QAA Podcast - 49ers Electrical Substation Conspiracy Theory feat. Arif Hasan (Premium E322) Sample

Episode Date: February 7, 2026

As 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. Wide Left: A newsletter about the NFL and its intersection with politics and culture https://www.wideleft.football/ Arif Hasan https://x.com/ArifHasanNFL?lang=en Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media and binge the entirety of our exclusive shows Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Truly, Tradly, Deely by Annie Kelly https://cursedmedia.net Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Well done. You've found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast Premium Episode 32, the 49ers Electrical Substation Conspiracy Theory, featuring ARIFSA. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky and Travis View. This coming Sunday, Americans will enjoy one of the last remaining parts of the monoculture, the Super Bowl. This NFL championship game will feature the New England Patriots extending their record of appearances to 12, they'll face off against the Seattle Seahawks who are looking to get revenge against the Patriots for their loss to them after the last Super Bowl appearance back in 2014. And I will say, Travis, not all Americans are looking forward to because the halftime show

now has become a point of contention. Over the last couple of years, there has been some culture war stuff that's worked its way out in the halftime show. So it's slowly being ripped away from us one performer at a time. No, no. We can't go back to the days of Michael Jackson or even like up with people now. Yeah, now we have to have competing

halftime shows. I read that like they're doing like, we're going to do our own half because it's bad bunny and they're like they're like we're going to do our own halftime show with Kid Rock. Isn't that a thing? Am I or am I making that up? Yes, that's right.

You're right. That's correct. Yes, they're doing their own their own conservative halftime show with Kid Rock. It's like Christian Bale's character in The Prestige. She's like, please join me at my magic show across the street at the Pantages. But it's like, please. But they're like, please join us out in a field somewhere with Kid Rock. Now, to mark the occasion, I thought it would be fun to have a football themed episode.

But I personally haven't watched the NFL with any amount of regularity since the San Diego Chargers and the San Diego Chargers haven't existed as a team since the Obama administration. So to discuss the subject, we brought on an actual expert, the CEO and chief writer, of the wide left newsletter, Arif Hassan, Arif, pleasure to have you back on the podcast. Yeah, absolutely, really extremely happy to be back on the podcast. I've always enjoyed my appearances. It's been too long, in fact. Yeah, before we get into our topic today, I mean, anything specific you're looking for this coming

Super Bowl? I mean, like, from a football nerd perspective, this is like an outstanding schematic matchup, a known piece of shit. Josh McDaniels is a football genius. And he does an incredible job kind of figuring how to design offenses. The head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Mike McDonald, is like a second year head coach. He's done a really astounding job, creating a simple but effective Seahawks defense. And they do a bunch of really good back and from a football nerd perspective. Schematically, there's all kinds of things we could do. I was just on a podcast, actually five minutes before I jumped onto this one, discussing kind of all of that break that. So I'm really excited about this one. It's a lot better, I think, than a lot of other

Super Bowls in terms of that kind of matchup. So that'll be fun. I haven't listened to any bad bunny. That's, that's an old thing, not a political thing. I'm excited to hear what that sounds like. I'm sure it's like with the number one Spotify guy. That's got to be good, right? Yeah, he was just, I was, I just watched him in some movie, too. He had like a part in it. Oh, was it? Was it Happy Gilmore, too? It was. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking of. You're right. You're right. That's so, did you watch it too. Yeah, yeah, I did. Oh, boy. Yeah, so like for me, as a person who only plays NBA 2K and doesn't follow any like real world sports at all. Like my feeling on the Super Bowl is I have a friend who's from Seattle and I see on social media that he's really excited about the Seahawks being in the Super Bowl. So if I'm around a. Super Bowl, if I'm around people that are watching it, I'll root for the Seahawks because I know that my friend will be happy if they win. And then I can reach out and text him and go like,

amazing game, which keeps me with my more sports friends. And, you know, I know just, I can talk about them just enough to like engage with other men in, you know, casual, casual conversation. Wait, I have to derail us while we're on the topic really quick. Travis, sorry. I have to derail us. about this. A couple years back, I was at Disneyland with my brother-in-law and his family, and he hadn't brought a hat, you know, Disneyland all day, and, you know, you got a little bit of a bald spot, California heat, bad idea. So I lent him a Bulls hat, and we're on the tram going into Disney. And for people who haven't gone to Disneyland, you have to ride this tram into the park with, you know, and you're kind of close-knit with other people. And this guy

