“The Green Revolution will not happen without robotics.“
Dr. Lawrence Rocks received his Master of Science in Chemistry from Purdue University, and his Doctor of Science from Technische Hochschule Vienna, where he wrote his doctoral thesis in German in the field of analytical chemistry. He authored two books, The Energy Crisis (1972) and Developing Your Chemistry Fundamentals and Fuels for Tomorrow, with the former proving influential in creating the United States Department of Energy.
In the immediate future, our dependency on oil will remain constant. Technology needs to advance around extraction and storage before we can look at dialing down our consumption. However, oil and natural gas will likely never fully go away. Instead, we’ll learn how to use both more efficiently and only for industries that truly require the resource.
As for solar and wind power, these two potential resources are being approached the wrong way. Wind farms need large areas to operate, as well as a reliable source of energy. A collaborative between the United States, Canada and Mexico to install turbines offshore along the length of our collective boarders could solve for unpredictable winds and high real estate costs.
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
SPEAKER
Lawrence Rocks
President
Lawrence Rocks Associates
MODERATOR
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello everyone. Welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks is a digital interview series that we started during this work from home period, with the world's leading and the foremost investors, creators and thinkers and what we're trying to do with these SALT Talks is replicate the experience that we provide at our global SALT conference series, which is to empower big important ideas that are shaping the future, as well as provide our audience a window into the mind of subject matter experts and we're very excited today to welcome a legend in the field of chemistry to SALT Talks and that is Dr. Lawrence Rocks and conducting today's interview is Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, as well as the chairman of SALT and with that, I'll turn it over to you, Anthony, for the interview.
Anthony Scaramucci: (00:57)
John, thank you. Dr. Rocks, I'm beaming in today from beautiful Venice Beach, California, so I'm trying to dress like a millennial. I'm competing with John Darsie for likes so, hope you'll forgive me for my attire. You look great by the way. Let's get into your background sir. Why did you decide to become a chemist? Where did you grow up and what motivated you to take this arc to your career?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (01:24)
I grew up in New York City and at the age of 12, our class in elementary school had a science project, so I elected to try to make a telescope from available lenses, a long focal plane lens and a very small microscope piece and I put together a telescope that actually could see a moon of Jupiter, so I was very excited to see Jupiter as a disk and a little tiny spot, which was a moon and I couldn't wait to tell the class about it, which I don't know how it went over, but I enjoyed it very much and that sort of started me on a path of interest in astronomy and science and chemistry. They come together, especially my interest in latter years with health and the environment. The environment is a tremendous area, encompassing so many different things that you can go a million different directions in it, chemical, astronomy, climate and so forth. So, I'm focused on matters dealing with health and the environment.
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:36)
Oh. You published in 1973, a paper called The Energy Crisis and it influenced the creation of The Department of Energy under the Carter Administration. What was the book about, sir? Why did you feel it was so important at that time to have a unified national energy policy?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (02:56)
Well, at that time there was a looming shortage of gasoline and oil, exacerbated by an embargo on this country and I thought that energy would be a very critical issue. It was very difficult to get the book published. The publisher sent the manuscript to various universities and professors in a variety of very big named schools said, "Energy will never be a story. Don't bother with it." But I persisted with my partner, Richard Runyon, he's now deceased and we did manage to get it published at Crown and sure enough, energy became quite a story and is still a story. It's just lingering. It pops up here and there with wind power, solar, nuclear and so forth, but that was my basic motivation that this is a story that's good for a lifetime or more.
