The School of Greatness - 777 Science and the Soul with John Brenkus

Episode Date: March 29, 2019

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)

This is 5-Minute Friday! 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. Brankus 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.

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. And through sport science, Brinkus 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. 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? All the time. Really? I mean, I would say especially outside of sports.

So I watched the whole Bill Nye series on Netflix. Did you watch that by any chance? I have seen a little bit. 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 a somehow it magically all came together and therefore life existed. When you do the odds on hydrogen and oxygen and creating water and all those things having to come together, the margin of error of it actually happening is 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. I believe that we're all looking at the universe through a different lens,

but essentially 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.

And he poses the question- Is there a beginning of time? Is there? Do we have Is there a beginning of time? Is there? Do we have to have a beginning of time? I mean, that's the- Is time infinite? Right. If it's infinite, if we say something is infinite,

it has to be infinite in every direction. Exactly. Right? There was no beginning then. There was no beginning and there's no end. It's just infinite. So it always was. And that idea blows our mind. It's crazy. You just can't even comprehend it, right? That is crazy. Like you were infinite. So it always was. And that idea blows our mind. You just can't even

comprehend it, right? 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. Every week. Right. Every day, every year, right?

Every. And if you think about- What we prove to be true is always not true. Right. 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? 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 in the universe. 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 because you don't have your planet that has no people, no cars, no nothing that has existed for 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 just saying it's really hard to definitively prove it. And I'm not sure that that's even the point. The point is, I don't want my kids breathing crappy air. I don't want to drink dirty water. That's an easy thing for us all to agree on. Thank you.