran around and interviewed the partners and pulled them into a little

0:41.1

side room away from the noise. One of the guys who came to the party was Allah Khaled, who

0:46.6

recently told a stranger's story about being a Palestinian but pretending to be Jewish,

0:51.5

from Israel, in order to get a gig with Barbara Streisand.

0:55.6

So that was a funny story, and Allah came to our party,

0:58.2

and he managed to find the person who'd received the same question as him.

1:02.0

I asked him his name.

1:03.6

Which is Avishai?

1:05.3

And instantly I asked him where he was from, and he said,

1:08.4

Well, I was born in Israel.

1:10.4

So here we have an Israeli and a Palestinian, and the question they both received was,

1:15.3

Do you believe true altruism exists?

1:19.0

No.

1:20.3

I don't believe that it exists.

1:22.9

No.

1:24.0

But what's interesting about this question, we got to get into that.

1:28.7

Yeah.

...

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