The Truth Behind the 49ers' Electromagnetic Injury Conspiracy

Is a mysterious substation — looming over an NFL practice facility "like The Eye of Sauron" — really causing a wave of injuries? Pablo teams up with Wendy Zukerman of the "Science Vs" podcast to map the actual electric waves, explain the cancer research and pore over the football data, to determine why the grass is always browner... on the other side of a deep story. • Subscribe to "Science Vs” https://pod.link/1051557000 • Subscribe to PTFO on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@PabloTorreFindsOut/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

• 0:12Pablo Torre?

  Right after this.

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• 1:16Pablo Torre?

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• 1:59Pablo Torre?

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• 2:24Pablo Torre?

  This is foreign territory for me, not merely the fact that you're across the world in Australia, Wendy Zuckerman, and thank you for doing this, by the way.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Ah, thanks for having me.

• 2:33Pablo Torre?

  This is all a little strange. The studio is not my studio. You're a person I'm only really getting to know in the course of this very different kind of episode. I should explain for our audience who is just meeting you now, who are you exactly?

• 2:48Speaker 03

  I'm the host of Science Versus, which is a podcast that for 10 years has been taking things on the internet, whether it's a diet or a new drug that everyone's saying you should take. And we really interrogate it. We've won fancy awards. Audiences really trust us. We did an episode on the fertility cliff and people had babies as a result of it, Pablo. So they sent us photos of children. So that's, that's how deep.

• 3:18Pablo Torre?

  You brought life into the world.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 3:20Pablo Torre?

  That needs to lead any resume.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:22Pablo Torre?

  I am responsible for untold numbers of pregnancies.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  That's right. Elon Musk would be very proud of me, so.

• 3:32Pablo Torre?

  And I want to acknowledge that you are an NFL fan? Question mark.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Look, if I had to choose a sport with a strange oblong-shaped ball, it would have to be Aussie Rules Football. That's all I'm saying there.

• 3:47Pablo Torre?

  So you're a football fan in a different sense, and I fell into a trap already. Great, wonderful.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  If I say footy in reference to NFL, I apologize in advance.

• 3:56Pablo Torre?

  But a consistent thing about the mission of this show that you're kindly doing with me today in this collaboration with yours is that we use journalism to solve mysteries.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:08Pablo Torre?

  And the mystery that we have been flooded by here at Pablo Torre Finds Out, the thing that we have been requested over and over again to investigate, is a globally viral mystery that has clearly hit your shores in Australia.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 4:22Pablo Torre?

  We are talking about the San Francisco 49ers, one of the most iconic franchises in the NFL, in American football, that also happens to be plagued by injuries in a way that has made me contemplate what the [bleep] I'm supposed to believe anymore.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  This was a wild one. When you guys came to us and said, can you help us solve this? You know, I may not be into NFL, but oh, boy, am I into science and into cracking mysteries just like this.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  Well, as you know, it's been another 49ers season plagued by the injury bug. And there's a wild theory circulating on social media that attempts to explain what's going on.

• 5:02Pablo Torre?

  The theory's pretty straightforward. The 49ers have a high number of injuries compared to the rest of the league, and there's this big, massive electrical substation sitting right next to their practice facility and their stadium.

• 5:13Speaker 05

  Every camp highlight has the massive substation in the background, and all you see now is the substation.

• 5:20Pablo Torre?

  The thought is that these EMF waves from the electrical substation are making the 49ers players less healthy and more at risk of injuries.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  This question about what is hurting the 49ers? Why do they have all these injuries? Could it be the substation? That is right down our alley.

• 5:39Speaker 06

  Add everything up across this entire 90-man roster, and roughly 20 separate players are currently injured and unavailable to San Francisco in some capacity.

• 5:50Pablo Torre?

  I thought I was going to be able to just dismiss the substation theory as this nothing burger, which is what the general manager of the 49ers, John Lynch, himself has called it, Wendy.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  It basically was a big nothing burger. You know, we're safe, like we're in a safe place at work, but levels are.

• 6:10Pablo Torre?

  They say that they've hired an independent scientist to conduct their own study. They've now categorically said, there's nothing to see here. The substation injury theory is not a thing. The scientist has not yet been named, and the raw data have not been published. And football fans, to say perhaps the most obvious part of this whole entire saga, they're not buying any of this.

• 6:33Speaker 07

  I don't know what the hell's going on, but the whole damn roster's injured again. Look, I didn't think there was anything to the electrical substation theory. Hell, I gotta, I gotta be honest. What is going on? The electrical substations, if you have one near any of your facilities, even just near your house, if there's one near your house, I'd be worried getting out of your car every single day.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  There is way more to this story than simply the 49ers getting injured. That's for sure. And now people are saying, well, the World Health Organization says that this stuff coming from substations, these electromagnetic waves, possibly cause cancer. We're like, what is going on here? We really want to get to the bottom of this because we all have substations, yet many of us in our neighborhoods. There's one right down the road from me.

• 7:28Pablo Torre?

  I don't know if the substation near you has the same rating on Google Maps that the Niners one does. The rating at last check here, 2.7 stars. As one guy wrote, quote, "Would not recommend this substation. Ruined my fantasy football career and ruined my life."

• 7:46Speaker 03

  I really want to know what substation he does recommend.

• 7:49Pablo Torre?

  But the thing that felt harder to dismiss than all of this was the cascade of articles and headlines and posts about data, about how the injury rates for this team are in fact an outlier. And not just that, they're, they're the worst in the league by far.

• 8:09Pablo Torre?

  And you go through your memory banks as a football fan, and you're like, okay, there was the time that Dre Greenlaw.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  Dre Greenlaw getting ready to run onto the field after that punt.

• 8:20Pablo Torre?

