Philosophy, Gardening, and Aliens with Roman Gonzalez

In this episode of Discern Earth, I speak with my good friend and product wizard, Roman Gonzalez, about his materialist ecological spirituality, what is was like growing up in Corpus Christi, how existentialist philosophy informs his personal metaphysics, his experience founding a home gardening startup, his passion for supporting underrepresented startup founders, and his recent obsession with alien cosmology. This was a fun one!

Transcript

David Valerio: Howdy! My name is David Valerio, and this is Discern Earth, a podcast where I ask people who work in nature and climate about why they do what they do. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking to my friend Roman Gonzalez, a product and design consultant through his company Rad Plant Man Consulting, who has a deep history working with social and environmental impact startups. So I've given you a brief introduction to Roman, but I would love to hear from you, Roman, you know, how do you describe yourself? How would you introduce yourself to the audience?

Roman Gonzalez: Yeah. Thank you so much. Excited to be chatting with you. My name is Roman Gonzalez. I help startups install and operate product departments to be able to run really effective product machines and organizations. So typically on the earlier side, I mean, sweet spot’s like 3 to 10 people. You know, they've just gotten a bunch of funding, they've been building a certain way. I can help come in and say like, okay, well, you've hacked it together so far. Now you got money, you have people you're accountable to. So let's install that product department and get it running like a well-oiled machine. I do also consulting on the growth side, some kind of cross-function COO type of things. But yeah, just helping people who are doing really awesome, fantastic things that need to be done, a lot of times in social impact and environmental impact. Helping them figure out like, you know, the best ways to do this at scale now. Early, good habits, early. So that is largely what I do. Even outside of that, though, I've tried to sort of blend my personal and professional life. I'm just a really curious dude. I love learning. I love talking about the things that I'm learning about. I love talking about the things that you're learning about. And I’m a man of many hobbies, um, with wild interests. Deeply into gardening. I know we're going to talk about that and that's actually an important part of my spirituality. And into coffee and cheese and food and cooking and travel. I just find this world deeply fascinating. And I'm excited to be here in the world. And yeah, I think that that sort of cloud of curiosity is really emblematic of how I enjoy being in the world.

David Valerio: Awesome. You already alluded to spirituality, I'm curious how you would describe your relationship to the divine and how it influences your work. Then we can sort of dig into the history of that as we get into the conversation. But yeah, how would you describe your spirituality? How does it influence what you do nowadays?

Roman Gonzalez: Yeah. It's interesting. Cause you know, we've been working together on some of this for the past couple of months and you would think that I'd have a really good answer right now. I do think that it's very much an evolving thing. I'll say this and we'll get more into it. I grew up Catholic. I left the church in like middle school or high school, was a strong atheist, became a softer atheist over time. In the last several years, I began to kind of reopen that chest that had been locked tight so long with my idea of what the right answer was and have found it exciting and interesting to sort of say like, oh, what else could be there? I think I've started to see nature largely as a kind of intelligence and I mean like a literal intelligence. I think that's really opened up my world in the past couple of years. The idea of what better, or more appropriate, purpose could we have in the world than to, sort of, uh, operate according to the rhythms of nature in the universe. And when I say that, I wanna be clear, and hopefully I will be clear, that I'm talking about very physical properties and rhythms and patterns. I would say my current disposition to spirituality is one of, uh, curiosity and wonder and possibility and humbleness at the unknown. I think since that shift has happened, the world has just been a more interesting, colorful place.

David Valerio: That's an excellent answer. And, you know, frankly, I was in a similar position before I came back to Catholicism. I was never a hard atheist, more agnostic in middle school and high school. My family just stopped going to church, but I was always pro-religion in terms of thinking like yeah, I see the benefit, the instrumental value, of it for my grandmother and my mom and people like this. But I just couldn't take it seriously scientifically. But then as I dug deeper into the world and dug deeper into science, I was like, wow, there's just so much more mystery here than we really appreciate, or at least let on in terms of the way that science and learning about the universe is framed. So I definitely understand that exploratory phase and how it opens up a whole other layer to experience and perspective to just, you know, not write off all of that stuff at first glance. So that being said, would love to dig more into sort of your childhood and especially how the particular embodied place you grew up in, Corpus Christi, shaped you and formed you. Because I'm sure that there's a lot there.

Roman Gonzalez: Yeah. It's funny being a pretty hardline atheist in a city called Corpus Christi. I remember I was in college and there was this professor who took an interest in me, and it was actually a class about death. Maybe we'll get to that too, um, inevitably when we talk about these things, we get to death. He just looked at me and he was like, you don't believe in God but grew up in the body of Christ? And I was like, yeah, I guess so. I mean, growing up, I don't think I appreciated it. Like a lot of kids in their hometowns, I don't think I appreciated some of the really awesome things about Corpus Christi, um, but my impression of it was that, you know, this is this small to medium-sized, uh, town or city and that there isn't much to do here. I was always a curious kid. Questioning things, questioning everything. I love to debate. I love to argue. Had a lot of energy. And you know, going to school there there weren't the kind of, there wasn't the level of educational opportunities and challenges that I wanted. So I found myself like bored a lot and identified a lot growing up with just like being bored. Um, but I grew over time to really appreciate that and actually I miss it now. We can talk about that in technology, but like I miss being bored because it forced me to be creative. It forced me to look up things around this topic or something like that. I would go Wikipedia stuff about philosophers when I was bored, right? My whole journey in philosophy started with just being interested in like, well, it seems to be a lot of ideas on how the world works. So I want to learn all of them and sort of evaluate them and see what I resonate with. But yeah, so I was just bored. You know, some of that was like fun, smart stuff, like looking up philosophers are starting to get into reading. You know, you just had to sit there and have conversations with your friends without an agenda or some reason to be there. That just sounds so far away from me right now. It's like I feel like if I have to be if I'm in a room with a friend, even just a friend, I feel like that we have to have a purpose or an anchor or a theme. Gone are the days when you just like sit in a room and just be and be like, yeah, you know, South Park's pretty cool, huh? Anyway, I'm gonna sound 122 years old by the end, by the time we're done here. But yeah, that boredom forced creativity, you know, I got into like drawing and stuff like that. And so I grew to appreciate it over time. There's certain beautiful things about it. Growing up by the water, there's a certain romance to growing up by the water that I think everybody identifies with. So just like driving down there was really beautiful. As a city, it's sort of political-religious disposition was certainly right of center. And this is somebody who came hot and heavy like me, with a lot of strong beliefs. I didn't always find my place there. I was like, oh, this place isn't for me.

David Valerio: I was curious about that because like you said, very much from what I gather of you, not right of center, Corpus Christi, from what I think about it, very right of center. So it's a very different kind of operating environment for you from where you are in Austin now. You mentioned growing up on by the water, you know, I haven't spent a ton of time in Corpus Christi, but when I have, it's obviously been at the beach and it’s very nice. How did you connect to the natural environment around you in Corpus Christi?