Anthony Scaramucci: (04:00)
You think that oil, sir, is still a national security issue for our reliance on it?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (04:07)
Yes, I do. I think that oil of course, the technology of drilling hasn't improved, so that the old method of measuring reserves, oil recovered before the drilling is slightly old-fashioned, but it's still an important measure, but we've got wean ourselves a little bit off oil, which brings up a very tricky question. Many people are saying, "We've got to end the fossil fuel era." Which I don't think is at all practical or meaningful, but we've got to simply reduce and use oil more wisely and our natural gas. So, I have thought of strategies over the last almost 50 years now since the book. I can't believe it's that long, but the strategies that seem to be most appealing are so encompassed in so called green revolution, but how to harness the wind and sunshine, that's the problem and I think they're being harnessed all wrong now.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (05:21)
What we need to harness the wind is a North American Offshore Wind Alliance with Canada and Mexico. Why, because the stretch offshore Canada through America through Mexico, the wind is always strong somewhere. So, you wouldn't need much backup, East Coast, West Coast. It's a regional issue. If you pick one area, the wind is erratic. The wind is erratic all over the world, but when you add them all up, a stretcher like that of six, 7,000 miles, the wind is reliable because it's always blowing strongly somewhere and another reason is that wind on land, the real estate is against you. I mean, T. Boone Pickens had a company called Mesa Energy, building windmills up the central part of the US and the company went bankrupt. The wind power for a 1,000 megawatts of wind, which is typical power plant, that's installed capacity.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (06:25)
It's stacked up and the wind doesn't blow, but for a 1,000 megawatts installed capacity, you might need 20 or 30 square miles and 500 windmills. The real estate is against you, but offshore the real estate is not against you, but to compensate for that big area you need, I think robotics. So, one of my themes I believe in passionately is that the green revolution will not happen without robotic assistance to monitor the security and minor repair thousands of windmills stretching from Alaska, all the way to Southern Mexico. The potential wind power would give us all the electric energy we need, but then that's a power grid problem between nations and we need cooperation I think.
Anthony Scaramucci: (07:22)
So, let's talk about that for a second. So you're saying, at least for the immediate future, we're going to always have some reliance on oil and you'd like to bring it down. So, let me ask you about the green new deal, which has been proposed by some people on the left. What's your opinion of the green new deal.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (07:48)
I'm not familiar with the details, but if we're to say oil and natural gas, we've got to also harness sunshine, but I believe it's being harnessed the wrong way. Solar electricity has not worked in 40 years and I don't think it's going to work in the next 40 years except on an extremely local basis, highly subsidized and my reasons are that the solar panels convert sunlight into electricity in a PN junction, which wears out with time, because of atomic migration. So, the solar cell is not eternal. It may lose 50% of its power in 20 or 30 years. It's got to be replaced. You need a large area. So, how to harness sunshine, solar architecture. If homes and buildings were designed to absorb sunlight in the winter and shield them from sunlight in the summer, the energy saved would be very important, by oil, gas and electric power. We've got a harness sunshine first as solar architecture, second as electricity if possible.
Anthony Scaramucci: (09:03)
What is your view of what's going on now with the climate? Are you a believer in climate change sir, based on the science or what's your view?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (09:15)
Oh yes. So, I think climate change is way beyond theoretical idea. Global warming and with [crosstalk 00:09:24].
Anthony Scaramucci: (09:25)
It's manmade, man and woman made. It's being created by the emission of all the CO2?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (09:31)
Well, it does. That is a very complicated story. Nature has its own cycle. Drilling into Arctic ice and measuring the isotopes of oxygen 16 to 18 shows that in the last 400,000 years we've had about five ice ages. The way the earth has behaved, apparently from oxygen isotope per measurements, 50,000 or 60,000 years of very cold weather compared to what we know and then, 10 or 20,000 years of a warm spell, which we're in now. So, we've had five such cycles long before people were here, long before industrial revolution, but some unknown reasons there was that pattern revealed by isotopic chemistry in the polar caps.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (10:27)
Now, where are we now? According to that rhythm, we're about 1,000 years overdue for an ice age. However, right now there's a problem of global warming, because we're in a relatively one period may be coming out of it. Where does mankind come in? Well, we're contributing to carbon dioxide and methane, but there is a very big disconnect here, which is why I propose Weather Station Moon and here is the disconnect, in the last 50 years, carbon dioxide has risen in the atmosphere at least 50%, but temperature on the Kelvin scale has not. It's gone up maybe 1%. We are experiencing more carbon dioxide and more methane in the atmosphere and more unstable weather, stronger wind and stronger hurricanes, very unstable weather patterns and yet the global temperature doesn't seem to have risen. Maybe it's hard to measure.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (11:36)
So, my concept is weather Station Moon, an unmanned telescopic station on the moon to take a look at the earth in the infrared to get its true overall temperature and you could also pinpoint areas telescopically. So you could get pinpoint temperature and global temperature and secondly, to look at the cloud cover not just visibly, to see if it's increasing or not, but in the ultra violent to see if there's more silicates up there. The silicates would reflect sunlight and cause the earth to get cloudier and colder, the so-called albedo effect. So, a cloudy earth would be a colder earth. How do we measure it? Well, Albany satellites gets some idea, but we need a total global picture of the earth and the only way to get it, I think is from the moon.
