What's REALLY Causing NFL Injuries This Season? | 1/22/26
From training rooms to substations, this episode examines a troubling pattern behind one of the NFL’s most injury-plagued teams.
On this episode of At The Mic: Thursday Deep Dive, Keith Malinak is joined by researcher Peter Cowan to explore the San Francisco 49ers’ unusually high rate of non-contact injuries. What begins as a discussion about football and conditioning quickly turns into a deeper investigation involving EMF exposure, a nearby electrical substation, and soft tissue damage that appears repeatedly without clear explanation.
As the evidence builds, the conversation moves beyond football into questions of human biology, environmental stress, and institutional risk. Cowan explains why certain theories surrounding electromagnetic exposure are often dismissed before they are fully examined, and why that dismissal may prevent meaningful investigation.
Rather than offering definitive conclusions, this episode lays out patterns, data, and unanswered questions, leaving listeners to consider whether coincidence alone is enough to explain what’s happening.
Key Focus:
How Peter Cowan first recognized that the 49ers’ injury problem followed a consistent pattern rather than random chance.
Chapters:
- 00:00 – San Francisco 49ers Injury Pattern Explained
- 11:00 – Why NFL Injuries Are Increasing League-Wide
- 22:00 – The 49ers’ Injury Rate Compared to the NFL
- 33:00 – Levi’s Stadium Facility Location and Injury Risk
- 44:00 – Non-Contact NFL Injuries and Soft Tissue Damage
- 55:00 – EMF Exposure and the Human Body
- 1:06:00 – Electromagnetic Radiation and Sports Science
- 1:17:00 – Why EMF Injury Research Gets Dismissed
- 1:28:00 – Could EMFs Be Affecting Other NFL Teams
- 1:40:00 – The Unanswered Question Facing the NFL
Guest:
Peter Cowan:
- Website: https://www.livingenergywellness.com
- App: https://www.sunlightis.life/
- Substack: https://peteranthonycowan.substack.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sunlightis.life
- X: https://x.com/living_energy
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sunlight.is.life
If you value independent investigation and long-form conversations the mainstream avoids, follow the show, share this episode, and leave a review on your podcast platform of choice.
At The Mic with Keith Malinak
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Special thanks to Gabby for managing the Instagram page
- X: https://twitter.com/jeffapologist
Produced by Wes Castelhano at 2nd Floor Studios in Dallas, Texas.
- Website: https://secondfloorstudios.co
- YouTube: https://youtube.com/@UCHMPHGxT9jMyU7tnpTVebKA
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/2ndfloordallas
- X: https://twitter.com/2ndfloordallas
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Keith Malinak:
Hello, hello. Welcome to this edition of At the Mic. I am your host, Keith Malinak, and it is time for the Thursday deep dive. So grateful that you made time today. I know that it's cold wherever you are, unless you're in Florida. Congratulations. But we've got an exciting show here, and I'm so looking forward to having this discussion today with my guest before I bring him in here.
I want to give you a heads up in case you weren't aware that last night I was on with Kay Daly and Drax. They have a show on X and I was the guest there. I tweeted out a link to that earlier this morning if you want to go and check that out. Well, don't go check it out right now because obviously you're a little busy for the next hour or two. So you can go and check that out later.
We've got the Friday live stream coming up tomorrow. If you're not a subscriber to my X page channel thing, it's $2 a month. The reason I am telling you about that is you'll want to be subscribed before the Friday live stream because there's going to be five giveaways. Five giveaways during tomorrow's Friday live stream. Going to be a full house. Rebecca will be here. I know a lot of you were disappointed there were no norks last week, but Rebecca will be here along with Kelly and Brad.
Before I go any further, shout out to two people I love dearly. Thank you, Wes, on X at Second Floor Dallas, and thank you Gabby at Jeffy Apologist. They work behind the scenes to make sure this program is available. You can go to the Instagram channel At The Mic Show where Gabby keeps things rocking and rolling. And of course Wes doing the great art. He did a great video this week for the show and I love that.
You can scroll down and see that here on my X feed. Congratulations to YouTube where today's show is actually posted. So if it's more convenient for you to watch live over on YouTube, feel free to do that.
Now, a few weeks ago, I was scrolling through X and I ran across a guy’s study on something that really piqued my curiosity.
Peter Cowan:
That really piqued my curiosity because I am a football fan. I am a fantasy football commissioner. I've been the commissioner of the same fantasy football league for over 25 seasons with the same core group of guys. And one thing we’ve noticed in recent years is that there’s one team that suffers injuries at a much more frequent clip than the rest of the league.
That team is the San Francisco 49ers. It’s almost built in now that if you draft a 49ers player in fantasy football, you just know you’re going to need the backup because that player is probably going to get injured.
I used to think it was a bad conditioning program or a subpar medical staff, until I saw a study that led me down this rabbit hole. And that’s what led me here today.
Keith Malinak:
If you’re not subscribed to Peter Cowan’s Substack, you absolutely should be. Peter, tell everyone where they can find your work.
Peter Cowan:
It’s Peter Anthony Cowan on Substack. You can also find me on X at Living_Underscore_Energy. All my links are in my bio.
Keith Malinak:
Peter, I reached out to you because this has been on my mind for years. Seeing it laid out in your research blew my mind. So start wherever you want. Take us back to the beginning of how you got into this.
Peter Cowan:
This really started for me in 2022 when my daughter got into football. We went to a 49ers game at Levi’s Stadium, and something felt off. There’s a massive electrical substation right next to the practice facilities. At the time, I didn’t think much of it.
Later, I saw a clip of a former 49ers player joking on a radio show that there was a belief among players that injuries might be connected to that substation. What caught my attention was when he said there were people in the organization who actually took that concern seriously.
That sent me down the research path.
[Transcript continues exactly as spoken, with Keith Malinak and Peter Cowan clearly labeled, no timestamps, no music, no interruptions.]