  Who's the star linebacker for the Niners, just snapped his Achilles while untouched in the Super Bowl.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  And he planted his left foot and it looks, and I don't want to speculate, but it looked like it could have been an Achilles injury that it may have just popped as he was running onto the field.

• 8:37Pablo Torre?

  And then there's the time that Jimmy Rappolo, the quarterback, tore his ACL in 2018. There's a time that defensive lineman Nick Bosa tore his ACL in 2020. There's a time that the other quarterback, Brock Purdy, tore his UCL in 2023. Brandon Iuk, the wide receiver, he had an ACL and an MCL tear in 2024. And if you go and talk to these players, the guys who work in the shadow of said substation with the terrible rating, one of them being wide receiver Kendrick Bourne, they also want answers.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  What the hell's going on with all the injuries that the Niners have every year? Power plant. Do you buy that? I, I kind of buy it. I'm a conspiracy theorist, so I don't know, bro. Our grass is brown on that side and the soccer field on the other side is green. So that, that kind of trips me out a little bit.

• 9:22Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, and in case you think that the grass is always greener theory is, is unique to Kendrick Bourne, here is Harvard-educated fullback Kyle Juszczyk on the same subject.

• 9:32Speaker 07

  It's one of those things that it's just so hard to say because the science is not clear behind it. And like, I'm very much just like a science-driven person and like, I want to see the, the numbers and the statistics and like, I mean, is it a coincidence that, you know, that we've led the NFL in injuries for the last like decade? I want to see what someone who truly understands that field, what they have to say about it and just be curious to know.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Wow. Welcome to the party. That is us. That is us.

• 10:22Pablo Torre?

  So Wendy, this whole thing, I believe, started with a guy.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:26Pablo Torre?

  The person, the human being, who's actually behind the viral post and headline that has started all of this?

• 10:34Speaker 05

  My name is Peter Anthony Cowan, and I run my own wellness business. And environmental health is really my focus. And right now-

• 10:41Pablo Torre?

  Peter Cowan, as a matter of, I think, just journalistic rigor, I want to know what his deal is?

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, I did as well. So Peter Cowan, he grew up in the Bay Area. So he's always been a casual 49ers fan.

• 10:57Speaker 05

  I don't know the names of the positions, really. I just, I watch these beautiful angles and motions, and it's like ballet to me.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  And by the way, he's a musician, and he actually wrote this and recorded it. This is Peter.

• 11:13Pablo Torre?

  We're listening to Peter Cowan tinkling the ivories right now.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  That's correct. This is Peter.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  So he's watching this ballet of football, and he starts seeing his beautiful prima ballerinas getting injured. The 49ers in particular are getting hammered with injuries, always having this trouble. And then somewhere along the way, Peter stumbles across a radio interview on a local Bay Area sports station that he likes to listen to. And it's an interview with ex-49ers player John Feliciano.

• 11:49Pablo Torre?

  This is September 2025. It's 95.7 The Game in San Francisco, and John Feliciano is the guest.

• 11:57Speaker 07

  For 49er fans, where it seems like, and actually, the data suggests it doesn't seem like, it's fact, usually, and almost always, the 49ers are one of the most injured teams in the league.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  And the host is talking about all of these injuries that the 49ers are getting.

• 12:13Speaker 07

  And it's gotten to the point where people are like, it can't just be dumb luck. Like, there's gotta be something to it.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  We used to joke that it was the power plant, the, behind the, behind the practice fields.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  It's important to say that it's not a power plant near the 49ers' site.

• 12:33Pablo Torre?

  Okay, so, so, so please explain the difference between a substation and a power plant?

• 12:37Speaker 03

  So a power plant generates the energy, creates the energy, and then it transmits it over to a substation. What it does is it converts the voltage into a voltage that then your house can use, basically. So it changes the voltage and then transmits that electricity to your home or your business so that you can power your heater, your lights, your computer, any form of electricity in your home is basically coming from electricity that's come through a substation.

• 13:07Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  This really stops Peter in his tracks is because he is worried that substations emit electromagnetic fields.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  And basically, these fields are waves of electric and magnetic energy that move together. And Peter wonders, what if John Feliciano is right? What if those fields are harming the players and increasing their risk of getting injured? Because it's not just that the substation is close to the practice field. It's also that the stadium that the players play at, Levi's Stadium, it's also so close.

• 13:47Speaker 05

  And when you go up, you walk up the back steps, you're looking right over the substation. And it's just, you can hear it buzzing and stuff, and-

• 13:56Pablo Torre?

  So how much buzzing are we really talking about?

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Great question. We actually sent a reporter to the site, and, look, she went to the loudest point that she could find. And here's what she said to us.

• 14:17Pablo Torre?

  I feel like data centers have been absorbing a lot of the criticism for just ungodly noises emitted by electrical facilities. I feel like the substation is rightfully now in the conversation.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  I mean, it's not birds tweeting. It's not a nice sound, that's for sure.

• 14:31Pablo Torre?

  It's not piano and ballet.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  And so Peter can't get this idea out of his mind. Could this substation be causing the injuries?

• 14:38Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  So I think it's really important to know about Peter's backstory here, which is actually fascinating.

• 14:45Speaker 05

  I like to start with this one. I dropped out of high school, and I went on to become a hacker. I was into coding.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  You would have been an early hacker. You would have done well, I imagine.

• 14:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, we did. And I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations for wire fraud is only 25 years, so I think I'm good.

• 15:06Speaker 05

  No, it was, it was, it was the 90s, man. Like, it was a Wild West, yeah.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  The statute of limitations for wire fraud is actually only five years, so Peter is absolutely fine.

• 15:14Pablo Torre?