Roman Gonzalez: See, that's a great question because not at all. So my relationship with nature is kind of the same with my relationship with food. So I kind of start with the food. I swear we're going to, we're going to get to your question, which is that like, I didn't have like a real salad until like I went to college. My idea of a salad growing up was iceberg lettuce, ranch, croutons, tomatoes, like nothing more. That was my whole world. Similarly with nature, my idea of nature was like, I don't know, we went to Fiesta, Texas and there were trees. We didn't go camping. We never, not once went to the beach growing up as a family. And I asked my family about that. I asked my dad and my dad was like, oh, well, your mother never wanted to. And my mom's like, that's ridiculous. So, you know, there was no good reason I feel, especially since it's free. As a family, we never went to the beach. I went to the beach maybe two or three times with friends, like one bonfire, you know, late at night. One time I skipped school with my girlfriend and I went, but it was this kind of place I didn't go often. Maybe it was more special that way, it was the place to run away to. I only thought about this later in my life that I was like, I think I like the idea of being by the water because if I really needed to, I could get on a boat and sail away. Nature was this kind of escape hatch. You know, I wouldn't know how to be on a boat. I don't have the skills to sail away, but there was this safety to it. That if I'm there, there's a sense of freedom. There's the vastness of the water, you know, you can't see past that horizon. So there's a safety and a bigness. Even now, still, when I go to the ocean, you're just like water big, sky big, me small. So, yeah, I would say it kind of played that function, but it was mostly in my head because I was rarely there.

David Valerio: Yeah, I sympathize with that as well. You know, I grew up in Houston, so a few hours away from Corpus Christi. A giant concrete metropolis. Very biodiverse region, but there's concrete everywhere. We did go to the beach, down to Galveston, a good amount. It's interesting thinking about like the cultural backgrounds of how families either do or do not think of that as an activity to do, right? Cause like the reason I asked the question is like, oh, surely if you're in Corpus Christi, you're out on the beach all the time, but you've only been there like twice when you were growing up. It's pretty remarkable. I think it's obviously related to like, you know, I'm half-Mexican, half-Cuban and I assume your family's Mexican, and there's like different cultural attitudes to interacting with nature. It's something I think about quite a bit.

Roman Gonzalez: To that point, we never went camping or anything like that because in our minds, at least that's white people stuff, you know, like you know, to choose to go out there and sort of not have resources and things like that.

David Valerio: Yeah it's funny you say that, and I think part of the reason why we did it is because uh, my family's very assimilated, and we're white people now, basically. Ha ha ha ha ha!

Roman Gonzalez: Yeah. I think it's like now, now I'm happy to do it. Now I feel like I've gotten kind of gone past this sort of initial bar in that, like, I like glamping, right. If I'm going to be camping, give me a luxury trailer or something and that is my preferred way to do.

David Valerio: Now I want to sort of move on to philosophy and you mentioned that this is just an abiding interest in you growing up. Part of it being you being born in Corpus Christi is thinking about the deeper things of life while looking at big ocean. How did you end up going to Brown and studying philosophy? You know, what kind of philosophy were you into? And how do you think that shaped your world and what you do?

Roman Gonzalez: Yeah. It's interesting. Like I mentioned, I was always a curious kid, always asking a ton of questions, the why, why, why, and I love to debate. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, but I just, I think I just had a lot of energy as a kid and I still do. That questioning and that debate is just wanting to be engaged with, was just like a function of that energy needing a direction. When you ask why enough, you very quickly get to quite big questions. So I found those fascinating and I found that people weren't really talking about it. But I had a friend, his name is Matt Garcia, a Mexican American dude, a year older than me and we were very similar in a lot of ways. I was glad to sort of have somebody near my age, you know, but a little older. And at that, at that age, it means a lot for somebody to be like a year older. Who sort of represented being Mexican American and having very deep philosophical interests. Very academic, intellectual sort of headspace. And so, you know, I had two groups of friends. I had the friends that I grew up with, and you know, we would like, go to the movies, and we'd joke around, and we'd like record videos of them like jumping off stuff. Then I had my other friends with Matt Garcia. We went and, you know, we played a little poker, but like, we would talk about what makes a thing, a thing. Like, I remember one time I went over and he took out a cell phone. Might've been a Razr or something like that. And he was like, um, what is this? And I was like, well, it's a phone. And he was like, okay, well, what if it doesn't make a call? Is it still a phone? And I'm like, yeah, it's just a phone that doesn't make calls. And he's like, okay, well, what if I take away the numbers, you know, is it still a phone? And we sort of kind of went through this exercise and I think that ends up being like Theseus's ship. Is that what it is? Do you know that one?

David Valerio: Yeah I think it's Theseus' ship. Where it's like you replace every plank in the ship over its lifetime, is it still the same ship?

Roman Gonzalez: Yeah, exactly. And so it was just these exercises. And I don't think he was exercising me. I think he was also kind of managing this idea of like, yeah, like what is a thing? And that idea of, like, what's the thing’s constitutive properties just resonated so deeply with me cause that felt like truly understanding a thing. So just hanging out with him and his friends who were heady and weird and liked cool independent movies that were hard to find even a Blockbuster, that was a pathway and a channel for that intellectual energy. I remember I went to Barnes & Noble one day and, uh, this is the day, this were the days when I stole books. I thought like all books should be free. I went to the philosophy section cause I was like, okay, this sounds really interesting. And the first book I ever bought is Philosophy for Dummies.

David Valerio: Fire.

Roman Gonzalez: Yeah, right. And I remember opening it and like I just flipped to a page and I saw it was some paragraph about how Thales believed that everything was made out of water. And I was like, that's batshit, but what is he seeing? What's the thought there? Like, I'm interested in how you got there. I'll hear you. Then there was another Henrik Ibsen quote that was like, I'm inclined to believe that we are all ghosts, every one of us. It's just these big statements about the world that I found really provocative and exciting and I was like, I want to know more. I've just been doing a lot of life reflection. I'm turning 35 this year and I have always been attracted to these wild ideas. I've always been curious about them. All that led to sort of like, I want to study this stuff. And I found pretty early, I had a pretty strong sort of like mentorship faculty within me and like teaching. I did a bunch of stuff in high school that was like mentoring young students in like public speaking and debate and argument and I really like that. I love the satisfaction of helping people understand these things and, oh, I went and learned something. I can make it easier for you now. You don't have to feel the same pain I did. I was like, I want to be a philosophy professor. I looked at all the programs, you know, I looked for a small student-to-teacher ratio. I got really interested in existentialism, particularly, you know, philosophy of like the everyday. It felt really grounded. Things that affect, you know, boredom and love and meaning and purpose. I was like, these are things that everybody deals with. So if I can get some kind of handle around this, I think that I might be able to bring some ideas to the forefront of people's minds that are helpful and help us all live better lives since that was the purpose of being a philosophy professor. So long story short, ended up at Brown, they had an open curriculum where you could sort of design your own course. And I was into existentialism, which is all about like creating your own meaning. So I was like, oh, this is perfect. This is like an existentialist school where I can kind of create my own path and chart it myself. So I found that really attractive.

