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  "path": "/across-the-hog-line-with-john-cullen",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-19T20:01:32.000Z",
  "site": "https://defector.com",
  "tags": [
    "Olympics",
    "Podcasts",
    "2026 olympics",
    "Boopgate",
    "canada",
    "Curling",
    "john cullen",
    "Nu-Metal",
    "sweden",
    "The Distraction",
    "The Spirit Of Curling",
    "winter olympics",
    "barely know how to watch",
    "Curling Rocks!",
    "Broomgate",
    "notable"
  ],
  "textContent": "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.\n\nFirst 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.",
  "title": "Across The Hog Line, With John Cullen"
}