Anthony Scaramucci: (12:39)
So are we doomed at our current projection? Some people are saying that they were in an average retrievable position or do you think it is retrievable?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (12:52)
Well, I think it's very erratic. It's almost like the stock market up and down. There was a little miniature ice age in Northern Europe, 1590 to 1640, well-documented in literature and paintings known as the Little Ice Age. So, that could be a forerunner of the fact that we're on a slope toward another ice age, but that might be a 100 or a 1,000 years from now. The isotopic record indicates we're overdue for an ice age for whatever the reasons are, but for the moment it looks like global warming, it looks like polar caps are melting, seas may be rising and people will be moving inland and Northward in the Northern hemisphere, inland and Southward in the Southern hemisphere, but who knows at what rate? Now, along comes the COVID virus and that's accelerating everything.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (13:53)
So, there's a gradual trend, hard to detect inward and northward in the Northern hemisphere, but COVID has now accelerated everything. We can see satellite cities, more telecommunications. I think the trend is not going to end. It's just going to be erratic and it may extend way past our lifetime, children, grandchildren and so forth, but I think the future is this inland and upward Northward movement. More satellite states, more telecommunications as we're doing right now and more short trip airline travel and I also think that if we do the North America wind lines properly and have sufficient electricity, more electric vehicles, I think the electric vehicle future is very, very bright with the movement going on now, if we take care of the power grid, which we're not doing.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (14:59)
The electric power grid in this country is not being properly monitored, it's got to be expanded for remote sources and it's got to be monitored. For example, in California, had we had in place drones take a careful look at the power grid, we'd see that in certain places there was tree overgrowth. Now, that's not anyone administration's fault, that's just a fact of nature. So, with robotic surveillance of drones, we would see that and maybe be able to correct some of it, but the high temperatures in California are quite a mystery.
Anthony Scaramucci: (15:46)
But you would say that the wildfires and the hurricanes are coming from the climate change and the global warming, or you think there's just a natural phenomenon? How would you assess that?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (15:57)
There is global warming and it's triggering off something that's very unstable. For example, a few weeks ago, we had a dust storm from the Sahara desert traveling all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Now, with a weather station moon, you could monitor that very clearly and it would really look like something on a nightly TV and it's happened before and right now, the fire is in California, the dust has reach Europe. You can detect it, you can almost see it. During the dust bowl of the 1930s in this country, dust was picked up in New York city from the far West. Now, had we had a weather station moon way back then you could really follow that. So, what I'm saying is that the immediate trend is global warming and maybe in the future, I don't know, a 100 years, a 1,000 years from now a freezing trend, because we've had these cycles for the last 400,000 years.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (17:08)
Well, we've got to monitor the situation now in terms of the total earth and parts of the earth, see from the moon you can get from infrared light, the total temperature of the earth. If you try to piecemeal it together, it's very hot and it leads to a lot of controversy and we can get the total cloud cover, the percent, the reflectivity of the earth. So, we need the earth's total temperature as well as pinpoint area temperature, total cloud cover, as well as pinpoint cloud cover, wind speed and it relates to weather forecasting and the famous problem of North hemisphere, Southern hemisphere air exchange, which now has come to light with the COVID virus. The experts are saying well, in South America when they're having their winter, the virus seems to spread and when we get all winter we're probably in for a spread of the virus up here. So, predicting weather pattern, sees the weather patterns would help. I don't know how much, but I think it would help in predicting virus outbreak.
