It's a strange thing to have a sports fandom that operates on something like the same life cycle as a cicada, but I do, and curling is that sport. Even by the standards of Olympic sports that I barely know how to watch, curling is both abstracted and wonderful to me—the opacity of it, the ASMR-adjacent audio experience, the strange and specific mastery required. I wanted to talk about curling before the Olympics go back into hibernation, and happily we were able to get John Cullen—author of the new book Curling Rocks!, host of the award-winning CBC curling podcast Broomgate, among other notable podcasts, and a former elite curler himself—on the pod to talk to us about it.

First we started with some other things, and anyone who wishes to skip past a long discussion of how I came to purchase Barstool-branded coffee at a deep discount, and why I now have it sitting in my home, should start the pod around the 15-minute mark. But those 15 minutes are densely packed, and include a long-awaited peek behind the curtain of my grocery shopping process, a deep reading of the (extensive) text on the package of Dan Katz's signature coffee product, the phrase "positive vibes" as a marker of the exact opposite of positive vibes, and John's experience recording too-spicy-for-TV jokes for a restaurant commercial.