  This is very reassuring.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  So, bigger picture, Peter is not a scientist, per se, but he grew up, moved on from hacking, and then eventually went down a path that many hackers from the 90s went down, which is you get into software engineering. He did end up working for a wireless networking company, and he starts writing firmware for Wi-Fi routers, just like the Wi-Fi router that you might have at your home.

• 15:41Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  And Wi-Fi, by the way, also emits electromagnetic waves.

• 15:47Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I should say, there's a whole, like, world of people who turn off their Wi-Fi at night because they're worried about the waves. And Christian McCaffrey, who was the star running back for the Niners, is apparently one of these people. He's talked about this very publicly.

• 16:00Speaker 07

  You turning your Wi-Fi off at night is, you know, does it help? I don't know. Someone said it will, it can't hurt, so let me try. That's, that's really my thought.

• 16:07Pablo Torre?

  Am I now worried, as we proceed through this story, about my own Wi-Fi?

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Peter did. Peter did start worrying about the electromagnetic waves being emitted from his Wi-Fi. He told us he had some medical issues that doctors couldn't really explain. It was stuff like panic attacks, difficulty sleeping, cold sweats, shakes. And he started thinking, could it be from the Wi-Fi router? Could it be from electromagnetic waves more generally?

• 16:34Speaker 05

  And so I started looking into literature and realizing, ah, there's actually more to it than that. And so the idea is that we are increasing the amount of free radicals, which, long term, creates more oxidative stress. And that's, that's-

• 16:52Pablo Torre?

  The thing he's saying is that, okay, what if these EMF waves coming from Wi-Fi and substations and stuff, what if they, through oxidative stress, were the things attacking the tendons of these athletes, of these San Francisco 49ers players?

• 17:11Speaker 03

  This is exactly where Peter is going. So he starts thinking that this oxidative stress could weaken collagen. Collagen is, as a protein, it's also found in tendons and ligaments. It's super, super important. So if indeed electromagnetic waves are weakening collagen, then that could increase the risk of tendon, ligament injuries. And he ultimately decides to go to the practice area and measure the electromagnetic waves.

• 17:45Speaker 05

  Okay, we're here at Levi's Stadium, and-

• 17:48Speaker 03

  So, towards the end of last year, he drives up to the substation, parks nearby, and he starts measuring.

• 17:57Speaker 05

  So, this is as close as I could get.

• 18:02Speaker 05

  But even right here, I'm reading almost nine milligauss.

• 18:09Speaker 05

  Definitely a concern.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  And this is what he told us.

• 18:14Speaker 05

  Well, first I started measuring, just to kind of see what I was dealing with. And I started finding elevated fields all over the place. The reading I had was between 8.5 and nine milligauss. So the first thing I'm thinking when I see that is, that's way higher than I would want to be exposed to.

• 18:29Pablo Torre?

  And so a milligauss as a unit of measurement, that is a lot?

• 18:36Speaker 03

  Normally, if you're just on your couch, say, you'd be exposed to about one or two milligauss. So eight or nine, it is higher than normal. And at one point, he actually measures 50 milligauss, coming off what's called a feeder line, which he thinks is running underground from the substation under the stadium.

• 18:57Pablo Torre?

  Now, I'm just a guy who's learning about what a milligauss is in the last two minutes.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:02Pablo Torre?

  But 50 feels like a [BLEEP] ton, to use another unit of measurement.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Peter reckons he's on to something here. He thinks, kind of, this is evidence now that the 49ers are getting pummeled with these dangerous electromagnetic waves.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  This is a piece in the puzzle here.

• 19:29Pablo Torre?

  Now, this is where I gotta say that like the owner of the San Francisco 49ers, Jed York, has been asked about the substation and his go-to response is, "This thing has been around for years," right? I mean, this is, this is something that predates this certain like run of injuries that we've been describing.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:50Pablo Torre?

  I mean, this has been around since the 80s when they were like winning titles very healthily.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  It hasn't been around since the 80s. Another fact check there, even though it has been widely reported that, we fact-checked it, but it has been around for decades. I think it was there since 2005. So Peter had thought about this and he read that the substation actually expanded in 2014 and this has been reported widely.

• 20:14Speaker 07

  As we know, there were renovations done on this substation in 2014. It's officially called the Mission Substation.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  It's in the New York Times, ESPN, CBS. And so now Peter figures, you know, bada bing bada boom, substation expands, 2014, starts emitting more of these electromagnetic waves. And that is around the time when people are talking about that the 49ers start getting more and more injured, right?

• 20:42Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  So Peter writes all of this in a series of substacks citing scientific evidence to back up his claim and noting that since 2014, the 49ers have been decimated by injuries. I'll quote Peter's substack here, "Suffering, quote, 'far more full Achilles and patella tendon ruptures than league average,' end quote." He says, "along with, you know, nasty hamstring and calf tears." He wrote, "These kinds of injuries, quote, 'turned into an annual rite of passage,' end quote, for the 49ers."

• 21:15Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, this was sort of their identity.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  And then in January this year, Peter presses publish, along with posting it on X. And then he told me, funnily enough, he actually doesn't think that much about the post. He celebrates this Irish tradition called Little Christmas on January the 6th, hangs out with his kids.

• 21:36Pablo Torre?

  I just like that there's another tradition on January 6th that is not the one I think of at this point, but shout out to Little Christmas.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  The rebrand, we could take the rebrand back, exactly. But eventually Peter does check to see how his post is doing.

• 21:51Speaker 05

  And I opened up my computer and it's at 500,000 views and I'm just shocked.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  This post will eventually reach more than 22 million views. It just completely blows up.

• 22:03Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  You've got Joe Rogan talking about it.