David Valerio: It's interesting how the people in our lives just open up these possibilities for us. You mentioned your friend, Matt, being the path for you in terms of thinking like, whoa, this is a thing that people do. Thinking about giant ideas, asking whether everything is water versus, you know, if you never met him, you don't know what would have happened. And I, when I reflect on my own life and how I got interested in big ideas, it's like, I think I just got lucky. In terms of, in like kindergarten, a teacher saw that I was like maybe smart or something. Whatever that means in kindergarten, I don't know, and had me like take the GT, or recommended to my parents that I take, the GT test, to get into those gifted and talented courses. And I got into that. And so I was like on like that track of quote-unquote smart kids in public school and that introduced me to friends whose families were more like academics and you know, lawyers. People who are open to big ideas. Whereas within my own family, it wasn't like, uh, my parents were not, I wouldn't say they're necessarily intellectuals. My grandmother, she was very smart, read a lot. But it was like, I don't know, I just happened to get into a milieu of people where these big ideas were a thing. And then it turned out that I was quite good at it.

Roman Gonzalez: If you don't mind me suggesting so, I do think it takes those people along the way to enable and catalyze and encourage that way of being and that way of thinking. I think a lot about all the opportunities I had in the pathways and, you know, people like Matt and a million people along the way. But I think about the time is when I sort of like didn't have that and I think that, you know, I look back and I try not to judge myself for my past for like untapped potential. The thing I tell myself is like, I just want to be able to be that for as many people as possible, you know, and and just help people along that way and open that up for them, whether they're 14 or 8 or 45. If I can be that pathway still, even though I'm not a philosophy professor, if I can help open up and encourage that way of thinking, yeah, I want to do that. I'm curious actually, and not to turn the podcast around on you, but like do you have that similar kind of professorial, or just sort of like, how can I like unlock this and other people kind of energy or?

David Valerio: I would say I do, although I wouldn't have recognized it as such. Like five years ago, I was very much more of a hermit type. Like, leave me alone, I'm gonna be in the lab. Beep boop bop. Don't talk to me. Part of me converting to Christianity was taking very seriously that love is what I'm here on this planet to do, and love necessitates relationship with other people. Like you're not loving anybody if there's nobody there, right? That conversion happened to happen as I was coming into my career. I got my first job through a professor of mine at Rice, who really, he just extended, he was very gracious to me and said, you're very smart, you know, you're helpful. I mastered out of my PhD program not knowing what I wanted to do, but he happened to say, no, I believe in you, David, I'll bring you on. So I've had just so many people in my life who have done that for me. One, there's the religious obligation and desire to do that for others. But then also I see, even in an instrumental way, like sowing into other people is very good for you personally. That's not the reason to do it, but since I've been at Renoster this past year, I've been doing that a lot more. Just like helping people by like, hey, let me send you jobs that I think you'd be interested in. I just met you, but I think that you could fit in here. So, yeah, I definitely have that desire in myself now. I guess it's really cultivated, it's been cultivated as I've become deeper in my faith. It's been interesting to think about like me five years ago, not being like this at all. Whereas now it's like, I want to help as many people as they can figure out what they're supposed to be doing in the world and striving after it and lending whatever assistance I can.

Roman Gonzalez: I love that. You know, for a while I was very like, anti-faith like anti-religion, like this has done so many bad things. I've like deeply loosened up on that. Like I can hold the good and the bad now, of the past and the present. And I just think that way of being is so special and good, that it doesn't matter as much to me like how people get there as long as they sort of get there. And I appreciate that faith can do that for a lot of people.

David Valerio: Yeah, definitely. And I mean, to be fair with Christianity, there are plenty of Christians who do not do this, and I'm not, you know, I'm a sinner just as much as anybody else, but you can get very, uh, cynical about the whole project when you see particular people. But that does not mean that relationship with Jesus Christ does not lead to great saints and great holy people who do this. Cause I've had so many amazing just priests in my life and devout Christians, my grandmother, my mom, these people who've really shown that this is like, just how loving others is the highest thing that we can do. And love, not love in a sappy sense, in terms of like, oh yeah, do I really emotionally feel for you? It's service. It's charity and charity in the sense of like you are giving up your own self and you are sacrificing it for somebody else. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. So, you know, you're not a philosophy professor now. But it's, you're still, it sounds like, doing what you wanted to do in terms of big ideas and helping get other people interested in big ideas, but now through your product work, your tech startup stuff. So I kind of wanted to talk about your experience being a startup founder with Gardenio, obviously being focused on gardening. What motivated you to get into that line of work and how have you seen, I don't know, maybe just share reflections on that time, because I know it was a very, very important experience for you.