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:26)
Doc, John Darsie, we're getting a lot of questions piling up from the audience so, I'm going to let John Darsie cut in here and ask you a few questions from people that are thinking about these big issues.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (18:39)
Sure.
John Darsie: (18:40)
So, I'm going to start on a more lighthearted issue and then we'll get back into the deeper issues, but you're a renowned chemist and you've applied your knowledge and chemistry across a variety of different subject matters, starting with energy in the 70s, as we talked about, including public health, but you've also done work in sports and I think it's really interesting, the work you've done with St. Louis Cardinals Shortstop, Paul DeJong, regarding different experiments about optimizing bat speed and launch angles and thing in baseball. Talk about the research you've done in the baseball world. You were honored by Topps and given your own baseball card, which was a first for a chemist, but talk a little bit about the work you've done and what you've learned about how to optimize performance in baseball.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (19:25)
Well, what Paul and I did was, we hit a baseball and looked at its bounce and cooled it and looked at its bounce and sort of studied the elasticity of the surface of a baseball with respect to temperature. Elastic materials tend to get brittle at low temperature. They lose their bounce and at very high temperature, they tend to get so off. They lose their bounce. So, if a typical elastane and this is in optimal temperature of a day of elasticity, like an automobile tyre, it's got its own range, a baseball has its own range, seems to be most flexible around 70 degrees. Different materials will have their own ideal flexibility temperature range and that was done in a hope of encouraging school children to do their own experiments and that's what the program with Topps is all about, helping school children realize that you can do experiments. You don't need sophisticated scientific equipment, economic status is not that big a hindrance, that children can play around and do something of a scientific nature.
John Darsie: (20:44)
So, we have another question again, switching gears back to the solar energy piece, and we have a couple of questions that I'm going to combine into one and that's about, what are the best storage systems that we need to meet peak energy demand as we transition to more erratic sources of energy and do we have the infrastructure in place to build a better smart grid on top of existing infrastructure? Or do we need to completely overhaul our energy grid to prepare ourselves for the future?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (21:15)
I think energy storage is a tremendous problem and there isn't any simple answer to it. So, what I'm taking is that what we need, is to somehow harness the internal source of power, sunshine and wind and then have a backup, but battery backup has never proved economic on a bare scale for nation's power grid. So, for my concept of North American Offshore Wind Alliance, I envision a small nuclear backup, small nuclear power plants. The old nuclear power plants, 1000 megawatts, they have too many problems, heat loss, it's been going on for years, but the smaller power plants as you'd find on a submarine or an aircraft carrier, don't have the heat loss problems because they're smaller. So, we need small nuclear power as a backup and for decades I've been saying, "Go small, go, small."
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (22:18)
Utilities have been saying, "Not economical, not economical." The Gates foundation has funded research in what's called a Traveling Wave Nuclear Reactor. If fuel rods are moved about so that the plant doesn't have to be refueled more than once every 20 years, they think, theoretically speaking, it's being built right now in China. Why is something funded by the Gates Foundation being built in China? Because of the red tape in this country. Maybe red tape is a bad expression. People are leery of nuclear power and rightly so, because the power plants are too big. They're melting down. They're not cooling off. I mean, if you boil a potato in water and take it out of the water, it stays hot a long time, but a piece of potato cools right off. So, my answer to nuclear power is go small and the nuclear waste has to be buried in nickel steel containers, offshore in the ocean by robotic submarine. People are aghast at that.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (23:31)
Burying nuclear waste on land is never going to work, because the radioactivity dies off, it takes at least a thousand years. You can't have multi-generations of people adhering to safety protocols for a 1,000 years. That's not going to happen. There's no societal mechanism for that. It's almost as if in the days of Julius Caesar, there were rules about burying nuclear waste and we're adhering to them today. The waste material has to be buried in a place where it's inaccessible and perfectly harmless and that's nickel steel containers, they don't rust in salty water, buried deep in the ocean floor by robotic submarines, there will be no problem.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (24:23)
Now, we can opt not to have nuclear backup and the question is, what is the backup, since the wind will always be somewhat erratic? And the only answer I can think of is extend the wind system. In other words, they're filled with some way to tap the entire earth. It's always windy somewhere, but then we'd have to be sharing electricity around the world. So I foresee regionalism. Where we are, the region would be Canada and the United States and Mexico go offshore and you don't have a real estate problem, hook up all the windmills in one giant power grid, three nations are involved and work out the rules of sharing power, that they see as the only way to avoid the fact that people are leery of nuclear power and secondly, battery systems don't work.
