QAA Podcast - Baking CERN’s Shutdown (Premium E349) Sample

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

Sweetest listener, did your July of this year (2026) hit just a little different? Maybe the other side of your pillow always seemed to be cold or you spidey sensed the shit out of everything that fell? Maybe it was just the opposite and your floor has been covered in pickles and broken glass more times than you care to count? Whatever the change, know you are not alone and that many folks have agreed things have been…different and that it all points to one event - the shutting down of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. So, listener, join the OG trio as Liv takes us for a ride around the 27 kilometer collider, picking up speed as the particles break down leaving a trail of little black hole conspiracies in their wake. Will they envelop the earth? Probably not…but the chances aren’t zero. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media! All episodes of Spectral Voyager Season 2 are out now! Binge the entirety of Truly Tradly Deeply by Annie Kelly and Megan Kelly as well as Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows: cursedmedia.net Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Well done. You found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, Premium Episode 349. Baking Surge Shutdown. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky. Julian Fields and Travis Vue. Oh, fuck. Step it on. Just the one, just the one who wrote the episode.

I'm on a pilot. What am I? Chopped living are? Exactly. Wow. I can't believe. it's taken us this long to it. I can't believe I'm not the one that made that. It's kind of a Jewish joke. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky. Julian Fields. Liv Egar. And Travis

View. Have you noticed that your July this year was a little different? Maybe it was good things. Like that your sleep was especially good. Your anxiety levels have been especially low. Maybe things have changed for the worst. That's right. You're waking up dazed and confused. You can't stay focused. shadowy figures have been appearing in your peripheral vision. Yes. Yes, that's me. Whatever it was, something seems to have shifted. Well, you wouldn't be alone in observing some sort of disturbance,

and many internet growers have come together to agree that some cosmic force, starting around the end of June, has affected them in some important way. And while no one seems to be able to agree on whether this change has been a good or a bad thing, they've all agreed on this change's source, the temporary shutdown of crucial components of Surin's large Hadron Collider. But before we return to a classic, 5D intergalactic conspiracy theory, I want to know how the other hosts had been in the past month or so.

Whether they have felt the effects of CERN's cosmic rays being temporarily shut off. Yeah, I can tell that CERN's a great thing because it was barely holding me together. It really was. You know, I've actually, yeah, this has been a tough past month for me as well. So I didn't really put two and two together, but I'm glad I have an explanation for the things that I'm feeling and not that life is just a series of, you know, wins and long. losses that you have to just sort of choose how to feel about. And there's nothing more than that. And it's all random and bad things are going to keep happening. It's so, it's way easier to just be like, oh, well, once they turn CERN back on, my life's going to get back on track. In fact, maybe I should go try to turn it on myself. Maybe me and Julian should go on a Gooney style adventure to go to reactivate CERD.

Liv Agar, of course, a casualty along the way. The first to die, probably. Travis, any effects from CERN? No, I feel, you know, in limbo. So maybe that's it. They've frozen time for me specifically. Travis's psyche is too strong to be affected by CERN. Could be an effect, yeah.

Us untramensches, we're all suffering. Maybe it could be just like being out in the woods because I've been doing great. I've been on Vancouver Island, catching crabs, eating them. Oh, well. Yeah. Well, of course you're great then.

Away from the phone, away from the screens, away from the web, eating crabs fresh, catching them? That sounds great. This is what humans, this is what our brains are basically evolved to do, unless you don't like crabs, which, too bad for you. And look, I've been there. I used to not like seafood, but then I did, and now I'm catching up for a lost time. I bet if we ask the crabs, they'd have a very different perspective. That's true. Oh, Julian, he's always thinking about the crabs.

All right, we're already losing Jake To the idea of a crab Well, I'm just thinking about, yeah, you're right Like I never thought about it from the crab's perspective Like live coming to Vancouver Island is essentially a fucking horror movie A giant that's scooping them up off the ground They're in a bucket, they're clawing at each other's eyes It's dark, they're in a van, they don't know where they're going

It was crazy one of them like it was really hard to pick him up Like, he did not calm down. He, like, he, like, under, he figured out the meta of, like, how a crab is supposed to move, so it's hard for you to pick them up. Because most of the crabs, they just, like, let you pick them up and then throw you into, you know, like, boiling water. The boiling pot. For this guy, it took, it took us, like, 20 minutes. Wow. You could say he was fighting for his life.