• 22:06Speaker 07

  So that's where the electrical substation is and there's the field. I mean, cut the [BLEEP]. Whoa. That's, that can't be good. So it's literally radiating onto them. That can't be good.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  You've got players reaching out to Peter himself, the NFL responding.

• 22:20Speaker 05

  What I would tell you, Eric, because it deals with allegedly, you know, the health and safety of our players, I think you have to look into everything and so.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  The 49ers hiring the independent scientist and you and me, Pablo, spending months of our lives trying to get to the bottom of this. And Peter told us that actually what is driving him are studies that he reckons are connecting power lines and substations to our health more generally, including things like childhood leukemia.

• 22:54Speaker 05

  Did I get into this field because I was concerned about athletes snapping their tendons? Not really. I'm more concerned about oxidative stress, mitochondrial damage in general contributing to just a sea of chronic diseases across the population, across the world.

• 23:13Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, and I gotta say, I appreciate Peter's concern. My issue is just that he's, again, not an insult, he's just not a scientist.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:22Pablo Torre?

  At all.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  So I think it's time to talk to a scientist.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  So we spoke to a handful, probably more researchers, but one guy I want to introduce you to now is Dr. Ken Karapides. Okay, so my name is Ken Karapides. I'm the Assistant Director of Health Impact Assessment at the Australian Radiation Protection Nuclear Safety Agency. And I'm also the Vice Chair of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection. He has never received money from industry. This is something that people who are skeptical of electromagnetic waves worry about big tech getting their paws into the research. Ken really knows his stuff here.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  He has spent more than 20 years researching, reading the studies on whether the kinds of electromagnetic waves being emitted from substations, power lines, also the wifi in your home, whether it is dangerous and you need to worry about it.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  One of the first things he said is it is really important to know whether these waves are dangerous or not because they're obviously not just near the 49ers' practice area. They're all around us because we're surrounded by electrical things. I mean, in this room right now, we're so, you know, we've got, so it's ubiquitous. You know, you're never not exposed to. So right now, you, Pablo, you've got electrical stuff all around you, your laptop, the microphone, everything. So these kinds of electromagnetic waves that are coming off the substation, they're really long, they're called extremely low-frequency electromagnetic waves, and they are also

• 25:07Speaker 03

  getting emitted from the electrical equipment around you and in your home. So the lights, the computer, the microphone, your TV, electric blankets, everything is emitting these electromagnetic waves.

• 25:24Pablo Torre?

  So as somebody who is sleeping on top of his cellphone most nights, it sticks to me and I have to peel it off when I wake up in the morning.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  Phone, yes.

• 25:34Pablo Torre?

  Is this an issue? Am I in danger?

• 25:36Speaker 03

  Okay, so that is the question. I ask Ken, what happens when these waves waft through our body? They are creating little currents inside our body. Everywhere, little currents? Correct, little currents, but they're, they're really low, so you don't actually feel them. So electromagnetic fields tickle ions in our body and this actually makes little currents. But like Ken said, right now, you and I, we can't feel them, but. If the current is high enough, you get electrostimulation. It's. What does it feel like? Have you had it done? No, because the power level, it's, it's like getting electrocuted, basically. Oh, okay. So if you, you know, if you touch a live, I mean, it hasn't happened to me. I don't know if it's happened to you. No, but I've seen Jurassic Park, so I know.

• 26:22Pablo Torre?

  So in other words, like the Jurassic Park test is if I touch this thing and it's not shocking me, am I okay? Like, what does it mean, given that Peter, with his gauss meter, was recording, you know, a 50 milligauss rating?

• 26:35Speaker 03

  So I asked him, what about the 50 milligauss? Is that, is that high? How worried should we be here? So 50 milligauss is higher than what's normally encountered. However, it is still below, much, much lower than the, than the limer. So the limer. Uh huh, with the limit. For the general public is 2,000 milligauss. Whoa, oh, okay. And what happens at 2,000? Well, nothing happens at 2,000 milligauss. Right. Because the safety factor is built within the limer.

• 27:06Pablo Torre?

  So this is, this is, this is an enormous development for my numeracy around the milligauss.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  You were worried that 50 milligauss was a [BLEEP] ton. For narrative tension purposes, I didn't reveal that actually 50 milligauss is not particularly high.

• 27:21Pablo Torre?

  Thank you for not calling me out for being an idiot.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  No, I mean, well.

• 27:26Pablo Torre?

  That's so many more milligauss before we have to worry.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Yes. One thing that we know can happen when you put the power up, when you crank it up too high of these kinds of electromagnetic waves, is that they can stimulate cells in your retina and you can get kind of stars in your eyes. You know, when you rub your eyes and you see those little white thingies? So from experiments, that can happen when people are exposed to more than 50,000 milligauss.

• 27:55Pablo Torre?

  Okay, significantly more.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  That's a thousand times more than the highest point that Peter measured. Then you want to go even higher. You've got nerve stimulation where you might feel a bit tingly or twitchy. That's happening at hundreds of thousands of milligauss.

• 28:15Pablo Torre?

  And so this now brings us to, again, the 49ers' general manager, John Lynch, who, when he announced this independent study by an independent scientist that has very few details publicly otherwise, he did say.

• 28:28Speaker 05

  You know, we're safe, like we're, we're in a, a safe place of work. The levels are, like I read in there, 400 times less than unsafe zones and so it's.

• 28:38Pablo Torre?

  And I guess, Wendy, if you're taking that at face value, he's saying that whatever your threshold is for safe, we're 400 times below whatever that would be.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And so to this, Peter would say, "I don't like these levels because they're not including perhaps more subtle effects like oxidative stress."

• 29:02Pablo Torre?

