Water Is a Soup: What's Really in Your Tap Water with Zach Hamilton

Zach HamiltonHi, my name is Zach Hamilton. I'm the founder of Aqueduct Research. We are a company that researches, develops and builds residential reverse osmosis machines. Our goal is to try to deliver the cleanest water to every individual house, focusing purely on drinking water and the machines that will make it more plentiful in people's lives.

Ravi KuraniYou said something before we hit record that I thought was really interesting. You said water is a soup. I think that's just such a great analogy to water because I don't think people understand that the chemicals that are in there touch on that. Like, what did you, what do you mean? And what are you working on?

Zach HamiltonYeah, so I say water is a soup and that it's going to be a little bit different everywhere. Right? So, you know, you make a chicken noodle soup in one culture, it's going to be a lot different from a chicken noodle soup in another culture. Call it the same thing, whatever. You know, there's different contaminants and different water supplies that could be from, hey, where the actual source water comes from. Or it could be something about, you know, the infrastructure on the way to your house or, you know, even down to the infrastructure within a house. You know, we have all these different chemicals that are in water, not all of them harmful, but they're all there.

Ravi KuraniRight?

Zach HamiltonSo, you know, we, we want to build systems and filtration systems to think about the, the largest spectrum of things that are harmful in water rather than just like, hey, this specific source has something wrong with it. The way that you would treat like, well water or something like the water is different in California than it is in New York and we should treat it a little bit differently depending on what we're trying to filter from it.

Ravi KuraniAnd when you say that there's contaminants in water and some are harmful, some are not, what, like, just for the audience, for somebody who doesn't understand what a contaminant is like, can you just touch on. You know, we've heard of pfas, microplastics. There's the ph, you know, there's this high ph. Water, like what are contaminants and what are you, like what are you looking for?

Zach HamiltonSo I guess, you know, you could qualify anything in water as a contaminant, right? Because you know, water is just H2O. Being humans though, we, we don't want to drink just pure H2O. It tastes weird. You know, distilled pure water tastes odd. It's not necessarily bad for you, but it tastes odd. You know, as the water moves through these systems, it picks up everything. You know, it's the, it's the universal solvent. So it's going to pick up whatever, generally whatever it goes by. So you know, we've got PFAs, we've got, you know, disinfection byproducts, you know, the things that are created because of the chlorination process. You know, we, we have to chlorinate our water as it moves through the system. I would consider chlorine a contaminant purely just because our body doesn't have a chlorine requirement. You know, there's all sorts of stuff in there, right? It's like I said, it's a soup of chemicals. Some of them aren't bad for you. You know, you've got some, some sediment or some rust in water. That's not necessarily bad. It makes the water look bad. You know, we don't like that it stains things but, but we again don't have a requirement for iron in our water. Some people, you're going to get iron in different places of your diet. So yeah, I would consider everything in water a contaminant that's not positive for the body and that includes most things that are in there. The disinfection products themselves, the byproducts, the modern contaminants, the pfas, the Gen X, those kind of long chain hydrocarbons that are more created in the past a hundred years. And then you've got your standard contaminants of arsenic. That's in a lot of well water. It's, it's, you can mitigate it but you know, there, there are dangerous things in some water supplies that need to be filtered out down to bacteria cysts. The living side of things too. I like to classify the contaminants as kind of two parts. One is the living side and then the non living side. They have two different treatment methods, both very effective but you know, there is a difference between, say, a bacteria that's in water or a cyst or a virus and something like lead or copper or, you know, onto the inorganic stuff like the pfas or those large forever chemicals.

Ravi KuraniAnd so if I was kind of a layperson living in New York City or Austin, Texas, or wherever I am, and let's maybe zoom into the US Just to keep the kind of question here contained, what should I be like, what are the top three things that I should be looking out for my water? I actually get this question asked a lot as a water guy, and they're like, in your drinking water, like out of the tap, Should I be worried about lead? Cause they think of Flint, Michigan, like, what are the major things people should be looking out for?

Zach HamiltonYou know, there's, there's so many things that can be in there, right? And you know, you can do a laboratory test things. I mean, tap score, simple lab, like they do these wonderful tests. They can be quite expensive, right? You know, three, $400. And that's not something you can really make cheaper. You know, you can't use test strips for a pool to find, you know, your, your levels of certain things, especially like PFAs. The things I worry about are the things that the EPA or the local water systems are not mandated to treat. So a lot of the new modern contaminants, they operate on the human body at such a low level, meaning parts per trillion level. You're talking about. One drop of water in 20 Olympic swimming pools is a contamination level that would exceed what the limit should be for your health. It's those modern contaminants that I worry about more than the traditional ones just because they take new technology to filter out of water. And that technology is still quite a few years away from even being mandated by the state. You know, the state has started testing a lot of contaminants, but not all of the contaminants they test for have mandates for their maximum action levels.

Ravi KuraniYou're referring to like PFAs and PFAs here, Is that kind of what you're talking about, correct?

Zach HamiltonYeah, yeah, that's, that's the new, you know, major thing that we're, we're looking at are those forever chemicals. You know, they don't break down in the environment, so they tend to go through water supplies. And the problem is, you know, we've got say, these PFAs from, say, firefighting foam, works amazing for fighting fires. But if you look at Air Force bases, we have all of those Firefighting chemicals going into the groundwater. And since they don't break down in the, in the environment, we have those leaching into water supplies, and there's no real way to get them out of the water supply. If that's your source water, that's your source water. You can't just say, we're not going to pull water from this area because the area is too big. So, yeah, those, those are the ones I think about the most. Those are the hardest ones to remove. But obviously things like lead levels, I mean, if you have high lead levels, your body doesn't have a lead requirement.

Ravi KuraniRight.