Roman Gonzalez: When I graduated college, and it was with a philosophy degree, I had started doing some video production because basically I went from being a, I wanted to be a philosophy professor, to like, because you didn't have to take basics I could take a bunch of philosophy courses, which I did. And I thought that was a good idea. It was not, and it really kind of burnt me out of academic professional philosophy, and I realized that it's like, I do want to help people. I want to help people understand these ideas and bring them into their lives. I think it can make our lives better when we sort of engage with these ideas. The unexamined life is not worth living, which is to say the examined life yields better results. So I was like, well, there's a bunch of ways to do that. And maybe the way to do it is not writing a bunch of articles that nobody's going to read or understand or care much about. I had already started making films. Film was a great container for my creativity. Cause I was like, oh, I make music, I write, I like photography. I was one of those kids that had a digital camera all the time, taking pictures everywhere. And, you know, just like of the sky, just a million sunset photos. So film was this container where I was like, oh, I don't have to make a choice. I can do all the arts. So, I was like, okay, I have this film, I have this philosophy. That's what I'll do. I'll make films, I'll incorporate these ideas. Then I was like, oh, but I need money. And so I helped to restart an organization at Brown that was like a TV station and film club. We raised money, we got stuff, started making videos. Okay. So beginning my career, I'm making videos, I'm consulting and as part of that I have to learn marketing. Sort of like, oh, how are you distributing? I'm not just somebody who makes a video. It's like, how are you going to distribute it? What's the strategy? Who's it for? Yada, yada, yada. So I'm doing that, social media is on the up and up. I get a gig doing that. I end up having like four or five jobs in media part time during college, always worked a ton. Started like five clubs or whatever. Okay. So I get out of college and I'm like, I still need to work. So I do video and social media for a couple more years. I spent about six years in marketing media production. As part of that, I joined this startup called Toopher. It was like a, uh, IT security startup. Not in my mind, like the world changing thing I want to do, but it introduced me to startups and I was like, oh man, this is like fast paced. They give me a lot of responsibility. In college, I was used to like being on top of the world. I ran organizations, right? I started them from scratch. Why would I believe that I should do anything else than create the things that I want to do in the world? So it gave me a lot of responsibility. I struggled in Austin for a while because not a lot of places in Austin trusted young people in the way that certainly Brown did. I wanted to tell stories that I thought were important, that communicated good ideas. That was the filmmaking philosophy, et cetera. So I was like, well, I'm helping these companies tell stories about their brand, about what it means, about what value they can provide. You're trying to create an experience that creates a feeling in the person on the other side of the screen. So I was like, okay, that's like the marketing side. Awesome. So I learned how to sort of build a growth engine, operate it. You know, the impressions to engagement, to conversion, use the data analytics. That’s a framework I still use today. And then I moved on to product design because I was like, I don't want to just tell the story. I want to solve the problem. So I got into product design with a buddy of mine. User experience design, then visual design, did more consulting. So now I have this growth background. I have this product background. I had also done some customer support in there. I was a community organizer on the Obama campaign in 2012. Since the beginning of my career, I've told myself that careers are things that happen in retrospect. I'm just going to try and do as many things as I can learn to work all the different parts of a business, because I know that I want to get back to starting things. That's what I like. That's what I'm good at. I'm a creative person. And I want to build things from scratch. But I didn't know what. I start coming up with all these ideas of what I want to build. You know, when you're a more immature founder, you're just thinking about like, well, what would be cool? Less about like, well, what's the market size? And is this scalable? Yada, yada. I had recently thought like it would be good to get into growing food, just generally. I did not grow up growing food. Nobody in my family really had a history of growing much food. I told that thing about salads growing up. I was not like a food connoisseur in any way, but I was like, oh, well, what if you want to make like a good salsa? And everything that I would read about this is, you know, you need good ingredients. Every expert chef that you end up talking to say it's the ingredients, the ingredients, the ingredients. And I was like, well, how do you get good ingredients? Somehow I skipped the step where you buy them from the farmer's market. And I was like, oh, well, you grow, you grow them. So I was like, oh, cool. Let me try this. I was already kind of thinking like a startup person, cause I'd been in it for several years and I was just like I feel like this is kind of a problem. We've been growing food for a really long time. The figures that would come up anywhere from 10 to 20,000 years we've been cultivating food in an organized way. But for some reason, I don't know how to grow it and I know we know how to grow it because we have an entire agricultural system around it, right? So then why don't I? And I was like, oh, perhaps this is a data problem. Okay. I had that operating idea. And so I called like 20 garden centers in Austin. And I was like, hey, like, how do I get started? How do I get started? How do I get started? And all of them were like, well, come right on down and we'll give you this PDF. And they wouldn't say PDF. But they'd be like, we’ll just, you know, give you our a document of like gardening one on one or, you know, come on down and well ask us, right. I’d be like, oh, what do I grow? And they're like, ah, just try anything. And I was like, there's no way it's this unstructured. So among the ideas I had, I was like, helping people grow food is it the intersection of these like here's like three things that I really enjoy, which is like one, is it like viable, right? I found out at the time it was like $52 billion spent on lawn and garden in general. 5.2 billion on DIY edibles. And I swear I'm not gonna go through the whole pitch, cause it's gone. But it was just like I don't have to change behavior. People are already growing food. Oh man, but they're really struggling with it. Then there's the second part, which is like, oh, there's actually this political axis. Which is just like with food justice, right? The way it's typically defined is the right to grow, sell and consume healthy, nutritious food. People usually talk about the business side: sell, you know, how can we make it easier for, um, for small farmers to sort of get access to customers and grow more and be a part of the supply chain. Then consume: that has to do with food deserts and you know, can we, the end consumer, receive it. But I didn't see anybody talking about grow. We just sort of assumed that it's too much work. Maybe it's too much money. So I was like, okay, there can actually be this political aspect to this. And I have always been politically driven. Then there was this, that it's just fun. Growing food is fun. Eating a tomato is fun. It's delicious. It's immediate. Smelling basil is this immediate thing that brings you into the present and you're like, ah, man, it feels good. So I was like, okay, it's business viable. It can be purposeful, and I still get to treat it with a lightness, right? I'm not working on some immediate life or death kind of thing. So this is where like a little bit of the spirituality starts to come in. This can be really purposeful. But at that time, I sort of didn't know enough for it to be spiritual quite yet, but that's how I sort of got into Gardenio.

David Valerio: I guess, you know, you mentioned part of it was just you getting interested in growing your own food and then realizing there was not an easy option for this. I don't know if you were part of this wave, but in 2020, a similar kind of like homesteading desire swept through at least my Twittersphere so I got kind of interested in it. Growing up in Houston, I'd never grew my own food. I'm just a city kid, whatever, didn't really know anything about it. Didn't know anything about how food was grown. When I went to the grocery store, what the heck was actually going on there? I had no idea. But what kept you going? Because you've been doing that to startup, how long was it? Like six years or something? Was it always sort of this deeper purpose spirituality that kept you going? How do you think about that?

Roman Gonzalez: It quickly got there. So I got into an accelerator in fall 2017 that helped me start working on it in earnest. I was kind of playing with the idea in 2016, maybe designing screens here and there, and I shut it down last year. So no longer in business. Sorry, folks, if you bought the pitch, I have nothing for you. So it started as okay cool, there's this way to get more delicious food. And it's very functional, right? I think a lot of people start this way. A lot of gardeners start this way. They're just like, oh, maybe I can save money. It's just closer. It's safer. You know, I don't trust the food system. I can know what happened to it. And I was like, I'm not going to grow anything that doesn't serve me. Why would I grow a flower? Doesn't do anything. One of the first plants I grew was like holy basil (tulsi). It grows incredibly well here, and kind of anywhere, whether you want it to or not. It's used a lot in Asian cuisine. It's supposed to help calm people down. And it did that. The smell is so fragrant and so great. This is just lovely. When you grow it and it was just lovely and it grows these little pink flowers, they're still some of my favorite flowers. And I'm like, oh, those pink flowers are lovely up against the green, the contrast is so good. It quickly became clear that there's other reasons to grow these things. This was the trap. This was our evil trap, by the way. It's like, if we can use the tools of traditional consumer commerce and marketing to sort of be like gardening is cool, you're cool for gardening, come into the fold, et cetera, the plants start to do the work. And this is where it does become spiritual, right? What I realized after a little bit of growing that it's like the plants start to do the work of being like, oh, wow. Okay, well, that's beautiful. Okay, that's awesome. Something about the joy of tending to it is, is quite nice and I'm finding calming. And there's so many studies around this, right? Then over time you're sort of like, oh, I want to grow more things. Then you're sort of like, oh, well now, oh man, my plans aren't working well. Oh, it's cause they're not getting pollinated. Oh, well, how do I attract pollinators? So now I want to grow stuff that is like good for pollinators. More flowers and things like that. And it brings it to the garden. You see it in higher yield. Now you're starting to grow for the bees. Then birds will start to come. And you're like, oh man, there are all these birds around or the squirrels or there's crows. And man at first you hate them. You're like, I would shoot that thing. I don't have guns, but like uh, shoot that thing with a gun, because I hate it so much. Then after a while you're like, you know, the birds need to eat too. And you know, a certain percentage of what I'm growing, you know, it's for the birds. Yes, I'm still going to shoo the squirrels away, et cetera. But then you're like, oh, wow, man, all around me, the birds are talking. The squirrels are scurrying. The bees and the wasps and the bees are actually quite friendly. Most of them. You're like, I'm a part of this ecosystem. Look all around me. I live in a forest. There are giant trees here. We just put some houses here. I don't think I'm the only one that happens to, I think it happens at different rates for different people based on their propensities. You just start to, you're like, oh, I am part of a system. Then over time, it was like, oh, maybe my job, maybe one of the reasons I'm here is to sort of like help this thing move along. Cause Lord knows humans are doing things that are not, you know, that're being counterproductive to what's going on. So maybe my job is to be a part of the story. I think that ends up happening to people in some form over time.

