Welcome to strangers from KCW and Radiotopia.

I'm Leah Tao.

And back in the fall, we did this Radiotopia Kickstarter,

and I kind of got swept up in the excitement of it and declared that come March,

we were going to do two episodes per month instead of just one.

And now March is here, and we are doing it.

We're doubling up, which is kind of exciting and also totally overwhelming.

If I can just confess that to you, because I've all this other work that I haven't managed to wind down,

and I'm kind of, I'm so stressed out.

So I'm trying to get ahead of the game a bit. Do you know that feeling? And in order to do that,

today I'm going to play a story from our first season of strangers, which has been off iTunes for a while. And if you were listening back then, please bear with me, maybe even enjoy hearing the story again.

And we fixed it up a bit, so it's not exactly as it was.

So as most of you probably know by now, I'm originally from Denmark.

And one of the things that really

struck me when I first moved here was the enormous difference between the rich and the poor in this

country. In fact, the very first time I visited New York, just as a tourist when I was 16, I saw a dead

homeless man being hauled off right in front of the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

He died alone in the cold in front of this opulent, gilded marble lobby.

And I'd just never seen anything like that before.

But then when I moved here, I'd hear people talk about the U.S. as a classless society. And I'd always be like, huh? What are they talking about?

I mean, sure, there are no earls and dukes here.

But classless? Hardly.

...