John Darsie: (25:24)
In terms of burying nuclear waste at sea, would that have any adverse effect on the marine ecosystem?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (25:30)
None. None whatsoever. The nickel steel propellers of the Titanic in all these years haven't rusted. The steel cylinders won't rust at the ocean floor, they're inaccessible even if anyone were to try and dig them up, there's nothing you could do with them. The radioactivity will decay significantly in 1,000 years, completely in 2000. If you put it on land, there'll always be a problem with security of that land site, always and for example, the Yucca mountain project failed. Why, because there could be an earthquake and the canisters could fracture and material could make its way through the fractured earth, but in the deep ocean basin who's in the ocean floor, that's impossible.
John Darsie: (26:27)
So I'm going to call you after the SALT Talk about starting a business to create these robot submarines that we can bury the nuclear waste with Dr. Rocks. So, just look out on your phone. I'm going to give you a call. Another question we have people following up about wind energy. So, a couple of the common criticisms of wind energy are, the effect they have on birds and animals in those ecosystems, as well as disposing of the wind turbine blades. So, the blades are massive in size, obviously after they complete their useful life. They're buried in landfills, but they're so large that they obviously create a ton of waste. Are those concerns that you think make wind energy less attractive, or do you think those are just hurdles that we have to overcome?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (27:15)
I think those concerns are real, but I think they're small compared to the real estate problem. A typical power plant, whether it be nuclear, gas, or oil or coal is about 1,000 megawatts. 1,000 megawatts on land, you need about 20 to 30 square miles and maybe 500 windmills. That's a lot of land area. Think of the real estate. Just think of how impossible that would be in New York City. That would be ridiculous. One power plant replaced by 30 square miles of windmills? It's a real estate problem as what happened with the T. Boone Pickens and his company Mesa Energy. It didn't work. It's not an engineering problem, it's real estate, it's economic. The best place for wind is the offshore. Now we need a big area, so, we'll have to go to a big area. So, I think the biggest stumbling block to harnessing wind is almost political. Canada, the United States and Mexico must cooperate.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (28:32)
Now, years ago when I was doing work on the book, The Energy Crisis, I had an idea that the gas being flared off in the Gulf of Mexico flagged as being wasted, could be harnessed and piped, that the United States and Mexico should join up and tap that natural gas and pipe it and it was an idea. It never saw the light of day. The economics, the politics involved, what happened was the countries at the Middle East, ExxonMobil, lowered the price of oil. That killed that project. You see, there's a lot of competitiveness going on. One industry will lower prices to put another one out of business. I know that the windmills, they have a hypnotic effect. It's an interesting phenomenon, 60 cycles a second seems to induce ecolepsy in a very small percentage of people. So, that's a problem. Bird migration, that's another problem.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (29:49)
I don't want to trivialize them. I just think that they're way behind the biggest problem, which is economic, the land area. It's just too large to put on land, got to get it offshore. Down now that way you've harnessed wind, by harnessing sunshine, all the projects being funded are solar electricity. That's the hardest way to go. The easiest, the best is solar architecture, because the solar architecture will last forever. I mean, as long as the home of the building, whereas solar panels will definitely wear out. Atomic migration happens at the PN junction. It's a natural phenomenon like water evaporating. So, whatever solar cell you invent, atomic migration will blur it and make it useless in whatever 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, it will go down in efficiency. Solar electricity is economically disadvantaged. It sounds beautiful, I love it, but it's economically disadvantaged. Solar architecture is the way to go.