David Valerio: You, in taking the first step in trying and growing your own food, it opens you up to the whole ecology of the world, basically, right? Like, you become a part of the biosphere. So whereas previously, growing up as humans do, and you and I did in cities, it's very easy to be disconnected from it. Because everything you see around you is human molded. But then, when you take that first step of cultivating a living creature then you see, oh wow, there are all these knock-on effects. I know that you're very passionate about diverse founders and it's kind of related to earlier stuff we had talked about in terms of just not knowing that these pathways are open to you given your life circumstances. I would love to hear more about just how, you know, your experience at Gardenio shaped that and how you think about, you know, diversity of peoples involved in startups in addition to the sort of ecological diversity we were just talking about.

Roman Gonzalez: Yeah, um, it's a little gimmicky but within Gardenio we had a bunch of core values and stuff that we articulated and one of them was biodiversity. We know that ecosystems that have broad biodiversity, a broad assortment of different things growing next to each other, creates a richer soil environment, a more resilient soil environment. And that when you put a lot of the same thing in one place, it depletes the same resources and creates a fallow environment. Which is a lot of how our agricultural system works. If we talk about like biomimicry, we're kind of always looking to nature to like, hey, nature has been around a long time. What can we learn from its patterns? Biodiversity is one of those things where if we can just encourage more diversity, we know on a natural level that that is a good productive thing. And so on the human level, how can we create environments that welcome and encourage and help support folks from all different kinds of backgrounds. I'm Mexican American and I wasn't particularly raised to sort of see that as a detriment in any way. But in a way that actually, I think, kind of shielded me from the reality of the world. My dad always told me, hey, you're gonna have to work twice as hard to get half as much kind of thing. At the time I didn't see it as a problem. I was like, okay, cool. I have the data. Let's go. I'll just do that. I think it's probably a big reason why I ended up trying to overachieve. But uh, it wasn't until after college that I started seeing a lot of those, uh, disparities and I looked back at my college years and I was like, oh, maybe some of the things that happened or the reasons why people didn't see me a certain way, maybe it had to do with some of their judgments, right? Or some of their ideas about what I'm supposed to be. I'm sure you felt this way too, that, as brown people, as Latin Americans, when you're really like smart and heady, people don't always know what to do with that. They know what to do with like, hey, you know, you're poor. You're from the barrio. Oh, you know, you operate a taco stand. Like that is in everybody's mind. Or if you're separated from your family at the border, right? Like they understand like what to do with that. And like, there's a certain kind of sympathy and script they go through and like, oh man. But like, if you're lucky enough to not be in the worst of circumstances, people don't always know what to do with that energy. They don't meet a ton of people like you. It occurred to me that there are people that I probably interacted with in college who, like, the only interactions they ever had really with Mexican Americans might have been like their gardeners. Which also made the idea of running a gardening company really attractive, right? Like, I didn't tell that story a lot, but believe me, I believed that story a lot. So in terms of advocating for founders. For folks who don't know venture capitalists who write millions of dollars of checks every year, I mean, billions and billions, 2 percent of all funding for several years went to black and brown founders—black, indigenous, POC. Less than 2 percent like of the entire pool. So this is really, really small. And so the pool of folks that end up getting funding, there's just a lot of similarity within them versus that other population. So with entrepreneurship as, you know, a popular path or an effective path to wealth creation for our communities, um, jis ust often closed off. There's a ton of reasons for that but the biggest ones are not surprises, which is just they were not given opportunities because they don't look like Mark Zuckerberg. And you might think, oh, I'm saying that because, whatever, I'm bitter. And I'm not saying I'm not, but, um, these are things that actual people say. Like, oh, they just don't look the part. I just don't trust them. Or they haven't had access, they haven't been able to raise money because they can't raise that friends and family capital. They don't have an uncle that'll give them 500,000 dollars. I'm sure there's some bootstrappy people out there who are saying, well, you know, I started with, you know, a dollar in my pocket and I worked my way up and I built my business. And I think that's incredible. It's also the difference in how people are perceived in this country and who is seen as capable and not capable despite their level of effort. You know, I've worked hard my entire life just like a lot of people do. Hard work is actually pretty universal but opportunity is not. So through my career, I've made an effort, whether it is being on the board of a nonprofit accelerator for people of color founders or being a mentor or, you know, just trying to be there for founders on the early end to be really real about what the environment is like for BIPOC founders and underrepresented founders, but also to do as much as I can to help them and catalyze them. I do a lot of mentorship to folks just for free because I just think the thing our community needs to do. And when I say our community, it is a broad umbrella, not just Latin Americans or Mexican Americans, but black, brown, indigenous, queer, LGBTQIA+, and women. Like, we all need to be helping each other out and realize that we're part of the same family of underrepresented folks and underresourced folks. The thing we need is to give each other the leg up, and give ourselves unfair advantages. So yeah, that's my soapbox for entrepreneurship.

