49ers Electrical Substation Conspiracy Theory feat. Arif Hasan (Premium E322)
Added 2026-02-07 02:36:38 +0000 UTCAs Super Bowl LX rolls into Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium, Jake Rockatansky and Travis View are joined by sports writer Arif Hasan (Wide Left newsletter) to dig into one of the NFL’s strangest modern fan obsessions: the idea that the San Francisco 49ers are cursed by an electrical substation.
Over the last decade the Niners have become infamous for suffering from brutal, momentum-killing injuries. This has fueled endless theories about potential reasons for the medical incidents that are causing heartburn among football fans in the Bay Area. Is it turf, training, recruiting strategy, bad luck, or something else?
One rumor has dominated the online discourse: the idea that the Northern Receiving Station, right next to where the pro athletes train and play, is bathing players in “EMF” and making them more injury-prone. We trace how the theory travelled from locker room chatter, to online content creators, to a “board-certified quantum biology practitioner” until it finally had to be addressed by the 49ers administration and NFL’s chief medical officer. This is despite the fact that the idea doesn’t have any empirical support and it doesn’t even make sense upon examination of the timeline of the substation.
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Arif Hasan
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Comments
Kept skipping ahead to get to the conspiracy bit
Dave
2026-03-05 08:22:14 +0000 UTCHas anyone mentioned Gmelch's "baseball magic"? Not to be the academic here, but he uses malinkowski's work on superstition to hypothesize that probaseball players turn to superstition to mitigate feeling a lack of control over the outcomes of their game. In short all humans rely on magic to relieve the anxiety of uncertain outcomes. It seems to fit here!
Carolyn
2026-03-02 13:43:50 +0000 UTCthe alkaline water (and bottled water in general) scam drives me crazy. you can look on the back its literally just water with baking soda in it. a coworker of mine was like “i mean i just like it, and then i saw if you’re balanced it prevents cancer so like why not?” because its not proven and all bottled water is a scam to privatize a public service and health scams are to scapegoat the blame of getting sick onto us, like “why do u need health insurance, you should have been taking care of your body”
ts_babyjane
2026-02-10 23:56:36 +0000 UTCim 31, and i didn’t have parents who were super into music, so i didnt get into it until i was in middle school, but a lot of the first stuff i heard was in 7th grade playing the guitar hero games. i had never heard any of those bands until guitar hero, like i remember listening to heart shaped box and it sounded sooo dark. i would buy all the songs in my ipod and listen to them.
ts_babyjane
2026-02-10 22:16:19 +0000 UTCSome idle comments from a biophysicist: 1) EMF can stand for electromotive force, which essentially means the voltage generated by a battery. This has nothing to do with anything. 2) Gauss rhymes with mouse, not moss, so the guy has probably never heard a physicist (or electrician) speak. 3) The claim from the AI generated article that federal safety regulations only apply to heat is actually totally true - powerful radio antennas pump out so much energy they can burn workers from the inside (this has nothing to do with radiation burns from x-rays). 4) Cells are sort of like mini faraday cages, and electric fields can't normally penetrate the cell membrane in the first place. 5) Despite that, some cells actually are known to have special electric field detectors (e.g. the protein galvanin, discovered last year). There's some evidence that this helps e.g. immune cells travel to wounds in order to help with healing. So, you can look forwards to hearing about that in the future from other quantum biology cranks!!
lamran
2026-02-10 16:31:56 +0000 UTCObligatory go hawks, fuck the 49ers
MifsudZ
2026-02-10 15:34:09 +0000 UTCAfter listening to this episode all I wanna know is where were these conspiracies 30 years ago when the Bengals were practicing in an active wasteland? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJuz8OzOge0
TravisPewPewPew
2026-02-10 11:56:13 +0000 UTCThis is way too much American Handegg chat for me.
Barry
2026-02-10 11:37:48 +0000 UTCI have no interest in sports let alone American so-called football, but I really enjoyed this episode.
Moloch's Personal Adrenochrome Peddler
2026-02-10 10:01:29 +0000 UTCI have and will never use an m dash
Matthew Chandler
2026-02-10 05:13:04 +0000 UTCYou have angered the substation and it's lashing out. 49er Keion White shot in the ankle. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/49ers/article/49ers-keion-white-21343888.php
Neil Johannsen
2026-02-10 03:29:07 +0000 UTCEagles mention at 1:28:22 go birds baby
claire
2026-02-09 20:48:39 +0000 UTC