John Darsie: (31:04)
And we have another question about nuclear energy and nuclear fusion is sort of the holy grail of nuclear energy and there's been people that have tried over the years to create a nuclear fusion reaction for the sake of producing energy. Do you think we'll ever get to the point of creating a fusion reaction to create energy, because if we do, obviously it would solve a lot of problems if you can do it safely, but what are your thoughts on that?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (31:30)
It would. Theoretically it would solve a lot of problems. The Russians pioneered a design called Tokamak. It's a tunnel, a magnetic tunnel to confine plasma and in this country, we've pioneered Laser fusion. Pallets of deuterium, little glass pallets are hit by laser light from all directions. The problem with thermonuclear energy is that once you get ignition, it's so hot, it is just tried temperature. It seems to destroy the very container it's in. So, I don't know about thermonuclear fusion, I think it's very theoretical at the moment. It's way off in the distance, I don't see any thermonuclear electric power plants in my lifetime, or I don't know how it's ever going to be done if at all.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (32:32)
I think the way to go is standard nuclear, the way the Navy did it. Small nuclear power plants. Now, the utilities will say, "Well, that's not very economical." And my answer is, "You're right." It's less economical than one big plant, but what if one big plant melts down, how economical is that? Like three mile Island or [GMA 00:32:56] in Japan or the Russian power plant, that's not economical at all. That's what stopped nuclear power, the danger of a large plant overheating. If you have a small plant, it won't overheat.
John Darsie: (33:11)
What about geothermal energy? We have a question from our audience. They mentioned Yellowstone as somewhere that's somewhat central that could be potentially used as a source of clean energy. Do you think geothermal energy has a larger future in the United States and around the world?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (33:28)
I'm not sure about it. The power plants that I read about seem to admit to sulfur deposits, wherever there's geothermal energy. It seems to be gases off gases from the hot lava down below and they're usually associated with the air pollution, a lot of off gases and there also could be a problem with earthquake production and I just think it's too limited.
John Darsie: (33:58)
Well, Dr. Rocks, thanks so much for joining us today. I want to kick it back to Anthony if he has a final word for you, but we appreciate you coming on in and you're a legend.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (34:06)
Oh. Thank you. I appreciate. Thank you.
Anthony Scaramucci: (34:07)
Before we leave, I want to talk about your legendary baseball status Doc. The shortstop on the St. Louis Cardinals, Paul DeJong, attributes a lot of your insights to his prowess on the field. Tell us a little bit about that. You said to me something a few months ago about ligaments, which I've never forgotten. I'd like you to share that with our audience and tell us how you ended up getting your own baseball card.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (34:38)
Well, the story is muscle versus ligament. Muscles produce energy, ligaments produce power. Power is energy per unit time. It's the snap. It's like a bow and arrow. That you just stretch the wood and release it and release the string and it snaps back. So, the muscles are providing energy to the tendons, the tendons stretch then they snap back and as we age, tendons get more crystalline, less amorphous. They get more brittle, they could get strong.
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:14)
Are you listening to that Darsie? Your time's going to come. Okay? Are you listening to that?
John Darsie: (35:18)
It's already come and[crosstalk 00:35:19].
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:19)
Dr. Rocks and I are already dealing with that Darsie. Pay attention.
John Darsie: (35:22)
I already had a knee replacement.
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:24)
So go back to the crystalline. Go ahead. What happens Doc?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (35:27)
The best gymnasts are teenagers and then in your twenties, you'll lose that and certainly in your thirties, but it's a well-known phenomenon with tendons and ligaments, that as we age they become more crystalline and less amorphous, almost like the automobile tyre industry has this problem, that the rubber has got to be amorphous enough to be flexible and crystalline enough to be strong. So, the weightlifter is developing strong tendons, more crystalline nature in the proteins, less amorphous, less flexibility, so they're strong, but they're less flexible. So, the discussions I had with Paul is that there's got to be a balance and I have no idea what it is for any one individual, it's an aging process, but there is a balance between being very strong and not being flexible enough to hit a baseball or being very flexible and not being very strong. So, it's got to be a balance. So, I think the way the athletes tell it to me, too much weightlifting is not good. You get strong lifting weights but you don't get better at hitting a ball.