David Valerio: No, I appreciate it. I think for a lot of people, you know, Mexican Americans, Mexicans are like some of the hardest working people out there, by God, like everywhere grinding perpetually. I work very hard, but I happen to be in these, you know, white collar rooms. My Mexican side of the family's been here since the 1910s. So we've been here a long time. I can't say like I personally at least noticed or experienced people treating me differently and maybe that's part of the energy of just like coming in thinking I'm white, not even thinking I'm white, but just like, it doesn't matter. I'm just going in and I'm grinding and I'm going to do it. But I saw growing up, I was so blessed to go into these great schools just because a teacher happened to notice me when I was in kindergarten. This guy's smart. Whereas my parents would not have known that really, even though my parents were like, I'd say like middle class, upper middle class, but it was just like culturally was not a thing that really people thought about. So I think about it in terms of just like laying out the option, you know, growing up in some, you know, the East End of Houston. Starting up a company, is that a thing that most people think about? Probably not. So like having examples like you and me, whether or not we come from the same economic background is just like, look, you can come and do these kinds of crazy things. And actually the world's really open in some ways to just like grinding and going out and talking to people. I don't know. I find that really admirable in you. I know you've helped me a lot just in terms of like mentorship, all these things. Cause I think, especially for people that just, like you said, I don't have an uncle with 500K to give me for some dumb startup idea I came up with, you have to grind harder than the others and you have to develop your own networks more because you're not sort of going into an existing cultural or economic system where you just have the optionality to sort of, you know, take a year off before you start college to go do some sort of startup, right? It's just not the thing you do. And I'm curious now, you know, given where you are, what you're working on, what is the next thing you're going to be striving after getting after in your work?

Roman Gonzalez: I'll look back to look forward, which that is I realized over the past several years I've had the good fortune of being able to create a career that like works on big things. Like when I was working on Gardenio actively, I was working for plants. I was working for plants and I was working for gardeners, right? That's who I was serving. And when I was doing some head of product consulting, previously with you, I was working for trees. I also did some work for a pet insurance tech company called Fursure and I was like, I'm working for dogs. So it's like, I'm working for dogs and trees and plants and gardens and stuff like that. That's really beautiful thing. So now I'm doing some work with a company called Literati, and so they do, um, kids book subscriptions. I'm helping them build out their e-commerce store. The problem they're basically trying to solve is like, how do we connect kids to the right book at the right time that they'll love. How do we connect them to the right book to like ignite a love of learning so they want to keep reading and want to keep learning and keep engaging the same kind of attitudes I have. But we also talk about a love of life. So it's not just shoving books at you, though they're significantly worse things to do, but it's like how do we match people to things that bring this broader appreciation of the world. And the founder, Jesse Wing, is very big about this. She's a wild personality. She's very philosophical herself. And it's one of the reasons that I started working with them. I know how she sees the function of the company. So I feel like now I'm working for books and I'm working for for kids. As I get a little bit older, it feels like nurturing the next generation and building that excitement and curiosity and wonder. I do think careers make sense in retrospect, but this was something that I accepted because of the scope of what it is. We're still working on very like big human things and real humans at the end of the day, who are just trying to figure out their place in the world. Whether they're parents who are buying the books and trying to understand, how do I parent a kid? Or they're little kids trying to be like, hey, the world is big and weird and confusing and the right book at the right time that they see themselves in that makes them feel powerful or smart or curious or excited, like that's awesome. So I've been doing a lot of that work recently. I've actually been getting more, I've been getting a little bit back into film. I started taking an acting class, which is scary. I had never done acting and I've been behind the camera, I've done all the production stuff, but I was just like, oh, there are stories out there that I still want to tell that I think are important. I mean they don't need to like quote Kierkegaard, right? But levels of thinking and nuance that I think are important for people to engage with at this moment in our history. I think it's me sort of trying to, um, bring back like the importance of art and storytelling in, uh, in my own framework. Because I think for a long time, I was like, oh, well, you know, I'm not going to do film or I'm not going to do that because there're more important critical things to do. And the thing that I realized is all the energy, all that creativity, all that learning, right? Like, I want that to mean something. I want to produce some kind of product with those things that people can engage with and consume. And again, try to use to live more interesting, fulfilling, introspective lives. So yeah, I took that acting class. I'm gonna start meeting up with a screenwriting group. I still have the stuff to make films. And so, when I think about some of those things that I learned about gardening and nature, and we didn't even get into compost and how compost is like magic and cool and amazing, I want to incorporate them into stories to show people maybe a way of living that we still have the option to live. I'm going to try not to get too high-horse tier, but like the role that technology has played in our lives, the saturation, is a very recent thing, right? I'm not saying we all need to like go back to chuckwagons, but I am saying that I think that while there are many things that we've gained, there are things that we not only risk losing, but it already feels like we've lost. And I feel like my message is that like, we don't have to lose some of those things. Whether that's our relationship with other people, our relationship with our food, or to ourselves. I think there are things to preserve, um, stories worth telling that sort of explore those ideas without being heavy handed. So when I think about that sort of evolved spirituality and the sense of, like, mystery and magic and wonder, and we might get to this, I’m very interested in the extraterrestrial and what that intellectual space of thinking sort of says about our own universe. So I can sort of ignite, that questioning about our place. I think that like that and like the gardening and the like relating to other people, I think it reminds us what it's like to be alive, to be human, to live good lives. There's such a force heading us in such a direction right now. And we don't have to say that we're on that ride. We get to choose what ride we're on.

David Valerio: Beautiful. I think this is like completely in line with history. Getting the right book to the right person at the right time is so invaluable. When I think about the books that have influenced me and my own trajectory, like you said, careers and life history, they only make sense in retrospect. You don't see the other potential twisting paths that you would have followed had you not encountered a person or a book or a video at a particular time. And I think that that is so important. You know, myself, I'm married, I have a one year old daughter. I think about this for her, right? Like, I don't want to be prescriptive, you know, I want to expose her to as many ideas and diverse approaches to the world as possible. So she can be like, oh, I want to be a biologist. I want to be a philosopher. I want to be, I don't know, a musician, something like this. So I think that that figuring out how to best connect our young people to this vast world of just amazing ideas throughout history is great. And then to your point about video, I think that's awesome, especially now in the world that we live in where a lot of people are consuming video content, figuring out how to package these deeper ideas in a way that's more readily consumable, if you will, for the generations now I think is like a really under tapped and important thing to do. Rather than just sort of letting, you know, the TikTokification of everything be about dumb stuff, make it about stuff that's great and fascinating and deep. You mentioned the world now has changed a lot, phones have only been around for 20 years. We're very much, you know, figuring out how to live with them properly. In general, I find, you know, just a tendency to say, hey, we're in qualitatively different times and therefore all of human history before is irrelevant. I just think that's deeply flawed and wrong because I don't think human nature has changed. Obviously, like our environment has changed, the technologies we're interacting with. A lot of things have changed externally, but human nature is the same as it was in the time of Plato, in the medieval era, et cetera. So to whatever extent we can mine this tremendous resource of thinking that people have explored in the past and keep those traditions going, I think it only sets us on a right foot. And of course I say this being a revert to Catholicism. But like, there's a reason that the church has been around for so long and that it's probably going to be around for the next 2000 years, if not, you know, forever going forward, notwithstanding all the craziness that's going on at the present moment.

Roman Gonzalez: I was gonna say as long as we are.