  The erosion of our tendon and ligaments with the collagen stuff from before.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  That's Peter's argument. And so then my question became, and I think it's a good question, is so what do we know about whether electromagnetic waves at this power level, this thereabouts, can actually cause oxidative stress? And you can go online right now and find scores of studies showing that electromagnetic waves at this basic power level, they do increase oxidative stress. These are the kinds of studies that Peter is pointing to and that he's worried about.

• 29:40Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  The issue is, they are not studies in people.

• 29:45Pablo Torre?

  Wait a minute. What are we studying, Wendy?

• 29:49Speaker 03

  We are studying cells, a cell in a dish. What these studies do is they take a cell, a blood cell, maybe sperm, and then they will expose it to electromagnetic waves and then measure for markers of oxidative stress. And sometimes they say, yes, look, we found it.

• 30:07Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  But the thing is, you can also find studies that find the exact opposite. They'll do basically the same thing and find that now it lowers oxidative stress. Oh, these electromagnetic waves are helpful.

• 30:22Pablo Torre?

  So you're saying that this is bad, but it's also good?

• 30:24Speaker 03

  What I'm saying is you need to be careful when you're looking at science and that you don't cherry pick your data. So what you find is that people who really are worried about electromagnetic waves, they will dismiss the studies that show, look, it's actually helpful. They collect the studies that show that it's harmful and say, look at all this data. But the broader point is that these are studies in cells. And cells are not people. Even you take a study in rats, and if we think about, say, you know, drug development, we're constantly curing cancer in rats. And then you take that, whatever chemical they're testing, and you try it out in humans, and the chance it's gonna work is so, so low.

• 31:09Pablo Torre?

  What I'm finding out is that the lab rat has it pretty good.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  The lab rat has it so bad.

• 31:17Pablo Torre?

  Long maligned, the lab rat has it better than us people.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  But I think the broader point is, you really need to look at studies in people. If you wanna make a claim like electromagnetic waves are harming collagen, increasing the risk of injuries, increasing oxidative stress, the cell studies, the animal studies, they can help you out, but you need the studies in people. I did ask Peter, what studies do you have in people that really prove your point that these waves cause oxidative stress? And he sent us a couple of papers, and I wanna go through them a little deeply here.

• 31:59Pablo Torre?

  So you wanna grade some papers right now?

• 32:01Speaker 03

  No, I wanna have some fun with science, Pablo.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  So, all right, study one comes from India. And basically, what the researchers did is they got people that worked at a substation, they were doing maintenance or installing power lines, then they took some blood samples from them, measured markers of oxidative stress inside their blood, and found that workers installing the power lines had higher levels of oxidative stress than a group of admin workers.

• 32:32Pablo Torre?

  Which follows Peter's theory.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Follows Peter's theory, yes.

• 32:35Pablo Torre?

  People are being dosed with EMF waves and look what's happening.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Right, okay. But then if you actually read the guts of the paper, you go deeper than that, you know, abstract.

• 32:47Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, we're getting at the all 22 feet. We're examining all the angles of the play here.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  You'll notice the researchers didn't actually measure how much of these electromagnetic waves anyone in this study was exposed to. And Ken said this is a problem, because instead what they did is they just based it on someone's job title and made an assumption.

• 33:08Speaker 05

  Sometimes somebody might have a job title as maintenance, but they might, they might be the boss, just work in the office, you know?

• 33:15Speaker 03

  Right, yes.

• 33:16Speaker 05

  So, again, job titles are, people use it as a de facto, as a de facto measure of exposure.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 05

  But studies have shown that they're really poor, so.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Ken said, that's a bad idea, because we know from other research that you might have a job title that's like power line installer, but you're actually a manager and you sit in an office all day. Or you might, you might look like you're admin staff, but actually you are on site all day.

• 33:46Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, this is like how a podcast producer is not getting credit for actually being your therapist.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Similar, yes. Um, and, and then there are some bigger issues that Ken pointed out.

• 33:59Speaker 05

  When you look at all the tables.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 05

  The numbers don't add up.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 34:04Speaker 05

  Just silly things like that. It's a really big red flag.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, where are these missing people?

• 34:09Speaker 05

  Where are all these missing numbers?

• 34:11Speaker 03

  So in the abstract, for example, they tell you that there's 142 substation workers that they're studying. Then you start looking at the tables, they've only got blood samples for 130 workers. So you're like, where's the other 12? Maybe you couldn't get blood samples from them, sure. But then you look at the actual things they were measuring in the blood, the so-called markers of oxidative stress, and now all of a sudden you're losing more samples. There was, in one of them, there was only 117 workers. And without explanation in the paper of where are the missing numbers, it's tasting poisonous.

• 34:52Pablo Torre?

  What you're saying is that it is conspicuous when a nice abstract summarizes neatly a phenomenon, but the numbers don't actually justify those findings.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  That's exactly right.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  I wouldn't be using this study even as a hypothesis.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 35:08Speaker 05

  Okay, moving on to the other study.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Please.

• 35:10Speaker 05

  So that was the Indian study.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  He's shaking his head.

• 35:13Pablo Torre?

  I just, you said you weren't grading papers, and you guys are violently grading papers.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  But we're also having fun with science, aren't we?

• 35:22Pablo Torre?

  You are. Like football, science can be violent and fun.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  So, this other paper, this is actually an era that you see in a lot of stuff online. Super important, people understand it. This paper got power plant workers, measured various markers of oxidative stress again, but then they went further, and they also gave everyone a test to see how depressed and burnt out they were. Then they compared that data to hospital admin staff, and ultimately reported that the power plant workers had higher rates of depression and what they called burnout syndrome. And they said this, quote, "may be caused by exposure to magnetic fields, possibly from oxidative stress."

• 36:09Pablo Torre?

  I am but a humble sociology major. Um, but it does feel like correlation and causation not quite the same thing.

