Nicki: It's time to make your health an act of rebellion. We're tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, your and answering diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help one million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You're listening to this Healthy Rebellion Radio. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nicki: Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary, or fitness change. Warning: when Robb gets passionate, he's been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well, there's always Disney Plus. Robb: Howdy, wife. Nicki: We are live. Hey, hubs. Robb: We are still alive, at least. Not dead yet. Nicki: We are alive. Robb: What's new? How's your jujitsu going? Nicki: Jujitsu's going pretty good, actually. Robb: Yeah? Nicki: Yeah. Robb: Cool. Nicki: Yeah. I had a little bit of low energy today training, but- Robb: We still got it in. Nicki: Still got it in. Robb: We just repped. Nicki: And did some good drilling and yeah, can't complain there. Robb: Cool. Cool. Nicki: Yep. Let's see what ... Oh, and we're taking the girls to Schlitterbahn for the first time. Robb: We are going to Schlitterbahn for the first time this summer. Nicki: It's actually open by reservation. They're limiting the number of people in the park. For those that don't know, Schlitterbahn is a waterpark. It's one of the best water parks. Robb: It has been voted the world's best water park- Nicki: Apparently in the world. Robb: ... 35 years in a row. I don't know who votes on these things, but they've been taking it home. Nicki: It's right here in New Braunfels. We went several times last summer, you get a season pass. It's super, super worth it. The girls absolutely love it. It's super fun time. So anyway, we are going to go do that. Apparently they will be taking our temperatures at the entrance and they're staggering the entrance. Nicki: In the past you could just show up whenever and stand in line, and then they kind of check your belongings to make sure you're not carrying anything dangerous and then you are admitted. And now they're grouping people, so you have to ... They're staggering the entrance. We will be going and seeing what that experience is like. Robb: It'll be interesting, as is everything in the age of COVID. Nicki: Yeah. Let's see ... What else is going on, hubs? Robb: We have the Rebel Strong Summer Strength program with Basis Health & Performance. That is cranking. Nicki: That is cranking along, loving that we're just at the tail end of week two of four weeks. Robb: Officially people have kind of spread out across the board because of the book launch. Nicki: We started a little late. Robb: We started basically a week late. It's amazing. It's a combination of just really expertly, intelligently planned strength training. Typically full body workout, squat, press, hinge, pole, lunge. And then they weave in all of this kinstretch mobility work in addition to that. It is- Nicki: And some PAILs and RAILs, and some capsule work to kind of help solidify your position in some of these movements. Because if you can't establish proper positioning when you're lifting, then obviously things can go arise. Yeah, that's been a ton of fun. People are loving it. We actually had one of our gals say, after completing this week's work, "I'm realizing that this is what I've been missing and have been wishing all the trainers I have hired actually did." Nicki: She's looking forward to the rest of the program, but she's loving it. Anyway, if you guys aren't familiar with Sarah Grayson and Nate over at Basis Health & Performance and Chico, California, they've got a great Instagram feed as well. Give them a follow. Just Basis Health & Performance. And for all of you Rebel members, you get in on some stuff like this. It's been a fun treat. Robb: Indeed, it has. Nicki: Let's see, hubs. What do you have for us today for our news topic? Robb: I actually snagged this one from Diana Rogers. She always has some great stuff in her feed, but it's called Beyond Mitigation. It's actually an essay from a person on medium that goes by the handle @FarmersLedge, and how the lingering vestiges of reductionism keep us from real environmental solutions. I have kind of a long paragraph here. I don't know if I need to read the whole thing, but it's been interesting. Robb: We've done a lot of interviews around Sacred Cow. It's been cool, we've had good feedback and whatnot. But even people that are fairly well-steeped in this stuff, they're kind of jaw dropped with the amount of complexity that we're dealing with. Like when you just say, "Well, is meat healthy or unhealthy to eat?" It's a nontrivial thing to unpack all that. Does the methane emission from cattle, is that going to destroy the planet as many people are saying? You can just say, "Well, of course not," but that's not really an answer. Robb: That's a dismissal. And so to really get in and unpack this stuff, it's both complex but also it's incredibly interconnected. I think that this is something that the complexity throws people a lot. But when you start layering complexity and you start finding that ethics and health and environmental issues are all really sticky and kind of woven together, it's beautiful in a way. Robb: Because if you really get going down an avenue that is working with nature, then things work fantastically. There's synergy and benefit. But this medium piece makes the case that as powerful as reductionism has been, it's given us rockets and airplanes and computers and all kinds of stuff. But it really hasn't served us that well for dealing with these complex adaptive systems. The author makes the point that what we end up doing is what he calls mitigation, which is basically looking at the pieces that we can see of a system and just reordering or reshuffling those. Robb: We don't oftentimes recognize that if there's a problem, the system itself may be broken and that the individual pieces maybe may need to be completely pulled out and alternatives put in there. This is some of the ironic features of kind of the industrial food system getting a green washing in the cases of Impossible Burger, Impossible foods, lab- grown meat. Robb: It seems plausible that growing meat in a vat is going to be good for the world. And then when you get in and really start unpacking that, it's not good for anybody. It's not sustainable. It's not energetically beneficial. It's from like a ... Just a humanity perspective, food as software where it can be intellectual property that's owned is not going to do anything good for humanity or developing countries or people who are poor or otherwise marginalized. Robb: And that's the interesting thing, I think that when you start putting on this kind of general systems theory lens to look at things. If you want to deal with, say, inequality among human beings, we actually need to look at food systems and economy. If you get completely focused on that problem, you'll almost be guaranteed to not only not solve it, but probably make it worse because it's all these other externalities. It's all these other pieces that interplay into making the situation what it is. Robb: But it's fascinating stuff. This is a lot of what drew me to people like Arthur De Vany and Nassim Taleb and other people as kind of hoity-toity systems thinking stuff that I really think is what we need to think about. Part of what I'm thinking about is how to teach this to our girls, like how do I teach them from the beginning to both understand and appreciate the benefits that a kind of logical linear reductionist process can provide in certain situations, but then be able to ditch that when appropriate and put on this kind of systems lens. Nicki: We will be linking to this medium piece in the show notes for anyone that wants to check that out in its entirety. Let's see here. I'm just looking at this last sentence of the paragraph that you copied actually, where the author says, "This theory dovetailed beautifully with my most favorite concept of gestalt, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," which ties right into what you were just saying. Robb: Yep. Nicki: Okay. Our t-shirt review winner today is from @ImAtTheComedyClub. It's a great handle. Robb: It might be the longest and best handle. Nicki: Longest. Yeah, yep. Unwavering advice, making Rob provide unbiased advice. "It's crazy that they can change their opinion when new data is published and realized it's beneficial. Who would have thought that science should be listened to and may even change? Nicki: The dogmatic often zealot approach to health and nutrition has created fractures in the lives of many people that follow if it fits your macros, veganism, the food pyramid, or even the recommendations of the American Diabetes Association.