David Valerio: Yeah, as long as we are, the Church will be there. Who knows, how long we'll still be around. Let's talk about aliens, you alluded to it, that was my next topic, let's go get on the soap box.

Roman Gonzalez: All right, you guys want to hear some shit? So yeah, it was a long pandemic. Let's start there. I didn't grow up with like an active interest in extraterrestrials, but I did grow up with a dad who would take me outside when, like, when there was a meter shower or something. I love and respect that in my father, uh, because there was this feeling like, oh, there's this big thing happening and I want you to see it. That's a really sweet thing. And then in high school, as I got into philosophy I got really into all these things around astrophysics and cosmology. You know, Stephen Hawking's Universe in a Nutshell, uh, Brian Greene, string theory was kind of really big back then. So there was all these really interesting ideas about the structure of the universe and how it might work, and the multiverse. For again, somebody who's attracted to big, wild ideas, like theoretical physics was like, oh man, this is really cool. I really annoyed my physics teacher because she was a physics teacher. She'd been in just normal kind of standard everyday physics. And I was just like, yeah, but what about the multiverse? And she's like, I don't know, Roman. So that was like a lot of my relationship with my educators growing up of like, let's go deeper. And they're just like, I am 26 years old and just have this job. So anyway, I was just really interested in that stuff. Wasn't on Decathlon until my senior year, but my junior year, the theme for Decathlon was cosmology. So I went to their final, they had like a public sort of trivia kind of thing, like a quiz, and I remember I got a higher score than the winner of that thing and I was very self satisfied. I was very interested in space generally, um, but I didn't grow up with like alien culture. I didn't watch Ancient Aliens or anything like that. And so during pandemic, some article came out in the New York Times and it was talking about the dark budgets of the Pentagon and the now famous, uh, Tic Tac video and Go Fast video. Um, if you've seen anything about UFOs, or UAPs as they're now called, over the last several years you've probably seen those videos. I looked at credible resources and it turns out there's a lot of folks talking about this and it's not just in fringe YouTube videos. These are like, uh, US government, UK government, uh, officials coming out and saying, like, hey, there's something going on here. We're not saying it was aliens. But there's something really weird going on here and it's a security threat. I also saw that a lot of people were scared to kind of say what they were seeing because of the stigma around it, because you bring it up and people are like, you're crazy. It's impossible. That's not how it works. It can't happen. Which, as I've mentioned before, my attraction to the wild ideas is very strong, then I'm sort of like, okay, well, this could be just really batshit or this could be kind of interesting. And so just kept reading about it and found out that back in the 1900s, uh, there's these major, mass, like lots-of-people-saw-a-UFO kind of thing. You look at all the explanations for why, like, there was, you know, lights over Washington in 1952, I think like over the White House that people saw. There's the Phoenix lights, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people saw, and you're seeing things that like now you might sort of say like, oh, they're drones. They're this or they're that technology, they're Chinese tech or something like that. But back then they just didn't have that kind of thing back then. Getting back into religion and spirituality, Diane Pasolka has this book, American Cosmic, that talks about the sort of UFO phenomena as a kind of modern religion and she's a religious studies professor. She kind of looks back, and she doesn't have a strong opinion about it, very sober about all this, you look back to all of human history, and you look back to sort of religious imagery and you sort of see some interesting kinds of things. The big popular thing is you know, the way that people described angels sometimes, is actually quite similar to the way somebody might describe if they saw a UFO today and including some of the effects that it has. So you're just sort of like, okay, this is a fun story. And I got into it to be clear, because it was fun. I was like, this is interesting, but like, it was always like halfway a joke for me. But as I got more into it and was like, oh, maybe there's actually kind of something here, I want to be really discerning, maybe there's something here. I also started talking to people about it. It's just so much fun to talk to people about it because then you find out a lot about people's personal metaphysics. There'd be people who would tell me like, hey man, you know, I never really told anybody, but when I was 12, you know, I saw this thing. So then you have people opening up to you and I'm just like, oh, as a vulnerability junkie, this is really cool. So all of this evolves, so it's like, okay, now I have this sort of sociological interest in it and interpersonal interest in it. I think there's like something here, right? There's enough to say that like something is going on and it's weird. I think that the explanations for it are largely unsatisfactory when you see the volume. Let's take a hundred percent of all things that people say are UFOs or UAPs, unidentified anomalous phenomena is what it stands for now. If 1 percent of those, if half a percent of those, were like deeply credible, and we know that most of it's bullshit, that is remarkable. Like all you need is one to sort of be like, oh man, maybe this tells us, there could be a lot we could learn here about our place in the universe. The interesting thing too, is there's a book. Man, I forget the guy's name. He was a Harvard head of the, uh, psychology department, or I think psychiatry? It's called Abduction and he basically interviews something like 80 people who've claimed to have been abducted and concludes that like, hey, listen, I'm not saying I know what happened, but what I am saying is that these people don't show the signs of mental illness that you might expect. They come from all walks of life. They're not just folks in the country. They are, you know, high powered executives. They are all among us, people who have had these kinds of experiences, but they don't feel safe sharing it. Something is happening here. So like that, plus my, um, background in astrophysics and cosmology, and like that came back in the last couple of years too, that fascination with how much we don't know the limits of our knowledge. There's definitely some magic and mystery at the tail end of the story. I think people think we know a lot more than we do, and that's not to say that the things we know should be discredited because we know a lot. They've allowed science, you know, and progress. But there's a lot that we really don't know. I think that we should be really, really humble. Oh, this is what I was going to say that that book about abductions, one of the trends, and this is outside of that book too, what you see is that in as much as there is any kind of extraterrestrial being or, you know, some people call it just like the phenomena or like the intelligence. You find that like, they're very big environmentalists. A lot of times when people, uh, when people claim abduction experiences, and they're not all this way, cause some of them are dark and negative, but a lot of them are like, hey, you guys gotta stop doing that to the planet. You got like a really good thing going on and you gotta like, you know, stop messing up the planet. That is most, from what I've seen, of like the abduction experiences. So in as much as they exist at all, if they do, and I want to be clear, I don't know. I'm coming out with no official position. If they did, I think I'd know how they'd vote.

David Valerio: Amazing. I love that and I can't say that I personally have been like super interested in the whole aliens thing. I'm not hardcore for or against it. I think I'm more interested in like the sociological phenomenon like you said, 21st-century, 20th-century, cosmo-mystical identifying that we don't know a lot about the world and this is like a theory for how that could or could not happen. Opening up people to discussions is super fascinating and it makes a lot of sense, right? People have heard about, have heard other people talk about these things, but there's generally not an open space to really get into it. And so like you knocking, you know, opening the door then gets you into like, oh wow, no, a lot more people are really are really interested in this stuff. I don't know, I think ocean creatures are aliens, frankly. I mean, they are, in terms of our own experience of the world. Like, you go to the deep sea, you know, we have no idea how those creatures live and what their experience of reality is like. For all I know, the whales could have a sentient civilization down there and I don't really know. I don't think it's implausible that there's like, you know, actually Atlantis mermaid civilization somewhere. And it's all just, they're hoodwinking us by pretending to not fully understand what we're saying, but maybe they really do. I don't know.