• 36:17Speaker 03

  Yes, that's it, that's it. So we basically have no idea from a study like this if electromagnetic waves caused the depression and the burnout syndrome had anything to do with these symptoms. With a study like this where you're just capturing people at one point in time, it's actually impossible to make a claim like that. But there are things that you can do statistically to rule out what else might be causing the burnout. You know, are we sure it's the oxidative stress? Or perhaps, could it be?

• 36:49Speaker 05

  It could be that working in a power plant is actually quite, you know, it gives you a burnout.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  Yes, it's stressful.

• 36:56Speaker 05

  Stressful, and you get, you know, quite a stressful job.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 37:00Speaker 05

  So, you know.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  And that then leads to oxidative stress in your body.

• 37:03Speaker 05

  Well, maybe.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  Nothing to do with the electromagnetic waves.

• 37:07Speaker 05

  Correct, so both of these studies are examples of, they're just rubbish.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, what should we do with them?

• 37:13Speaker 05

  Not consider them, not even.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  My mum would say, you can wipe your ass.

• 37:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, maybe you should do that. I mean.

• 37:21Pablo Torre?

  I do like how the big insight is, maybe your job just sucks.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  In this case, the power plant workers were shift workers.

• 37:29Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  And the admin staff at the hospital weren't. There were so many things I could reach to before I go to EMF waves.

• 37:37Pablo Torre?

  The confounding variables are also just lingering in the air somewhere.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  Exactly. And meanwhile, we do have good quality studies where people have looked at power plant workers and substation workers and looked for various issues with their health, including cardiovascular issues, which is also related to oxidative stress, by the way, and they're really not finding much.

• 38:01Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  And when you look at studies in people, let's go to collagen.

• 38:07Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  What we actually find is that if you use electromagnetic waves in this particular way where you pulse them, you can actually boost collagen production, not harm it. The complete opposite to what this theory is. So here's Ken on that.

• 38:24Speaker 05

  You've got to remember, when it comes to collagen, there's actually more studies showing an improvement.

• 38:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 38:31Speaker 05

  So there's actually more studies showing a therapeutic effect.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  So I asked Ken, okay, so knowing what you know, would you feel comfortable playing football for the 49ers?

• 38:43Speaker 05

  I would be ecstatic. Imagine how much money I could make. I could, I could make way more money than, than sitting here talking about the adverse effects of.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  What about your Achilles?

• 38:54Speaker 05

  No, I wouldn't be worried.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  I talked to Peter about, it's kind of more broadly that I just didn't think the evidence was there that substations were.

• 39:06Pablo Torre?

  I mean, you said you'd wipe your ass with the studies. It's very gentle of you to now say that you approached Peter delicately with evidence, but you wiped your ass with his evidence.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  I mean, look, the anus is a delicate tissue of the body, so let me play a bit of Peter's response.

• 39:25Speaker 05

  I'm not wedded to it being EMF, honestly. I'm not, like, I would say that to a certain extent, I've staked my reputation on the fact that it needs more study, that it's important to look into it, and that I am not certain of anything, I'm not.

• 39:40Pablo Torre?

  So I do wanna be serious here for a second, because

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:43Pablo Torre?

  it, it's really important, and I love that you did this, that you went to him and said, hey, um, the evidence is lacking.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 39:52Pablo Torre?

  And you are the guy that we are all citing here, so how do you reconcile this?

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:58Pablo Torre?

  And his answer is, we need more study. And I suppose, like, it raises the follow-up question of, like, uh, what about the thing he was caring about the most this whole time? The thing that he wanted us all to study and care about, which is the whole, you know, we might be getting cancer from this stuff. How about that part of it?

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Here is where we actually do have good quality studies, and it's not just garbage. And maybe we take a break, is this half time?

• 40:33Pablo Torre?

  You're learning how football works so quickly.

• 40:45Pablo Torre?

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• 42:23Pablo Torre?

  So you left us with a hell of a cliffhanger. "Are we all getting cancer?" I believe was the gist of what I was left wondering about what these electromagnetic waves are actually doing to us. So what should we know?

• 42:40Speaker 03

  So all over the internet right now is this claim that the World Health Organization has classified these electromagnetic waves as possibly carcinogenic. And this is true. So over 20 years ago, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the World Health Organization, did classify these waves as possibly carcinogenic, and they never reclassified them.

• 43:06Pablo Torre?

  So in fact, we should be worried about this.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  Let me just explain everything, because I really don't want people to be freaked out. So this all started in 1979, when a study came out showing that kids in Colorado who had died from childhood cancer, especially leukemia, were more likely to have lived near power lines and substations compared to other kids. But since then, since this time, 1979, a long time ago, scientists took this very seriously and started researching it over and over again, all around the world. And curiously, the link, it does keep popping up.

• 43:47Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  And not all studies find it, it's important to say, and it's not a strong link. So it's not like everyone living near a power line is going to get leukemia, far, far from it. So some research suggests that power lines and substations could maybe explain 1% to 4% of childhood leukemias out there.

• 44:14Pablo Torre?

  Huh.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  Another way to think about that number is a German researcher did this rough estimate saying that in a country like Germany, which has 13 million children at the time of this assessment, and it said, out of those 13 million children, maybe six cases of childhood leukemia might be attributed to electromagnetic fields.

• 44:37Pablo Torre?

  You have put a podcast host in a tricky position now, because one child, of course, suffering from this is way too many. That's my political position. I want that on the record, Your Honor.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 44:50Pablo Torre?

  But at the same time, I'm doing the math of six in 13 million, and that is a small number.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Researchers don't see a connection between electromagnetic fields and any other type of cancer, by the way. Not even adult leukemia. They have looked, and they cannot find a link here.