starts talking to him, and he's like, oh, man, he's like, yeah, what do you think about, like, So and so to my brother-in-law. And now, if I don't know anything about sports, this guy knows even less. He looked like a deer in headlight. This stranger just started talking to him, saying names. And at first I was like, what's going on? And I realized, oh, my God, he's asking him, because I didn't know either. I was like, oh, my God, he's asking him about bull stuff because he's got the bulls hat.

I put him in a fucking bull's hat. I was like, I set this guy up. And so I lean in and I'm like, oh, yeah, my, I lent him the hat. He doesn't know bulls. He doesn't know bulls. And the guy goes, oh man, but you're the, he goes, but you're the fan? And I go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, man, I grew up. And I, like, enough, I hit him with the Michael Jordan.

I hit him with the, you know, I was there in the heyday. It was enough to talk about that. We were saved. But it's so funny because there is a huge portion of the population, maybe even a huge portion of our listenership that absolutely is me. They are my brother-in-law. They know nothing about sports. It's a complete, to us, it's like statistics, you know.

I mean, it's, it is like a lot of people do enjoy sports actually just on that level, right? The statistics, like, that's what fantasy football is, right? It's like competing spreadsheet values, which I'm not going to knock. I love fantasy football. I wish I could get into it. Well, I mean, like, I have a friend who plays fantasy football where there's like every player is assigned to class, like a mage or a tank of some sort, right? or a Ranger or a Druid or whatever, right? And then, like, the teams have, like, some affinity.

And it's, like, this super complicated scoring system. And he, like, asks me for advice every couple of weeks. And I'm like, I have no fucking clue what the hell any of this is. And he's like, great, good, good, good. I'll start Jackson's Pith & Jigba. And I was like, oh, okay, great. This sounds great. Go for that.

Yeah, because it's, like, more elementals than it is, like, actual, like, plays and stuff. It's more magic going. It's kind of like, like, mutant league football, I like quite a bit. You go. Yeah. Was it the Blood Bowl? Yeah. Let's go.

Yeah. I like that. I played a lot of Mutant League football and Mutant League hockey as a kid. I played all of the Maddens growing up. I specifically remember, too, my grandfather coming downstairs and seeing a Madden. It was right when, I believe it was actually like NFL game day. It was when they went from Sprites to like polygons. And he walked downstairs and he was like, oh, you guys got a game on.

Who's playing? You know, because he thought it was like a real football game. He was like, wanted to know. Oh, you got, oh, boy, she got the game on. And we were like, no, no, no, grandpa, it's a video game. And he's like, what do you mean? And we're like, see the green circle or the star under the guy's feet? That means we're controlling him.

And he goes, huh, you guys are making him run around and do all that? We were like, yeah. And he walked upstairs. It was just like, it was too much. It was too much for him. It was too much. I will say the Maddens did define my music taste for quite a while. The soundtrack that would keep on replaying on repeat

ended up being somewhat like my favorite song. So I'll give Madden that, that they either knew how to pick a soundtrack or knew that I wouldn't care that they picked a soundtrack. That's, it's so interesting people discovering, like, music through video games. Yeah. Like, rapper, like, I've been listening to this guy, Kenny Mason who's, who has, like, his, some of his shit sounds like Lincoln Park because he was playing, like, Tony Hawks pro skater or something and got exposed to, like, this, like, he got exposed to, like, alt rock and, like, punk

music and weezer. It's really cool. Like, you forget. that there's a whole generation that got their music taste from were derailing the episode really bad. I mean, I'm sorry, Travis. We could talk about like 90s sports games for quite a long time. Yeah, I'm game for that too.

But we should get back to the sort of the batter at hand. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Pervers with Julian and Liv,

10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View. It's a bounty of content and the podcast. best deal in podcasting. Travis, for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact.

You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate all of our listeners. Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude, maybe? That's not true. The part about be crying. Not me being grateful. I'm very grateful.