Roman Gonzalez: Don’ they say like, um, we know more about the stars than we do about our own oceans?

David Valerio: Absolutely. And it's true. You mentioned there's a volcanoes thing here as well. What's the deal with volcanoes and aliens?

Roman Gonzalez: Okay. So for this one, I'll say a lot of what I just said I think there's like objective evidence and credible testimony. And I hope so far people listening think that I'm relatively discerning. And I do want to warn people when they get into the space to be discerning. It's very easy to sort of see something and be just like, yup, the president's an alien. So long pandemic, and there's all these ideas about uh, I'll just call the phenomenon. When people say that, what they mean is there's some thinking that like, hey, like ghosts and aliens and even Bigfoot and all these things, they're related by the way. Again, slow down. I'm not saying that's how it is. One idea is, um, that there are, I'll just say it the silly way, there's aliens in the oceans, right? The other idea is that, uh, there's aliens in volcanoes. There's some life that can be sustained at that level of heat. I mean, we kind of know that already, but there's some videos that show like some interesting things happening, like, in volcanoes. So I was just like, this is a silly idea. Again, long pandemic, you're sort of just like I want, what's the next interesting thing about this? What else can I learn about this? That's kind of fun. And you're like, oh, maybe aliens live in volcanoes. And I was like, that's silly. But I don't really know how volcanoes work. Like, if I'm being honest like I, maybe I learned about it like in elementary, middle, or high school. But I haven't thought about volcanoes in a long time. I don't really know. So I started YouTubing and how volcanoes work and of course you get to tectonic plates. By the way, do you, I feel like you probably do, do you know how many tectonic plates there are?

David Valerio: Hmm, that's a great question. I want to say, like, order of magnitude, like, there are ten major plates or so? That's not the exact number, but something like that, I think.

Roman Gonzalez: Yeah. I know you're going to love this as a religious. It's seven.

David Valerio: Is it really seven? Beautiful! There you go. Seven, three, I love those numbers. Great.

Roman Gonzalez: I almost want to look it up for a quick check. I'm like, how many, yeah, it's seven major plates. So I was like, I'll admit this. And again, this is why I say be careful. Because I was like, there's seven, just seven? Like that's weird. Then I was sort of like, that sounds like it sounds like it could be made up. Like I realized that it's real. There's geology, like there's so much behind it, but I was like, it sounds like if somebody was just like, hey, uh, how do volcanoes and earthquakes work and stuff like that? And they're just like, guys, there's little disks that rub up against each other and things like that. And you're like, how many are there? There’re about seven. I don't know. It just doesn't feel deep.

David Valerio: Too perfect, yeah.

Roman Gonzalez: Yeah it's like, too perfect. And, uh, so there was like a solid 60 seconds where I was like, we don't know. You know, That like I was, I was a tectonic plates denier. And then I was like, wait, wait, all right, get your bearings. Like so yeah, it's just one of these, I'll call it silly because even if it's true, it's still silly. Silly ideas that, uh, UFOs could be hiding out in, um, volcanoes.

David Valerio: Yeah. You know, being a scientist myself, there is a lot of stuff we don't know. And we know that in the past, what was an established dogma got upended. Like plate tectonics. It was only in the 1960s that this became a thing. Plate tectonics revolution. There's still a lot we don't know about how it works. I mean, how could we? Because the Earth is a huge place. It's only been like sixty years since this became a thing. My own other crazy pet theory is that, uh, have you ever heard of these things called ocean anoxic zones? They typically happen at like the mouths of the world's rivers where, in line with humans devastating the earth, we dump a bunch of fertilizers for agriculture, right? Not all of the nitrogen and phosphorus is taken up by the plants there. It runs off into rivers, the rivers transport those nutrients to the ocean. And those are nutrients that are used by marine plants, essentially to grow. Phytoplankton bloom, those guys die, they go down in the water column. Creatures eat them, use oxygen, not a lot of oxygen. Marine dead zones is what they're called. Um, and they're often connected to human overuse of fertilizers and other pollutants. But you know, one other explanation for this, is that dolphin civilization I was mentioning earlier, they are the ones that are cultivating marine plants in these areas. Basically, they're farming in those areas, which is why there's not a lot of oxygen, because they're using human excess nitrogen and phosphorus to cultivate and grow their own food in those oceanic dead zones. I had this whole thing in grad school where I kind of made that a joke.

Roman Gonzalez: Dolphin farmers?

David Valerio: Dolphin farmers, man, it's real.

Roman Gonzalez: I really want it to be just like, okay, now that's ridiculous. Like after all the things I said, just like, no, that's ridiculous.

David Valerio: I can't, that's ridiculous. I absolutely cannot. I don't know. But this is what I love about science, about learning about the world. I guess that anytime somebody takes such a stark, like that absolutely cannot be the case. They're almost always wrong.

Roman Gonzalez: Yeah.

David Valerio: Right. And then you even talk about like, you know, you didn't know how volcanoes work. I don't fully know how volcanics work. I'm a geologist. And what's interesting is like, like quote unquote conspiracy theories, whatever you want to call it, people who hold those often know a lot more about the topic than the person that holds the standard, uh, view on things. And so when you, when you query the people who hold the standard view, like, well, why do you believe that? Well, I trust this guy, I trust this guy. I think trust is good, like, that is the foundation, really, of most of our knowledge. It's like, oh, I trust this guy to know what he's doing because he studied the subject for however long. But there's not necessarily, like, a principled reason for you individually as a person to hold that view and to know it's true. You just happen to have a network of people that you trust who hold that view and you think that this is the standard view. I don't know, maybe this gets into solipsism and I guess it is just existential too, where it's just like, how do I, how do I know anything? Do I really know anything? Probably not.

Roman Gonzalez: True knowledge is to know that you know, nothing, right? But yeah, I think that especially these days with the internet how it is, it's weird to tell people to sort of get into things like UAPs and aliens and stuff, because, like, every space is rife with misinformation. It's one of the things I loved about working at Renoster that I got to work with scientists. In a world of uncertainty, science gives us like, uh, a reinforcing anchor. But what it doesn't do is give us like all of the answers. So I think that like anchoring on like the science we have, but like maintaining that sense of mystery and wonder and uncertainty and curiosity.=, I think that that's what will push science forward. And it's also, again, can't stress this enough. It's just fun.

David Valerio: Beautiful. Well, that was awesome. I really enjoyed this conversation, Roman. This is fantastic. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Roman Gonzalez: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, man.