Yeah, yeah. Holy hell. And lost. I'm glad you didn't give up. You know, that's the most important part is that 20 minutes later, his struggle was for not. Yeah. Do you think the other crabs in his. community, his friends and family went on to Facebook afterwards and they were like,

Louis the Crab has lost his battle against living. We last covered CERN's conspiracy theory four years ago, back in 2022. The last time the LHC was turned on, so to speak, following a few years of upgrades and maintenance. And now, after four years of smashing subatomic particles together in the name of scientific progress, the scientists at CERN have decided to pause operations within the accelerator complex until up to 2030. and what they call the long shutdown 3. To summarize its purpose from the CERN website, planned shutdowns like the LS3 are an integral part of the life cycle of particle accelerators,

especially those that operate at near absolute zero temperatures. These periods allow preventative and corrective maintenance, consolidation, and upgrades to be carried out at the same time. If you have at least a trivial interest in particle physics, this is pretty exciting, as the upgraded LHC will facilitate at least 10 times more collisions from its accelerator. What this basically means is that we'll get a substantially larger amount of data related to how physics worked under similar conditions to the very early period of the universe. For a good brief summary of what's going on in the LHC, here's a TikTok from 2022 by Particle Laura, a scientist working at CERN. And she's made out of particles.

You would hope. You may have heard that CERN is using the Large Hadron Collider to recreate the Big Bang. But what does that mean? And is it even true? So no, what we're actually doing at CERN is recreating conditions in the main. very early universe. This was when our universe was an extremely hot and dense place. So by colliding protons, and actually more often for these studies, by colliding heavy ions, like lead atoms with their electrons removed, we can recreate conditions fractions of a second

after the Big Bang. And when we do this, we can create a state of matter called the quack gluon plasma. And this is what we're really trying to study. We want to know how do the particles and the forces behave very early in the universe when they're in this very hot and dense state. But the state of matter itself only exists for a fraction of a second and then it fizzles out into our detector. Want more particle physics facts then we're not like this video? Give me a follow. This science witch is correct. Laura and those like here have been doing god's work as concerned stemming the tide of misinformation related to CERN. We'll be hearing more about Laura and what she's been up to

in recent months later. But for now it should be noted that that perfectly sensible science communication video has 550 likes. Keep this in mind when we talk about how many likes all the insane certain videos have been getting. Something you can notice even among the 26 comments left on this video is a very specific form of rational skepticism that has powered virtually every certain conspiracy theory, both those happening four years ago in 2022 and now. Astrid Helly Romer says why is it that you want to know that special condition? Why are you trying investigating the mysteries of the universe? Very sus. Only I'm allowed to inquire in a skeptical way about things. And those things are the things I see on my TikTok feed.

Heath Van says, For what, though? When you find the answers, then what? All this for what? Then he points another comment. Just to write some text afterwards, question mark? Oh, so that's what you plan, huh? You just want to discover new thing, just to write it down. And so people can know about, distribute the information about the new discoveries. Is this your plot, huh? These comments help show that a majority of certain conspiracy theories relate in some way to the that something nefarious is happening in CERN, that the scientists who are facilitating it are not to be trusted. I will go too deep into this history related to CERN, for more or less than a premium

episode 158, but pseudoscientific panic concerning the potentially adverse effects of a large particle collider predate even the start of the LHC, such as with the relativistic heavy ion collider that operated in New York State from 2000 to 2006. Unsurprisingly, these concerns were largely the product of an alarmist, clickbait, headline-seeking media class, overblowing a real, minor concern articulated among scientists related to the theoretical possibility that a large particle accelerator could create an incredibly small black hole or at least something like one. That was what I remember hearing at the time is surrounding CERN. That seemed to be the most prominent theories that was going to create a mini black hole that would envelop our planet

and known galaxy. Which sounds bad. I don't want black holes in New York. No. 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 Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of the Spectreys, Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickledown with me, Travis Vue.

It's a bounty of content and the 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.

Ha ha ha ha.