John Darsie: (36:50)
I mean that's Tom Brady. You're preaching Tom Brady's philosophy there. At his age and he's the oldest quarterback in the NFL and one of the oldest that has ever played at a high level in the NFL and he talks a lot about flexibility and pliability versus trying to get stronger and it's helped him extend his career.
Anthony Scaramucci: (37:07)
He uses a lot of band work, right? He doesn't really use weights, right? He just uses bands mostly. Right?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (37:14)
That's one of the things that Paul and I have discussed and the other thing I've discussed is, what level of air pollution. This COVID virus, they're cleaning facilities, right? You can over-clean. I mean, you can have so much cleaning around that it affects the lungs and some of the chemicals interact with each other, which is a subject that goes, I think unnoticed. For example, cleaning fluids that have fluoride and cleaning fluids that have acetic acid, if you mix them, you get trace amounts of fluoroacetic acid, which can cause scarring of lung tissue. So, one of the phenomena I'd like to study, like to get into it more deeply is low level air pollution.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (38:04)
How it can take the edge off an athlete, a little bit of carbon monoxide, or a little bit of cleaning fluid, or a little bit of ozone. Let us say that it's reducing oxygen transfer in the lungs by 2% hypothetically speaking. So, you've got 2% less energy, hypothetically speaking. So you hit a baseball 400 feet. What's 2% of 400 feet, eight feet. That could be the difference between a home run or a ball court and the running track. See for a non-athlete like me, you wouldn't even see the difference, but for an athlete where the edge counts, I think one or 2% loss of power, loss of breathing, loss of oxygen transfer makes a big difference.
Anthony Scaramucci: (38:57)
So Doc, what would you recommend instead of the cleaners? Get these air filtration systems?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (39:04)
Yes. Filtration and also air it out.
Anthony Scaramucci: (39:07)
Like open the window?
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (39:09)
Right. Ventilation.
Anthony Scaramucci: (39:10)
Right.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (39:12)
The cleaning fluids do their job in minutes, but the excess can linger for hours.
Anthony Scaramucci: (39:18)
Right. So open-
John Darsie: (39:19)
If I'm in the car with Anthony I'll make sure to follow that advice.
Anthony Scaramucci: (39:23)
I would never let him in the car Doc given his habits, his hygiene habits, that's fake news. He's never been in the car with me. Okay? God only knows what he does in his own house. There's a reason why the bookshelves are green behind him, Doc, just so you know. Okay? All right, before we let you go, tell us about the Topps baseball card. We all want to hear about this.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (39:47)
Well, I feel very honored that Topps made a baseball card for me and for Paul, for our work with the projects that might interest children in science. I think it should work to interest children to do things of a scientific nature. It's quite an honor. I hope I can live up to it.
Anthony Scaramucci: (40:18)
All right. You look great in the card. I love it. Well, we appreciate having you on and I want to turn it back to John, where he's going to talk about some upcoming SALT conferences and hopefully we get you back soon after the election and talk about the direction of the environment, the economy, and all things related to chemistry, but thank you so much for coming on today, Doc.
Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (40:39)
Anthony, I can't thank you enough. Just for me, this is a great opportunity. I appreciate it so much.
Anthony Scaramucci: (40:44)
Well, I want your message out there. I just think it's super important. Let's turn it back to John. I think we got the best of him, particularly when I said that the bookcase was green for a reason, Doc. I think we really nailed him. Go ahead Darsie.
John Darsie: (40:57)
Anthony's jokes always hit hard, but thanks everybody for joining us today on the SALT talks with Dr. Rocks.