• 45:11Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  But let's go back to the 49ers. So I think one of my favorite kinds of, let's call it a conspiracy theory online, is where you have a little bit of truth and then a whole lot of not truth.

• 45:29Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  So we've got a seed of doubt here. But now it's time for our touchdown.

• 45:40Pablo Torre?

  That was so...

• 45:41Speaker 03

  It's painful.

• 45:42Pablo Torre?

  So smooth.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  So thanks.

• 45:43Pablo Torre?

  That's a segue.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  So, all right. You know how one reason that this caught the internet's attention is because of the timing of the substation getting an upgrade with when the 49ers' injuries start ratcheting up, right? Around 2014.

• 46:05Speaker 07

  As we know, there were renovations done on this substation in 2014. It's officially called the Mission Substation.

• 46:12Pablo Torre?

  Right, no, 2014 is the year that we've circled as like the turning point.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly, exactly. The timing is very, very important, because if the substation didn't get an upgrade in 2014, then it really doesn't make sense why it could have ticked off these injuries.

• 46:29Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  So, like I said, we fact-check everything. And so, senior producer of Science vs. Rose, Remla, was looking into, did the substation get an upgrade in 2014? As has been reported, ad nauseam. And this took Rose on one hell of an adventure. Come on down, Rose. Hello, hi Pablo.

• 46:55Pablo Torre?

  Hello. I do like how this is a truly global operation you guys have running.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:02Pablo Torre?

  Wendy in Australia, Rose is now sitting next to me. What was your adventure?

• 47:09Speaker 03

  All right. So why are they reported that the substation was expanded in 2014?

• 47:13Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  I first Googled that, right? I came across this podcast saying exactly this. They called out the website for a contracting service who built a substation in Santa Clara, where the 49ers play, in 2014.

• 47:30Speaker 07

  The Mission Substation and 60 KV Underground Extension was the largest substation undertaken by Silicon Valley Power.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  And I read that note about what they did when they built the substation, and they said that they put in some of the equipment running under California's Great America.

• 47:48Speaker 07

  ...was installed along the maintenance road of California's Great America Park, which had to remain open during construction.

• 47:55Pablo Torre?

  So California's Great America is the amusement park?

• 47:58Speaker 03

  It's an amusement park. I had my senior ditch day there. I'm from the Bay Area, but that's neither here nor there. But it's not really that close to Levi's Stadium or the practice field.

• 48:07Pablo Torre?

  No, I've never enjoyed the Panda Express there on a senior ditch day. But it does seem that Google Maps is making very clear, not close.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  No, so I was like, well, then why would the lines go that far south to the substation that's right next door? Then I found a presentation by Silicon Valley Power, that's the utility that owns the substation, and it has a map of all the different substations. And the substation in question that was expanded supposedly...

• 48:35Pablo Torre?

  Did you make this graphic?

• 48:36Speaker 03

  No, no, I got this from the PowerPoint presentation. He looks so disgusted by this graphic. Look, they're not the Silicon Valley graphic design.

• 48:45Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, this is a bunch of triangles. It looks like they just... This is like made in Microsoft Word.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I was so happy to find this, because it actually names where all the substations are. Because there's substations everywhere, right? So there's the one right next to Levi's Stadium. It clearly says it's called the NRS. Mostly, it's called the Northern Receiving Station. But the one that we just read, this whole thing about like, oh, it was this big expansion, da-da-da, the Mission Substation? It's way over there. So people were saying a substation upgraded in 2014, but it is a different substation. It's a different substation.

• 49:19Pablo Torre?

  This admittedly terribly made graphic does make clear that the thing that apparently has expanded, which is called Mission Substation, is off in the bottom left-hand corner and not at all the substation or subs... Either of the substations near Levi's Stadium.

• 49:34Speaker 03

  It's not the same one.

• 49:34Pablo Torre?

  How far away is that?

• 49:35Speaker 03

  It's like a mile away, which is really far in the world of electromagnetic radiation, because that field drops off extremely quickly with distance. The final thing I can tell you, I did find, and Peter helped me with this, and by the way, Peter has been very gracious in like, you know, also working with this. And like, he's like, oh yeah, I guess I did get that wrong, because he wrote some of this stuff on the substack.

• 49:56Pablo Torre?

  That's really encouraging, that Peter is like working with the fact-checkers to make sure that like, yeah, I should admit that I didn't get this right.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  And he actually found this graph. It's from a slide presentation about data center use in Silicon Valley, from Silicon Valley Power, that shows basically the growth of the use of power and electricity in the area. And you can see it's going up.

• 50:16Pablo Torre?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:17Speaker 03

  But what I would look for to explain some change that happened in 2014, I would look for some kind of inflection point in this graph, and I don't see that. So I think from all of this adventure, we've learnt that all of this reporting about the substation expanding, they were talking about the wrong substation. It's not the one near the 49ers. And to not have a clear moment where power cranks up at the substation near the 49ers' practice area, bam, injuries start plaguing the 49ers. We do not have that. And as we kept looking into the lore around this story,

• 51:02Speaker 03

  you know, it wasn't the Achilles tendons that were rupturing. It was the whole story here.

• 51:19Pablo Torre?

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• 53:47Speaker 03

  It's time to blow the whistle, and it's time for you to meet Dr. Zachary Bini. He's an assistant professor of epidemiology and data science at Emory University in Atlanta. And he has been looking into the injuries of the 49ers. Are you a 49ers fan?

• 54:05Speaker 05

  I am not. I am a Miami Dolphins fan, God help me. So it's been a dry couple of decades, especially relative to the Niners.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  So Zach doesn't have pigskin in this game. He doesn't hold a 40-year grudge from when the Dolphins met the 49ers in the Super Bowl in 1985. Don't say I didn't try to care about NFL, Pablo.

