777 Science and the Soul with John Brenkus

THERE IS ORDER TO THE CHAOS. What is this place? Are we even really here? Is there a higher power that created us, or was it a random explosion? These are some big questions. But the odds of life actually existing are insane. Everything would have had to had come together so perfectly. It’s hard for people to wrap their minds around, but we need to admit there is so much about the universe we don’t understand. For this Five Minute Friday, I revisited a conversation I had with John Brenkus where we discuss how the soul and science can meet. John Brenkus is a six-time Emmy award-winning creator, host, and producer of Sport Science on ESPN. He is also co-founder of BASE Productions and a New York Times bestselling author. He currently hosts his own podcast The Brink of Midnight. He dives into the idea of time and how humans put labels on things that are hard for our brains to comprehend. I really enjoy the way that Josh is able to explain complicated scientific ideas. Learn how to think about the miracle of life in Episode 777. In This Episode You Will Learn: If God and science can mix (1:05) About the probability of life existing (3:00) If there is really a beginning of time (4:05) Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:10Lewis Howes?

  We've got John Brenkus in the house. He has spent the last decade studying and popularizing the unique characteristics of the world's greatest athletes. He co-created the groundbreaking series Fight Science for the National Geographic Channel. Brenkus is best known as the on-air host, co-creator and executive producer of ESPN's Emmy award-winning show Sports Science, appearing in and producing over 1,500 segments that have been featured on ABC and ESPN's enormous sports platforms. He has been featured in coverage of the Super Bowl, Monday Night Football, the NBA Finals, Sunday Night Baseball, The Masters, just to name a few.

• 0:51Lewis Howes?

  And through Sports Science, Brenkus has appeared before 80 million people annually for the last decade. He's won six Emmys and he's written a New York Times bestseller, The Perfection Point.

• 1:10Lewis Howes?

  Now, how often would you say that you are still studying science today? Are you obsessed with it? Do you constantly curious about science and testing things just outside of sports?

• 1:20Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 1:21Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  I mean, I would say especially outside of sports.

• 1:23Lewis Howes?

  So, I watched the whole Bill Nye series on Netflix. Did you watch that, by any chance?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  I have seen a little bit, yes.

• 1:28Lewis Howes?

  Most of them or a few of them? And I think there was one, I can't remember, I think there was one about an energy. And you were talking about before we got on here about God, energy. As a scientist, what is this place? What is this world, universe? Are we even here? Is there an energy force bigger than us that has created us? Or was it an explosion of particles that came together and light and molecules?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  I love the theory of probability of life existing.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Right, if you were to just say, okay, the universe exploded and then somehow it magically all came together and therefore life existed. When you do the odds on hydrogen and oxygen and, you know, creating water and all those things having to come together, the margin of error of it actually happening is so, it's so far off the meter that it couldn't, in my opinion, there's no way it could just happen by chance. There's some sort of order to the chaos. And this is what I think a lot of people can't wrap their brains around. And I'm a very spiritual guy, born and raised Catholic and accepting of all religions, all lenses.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  I believe that we're all looking at the universe through a different lens, but essentially we want to get, we want to live the same way and get to the same place. We want to be good people. That's what I believe. But when you think about this and people say, well, at the beginning of time, there's a great philosopher named Paul Davies that wrote a book called Time.

• 3:02Lewis Howes?

  Is there a beginning of time?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Is there? Do we have to have a beginning of time? I mean, that, that, that's the, that's a-

• 3:09Lewis Howes?

  Is time infinite?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Right. If it's infinite, if we say something is infinite, it has to be infinite in every direction.

• 3:16Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Right?

• 3:18Lewis Howes?

  There was no beginning then.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  There was no beginning and there's no end. It's just infinite. So it always was. And that idea blows our mind.

• 3:25Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  You just can't even comprehend it, right?

• 3:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Like you were never born, you always were, right? The universe always, it just, it's, it's just a crazy idea. So the idea that the universe has always existed and there's always been something to it, and it clearly has evolved, but the time idea is one that I think we can point to and say, there is order in this chaos. And we, through scientific terms, have put labels on what we believe we understand. But think of the number of things that we have had to change and revise because our understanding is now different.

• 4:03Lewis Howes?

  Every week.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:05Lewis Howes?

  Every day, every year, right?

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Every, and if you think about-

• 4:07Lewis Howes?

  What we prove to be true is always not true.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:10Lewis Howes?

  You do this all the time with the body or, I mean, the four-minute mile to all these other things of people breaking PRs every day in every category of sport, right?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And science, I think, best reflects that the only way that we can move forward is by- Agreeing on a set of signs and symbols that we refer to as language, so that we can communicate and evolve from there, right? It's just like saying the Earth is flat. We then say, "It is flat, period, it's flat." Then we say, "Oh, it's round, but it's the center of the Earth." "Oh, wait, but now that it's a globe, maybe it's not the center, maybe it's going around something else." Like, we keep evolving. And that's why it's almost like the argument of global warming, as an example, from a purely scientific standpoint. I feel like we're arguing something that you can't win. You can't win this argument one way or the other,

• 5:03Speaker 01

  because you don't have your planet that has no people, no cars, no nothing, that has existed the exact same way that Earth has. You don't have this constant other planet that would be something you could compare it to. So you can't prove it one way or the other. But what we can prove is that, well, the air is worse. The water is dirtier. We can prove that. And to me, it's like an anti-pollution argument is something far easier for everyone to get on that train than to say, "Well, the whole world is changing, because I just don't think we have enough of a snapshot." I'm not one of these, "Oh, global warming is not real." I'm just saying it's really hard to definitively prove it, and I'm not sure that that's even the point.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  The point is, I don't want my kids breathing crappy air. I don't want to drink dirty water. Like, that's an easy thing for us all to agree on.