Hey, everybody. It's been a few months since our last check-in episode and since then we've

been hard at work on a new season of heavyweight. There will be four new episodes coming out,

some funny, some sad, plus some bonus content like the check-ins, which we think you'll

really enjoy. The first new episode launches next week, but today I thought I'd share

a story I made way back in 2015 for a then little-known podcast called Reply All. These were the

early days of Gimlet, and I was in the middle of developing what would eventually become heavyweight.

And in a lot of ways, the story that I'm about to play for you would form a kind of blueprint

for heavyweight. And like many heavyweight stories, it began with a personal obsession,

a hunger for answers, and a need to insinuate myself into the personal lives of strangers,

one stranger in particular. Without further ado, from the Gimlet Media Vaults, here is

Why Is Mason Rees Crying. Right after, this very important message from our sponsor.

If as a child I'd been told of a future world where they're dwelled a magical TV that could

play anything I wanted, an infinite television jukebox that I could watch all night without ever

having the remote pride from my hands, I'd say you must be describing utopia. And this is where I find

myself Wednesday night 2.30am utopia. There are things for my childhood that I've seen on YouTube

that I thought I'd go to my deathbed without ever getting to revisit.

Like the fake boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Rocky Marciano, that special effects

wizards put together in 1970 to determine who was the greatest fighter of all time.

I often turn to it long after I should be in bed.

Our bookshelves are where we project our tastes, where we announce to our dinner guests that,

of course, we enjoy Faulkner, the golden age of comics and the essays of Montenna.

But if our bookshelves are where we telegraph a version of who we want to be,

...