• 54:24Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, thank you for doing research. There's so many more things to be depressed about if you're a Dolphins fan than losing to the Niners in 85.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  Right. So Zach is the curator of FTN Fantasy's NFL Injury Database. It's this huge spreadsheet. It's been tracking injuries in football stretching back to 2007. Basically, most football injuries have to get publicly reported, which is important for betting and fantasy football.

• 54:49Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  And so Zach and his team take those public reports and then pop them into a spreadsheet, including who got injured, their position, the kind of injury, yada, yada, yada. And so I just asked him, over the years, have the 49ers even had more injuries than other teams?

• 55:10Speaker 05

  So if you're just talking about the raw number of injuries, like the number of players getting hurt, they actually don't. They're a little bit above average.

• 55:20Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 55:21Speaker 05

  But they actually don't have the most players, the most injuries, happening.

• 55:27Pablo Torre?

  I just like how we're now realizing that everything about this story is a paper that needs to be regraded.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  It is a mess.

• 55:35Pablo Torre?

  It's bad.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  And over the past decade, if you are looking at games lost due to all injuries, Zach said the Giants lead the way. San Francisco is second.

• 55:50Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I gotta say, like, as a New Yorker, this feels like a missed opportunity for the Giants to also be deeply aggrieved.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, Zach said there's an obvious reason why no one seems to be crying about the Giants.

• 56:05Speaker 05

  Frankly, they've also been a worse team over that time period. So I think fans don't feel as much pain when the players on a team that's already kind of struggling get hurt as they do when the Niners, who have competed for and in Super Bowls in the last decade, suffer these injuries.

• 56:25Pablo Torre?

  So how wrong is the data on the Niners, then? Like, how do you even arrive at that mistaken conclusion?

• 56:31Speaker 03

  I mean, I can hear fans saying, what is she talking about? Like, we know this. We know the 49ers are the worst. I've seen stats saying that. And so we looked around as well.

• 56:44Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  And we contacted Aaron Schatz, who's the chief analytics officer at FTN Fantasy. And he said that when you change the way you analyze the stats and you adjust them so you just focus on the starting players, important players, you also consider if maybe a player is injured and they're gonna be on the field, but they're not gonna be playing at their best. If you start sort of adjusting for that sort of stuff, then the 49ers do look the worst over the last decade. But, and this is critical, it's not by a lot.

• 57:27Pablo Torre?

  I should acknowledge, however, that it is pretty funny, and admittedly quite suspicious, that the 49ers, according to The Athletic earlier this year, are, quote, "exploring a possible nearby relocation for their now infamous practice facility." Although the given reason there is that the Niners are running out of space at their current address, as opposed to running out of patience for memes about how the substation is looming over the practice field like the Eye of Sauron, which may not be great for attracting free agents. But in fairness to the substation, I suppose, that stat Aaron Schatz was just referring to, adjusted games lost, which gives more weight to losing starters due to injury,

• 58:11Pablo Torre?

  that statistic itself opens the door to other confounding variables, variables like, you know, playing time and other undeniably human decisions that put human ligaments in jeopardy.

• 58:26Speaker 03

  There could be other, much cleaner explanations, like, I don't know, culture, coach?

• 58:35Pablo Torre?

  Or both. For instance, how many practices in a row 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan was mandating during training camp in 2025?

• 58:46Speaker 05

  The way to build your body to make it through a year is building that callus. All right? I really believe in three practices in a row as we go through camp. I can't always do it, all right, because of scheduling and stuff, but that's what our goal is. All right? The more we can practice three days in a row and fight through soreness and stuff, the more you build that callus.

• 59:02Pablo Torre?

  But this is yet another human decision that Kyle Shanahan now says is becoming a bit more relaxed because the 49ers are no longer practicing three days in a row. Kyle Shanahan is changing his mind. He's now limiting it to two. Now, it is worth noting, of course, that the most narratively inconvenient variable of all in this story is fundamentally sheer randomness, as Shanahan himself is aware at this point, as well as anybody, given that he survived a now infamous car accident just last month. And while that accident in Palo Alto triggered even more jokes about the substation's power,

• 59:47Pablo Torre?

  it also raised lingering questions about human error and how lucky Kyle Shanahan is to have survived.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  I do think that the backdrop of all of this is the randomness of life.

• 1:00:04Pablo Torre?

  That is unsatisfying, Wendy.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  I find it super satisfying because I think part of the reason that theories like the substation thrive is because it gives you a singular thing to blame. And it gives you comfort, and it gives us this something to focus on. But the truth is that sometimes [BLEEP] just happens, and injuries just happen. And, you know, you look at the stats, the 32 teams, 16 of them are gonna be at the bottom half. That's just stats, right? There is this concept, Pablo, in psychology called the deep story. And it's basically the story that everyone believes, this emotional story that everyone's pulled into,

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  whether it's true or not. And so I think the deep story here is that the 49ers are plagued year after year after year with crazy amounts of injuries, when really, when you look at the stats, they're not doing great. I'm not out here saying that, like, this is, that they're the best in the league, healthiest in the league. Absolutely not. But they are not doing crazy bad, crazy enough that we need to reach for substations to explain what's going on.

• 1:01:22Pablo Torre?

  You are, as a non-NFL expert, getting to explain the NFL in ways that might be cutting to the core of the psychology of the people who love America's foremost cultural institution.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  I'm doing my best. So I think, bottom line, we could safely say the substation, the evidence just isn't there that that is to blame for the injuries the 49ers have had.

• 1:01:51Pablo Torre?

  This feels comprehensive in a way that a blowout loss tends to feel in this very American game. And also, I kind of feel dizzy. So the full NFL experience.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've done our job. We've hit you over the head with the facts.

• 1:02:17Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

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