Zach HamiltonLuckily, lead's generally easy to mitigate. It's something you can swap a couple of pipes in the house and bring lead levels down dramatically. The modern stuff is much, much harder to get out, especially at scale.

Ravi KuraniI was actually asked this question the other day, and they said, we've covered PFAS and PFAS on the podcast. It's obviously a big topic that comes up. Somebody was like, what really is. We obviously can imagine that drinking fire, you know, fire retardant is probably not good, but what really is the issue? Like, and like you said, one drop over, I think 20, 20 Olympic swimming pools. Like, if I have less than one drop, is it fine? Is it, is it like, I should just have zero if I, if I drink this stuff? Like, what, what exactly happens? Like, what's, what's the problem here?

Zach HamiltonYeah, so this is the, the inversion. This is where forever chemicals are a lot more dangerous than they may seem at these low concentrations is. This is a situation where the dose does not make the poison. A lot of these chemicals, they mimic hormones in your body. So very, very small amounts of these chemicals are able to attach themselves to the hormone receptors within your body and cause your body to do things kind of on its own. So if you think about, hey, like how a vaccine works or how, you know, any type of hormonal treatment works, you're shortcutting that with chemicals that are coming in at a certain time, say, during gestation or a certain time in one's life. Those effects on the body are. They're generated by the body, right? It's just that little bit of chemical coming in, attaching to a receptor that it shouldn't be attaching to at that point in life and causing whole system issues. So, you know, endocrine disrupting chemicals are not necessarily dangerous in that they're poison. They're dangerous in that they change the way that your body works internally. Unlike, say, lead or mercury or Something where it's building up in say a thyroid gland. It's not about that it's building up in your body. It's that it's attaching to receptors that should be attached to by natural hormones depending on, you know, which stage of life we're in.

Ravi KuraniI want to touch on something that you, you said earlier and especially since we're talking about the effects of these chemicals on the body. You had, you had mentioned earlier that chlorine for example, is necessary for sanitizing the water. However, it's not something that, that the body needs or is a requirement for the body. What is a requirement for the body? And, and you'd mentioned this point on distilled water too, is right. You've taken everything out and that's also, you know, tastes weird. There's all this talk about like remineralization of water. You know, like what, like what does your body need from water?

Zach HamiltonThere's a huge amount of discussion around this about how, you know, say distilled water is bad for you or pure reverse osmosis water, which is close to distilled water, is actively bad for you because it strips minerals out of your body and actually takes them away. And the hard part about this argument is that that is technically true.

Ravi KuraniRight?

Zach HamiltonSo it is technically true that if you were consisting or if you were subsisting on a diet of no food whatsoever and say you were doing a 30 day water fast, the pure distilled water or pure H2O, it will strip some of those minerals away from you. But over 90% of our, our mineral intake is, is via food. So if you're, if you're eating food, your mineral intake is there. It's good. You know, the pure distilled or reverse osmosis water wouldn't be bad for you. That being said, I still remineralize my water. All the machines I build have remineralizing cartridges because I like the way it tastes. You know, I like the way that Evian tastes versus Dasami. Yeah, I think it makes the water taste better. I think it's a little softer. So I add those, those minerals back in to, to change the way the water tastes to raise the ph a little bit from the reverse osmosis process, which brings it down a little bit. So yeah, it's a pure preference of mine. It's a preference of, I think most people, if you, if you put a bunch of water next to each other and say have distilled all the way up to, you know, heavily remineralized water. Most people will prefer the remineralized version. I don't put a lot of weight on the science of it. I put a lot of weight on just what people like to drink.

Ravi KuraniLet's jump into kind of what you're working on then. Right. You said all of your have remineralization. What exactly is aqueduct research and what are you working on?

Zach HamiltonYeah, so I'm trying to build essentially the perfect machine to sit inside of someone's house and to solve the problem of drinking water. I include cooking in this as well, because that's another direct consumption of water. You know, less than 1% of the water that comes into someone's house is used for drinking. So my opinion is if we've got this big system that is, you know, huge, this big water infrastructure system, we would have to control every tendril of that system to deliver perfect water to someone's house. And in the modern environment, with modern contaminants, it's just, I don't think something that's going to be possible. The scale is just too large, it's too complex. But if we want to filter just the 1% that comes to our house that we're drinking, what should we do to make that perfect? Right. So we don't need to use these disinfection chemicals like chlorine because it's in a sealed container. It's only a small amount of water relative to everything that's coming in. So right now I'm working on building all stainless steel systems to get away from microplastics as much as humanly possible. So I'm building laboratory grade reverse osmosis systems for homes. Like I said, I'm doing all stainless steel right now. In the future, we may move to some other stuff that will make the machines a lot cheaper and easier to say, maintain yourself. Yeah. Aqueduct research is trying to build just the perfect home water system, starting with a very high end product to try to say, hey, we've got the best here. And then working our way down to something that is more accessible with materials that still don't leach into the drinking water, but still remove all of the broadest spectrum of things from water. We want to be able to set this machine anywhere and say whatever your source of water is, as long as it's coming from the city and it's not ocean water, then anything coming out of this machine will be not only safe to drink, but will taste good. Technically, our machines could probably filter seawater. You could throw the feed into a lake, a pond, whatever they're not built for that. They're built for using municipal or well water. But the idea is we want to build one solution that you set it down and it works. You don't have to worry about what your source is. You don't have to worry about your different contamination levels, your iron levels, your nitrate levels, whatever. Put it in, hook it up, water comes out of it perfect. That's. That's the goal here.

Ravi KuraniAnd let's kind of dig into reverse osmosis. I feel like for. For. For the audience, there's kind of. Maybe here's kind of an AI prompt of, like, explain it to me. Like, I'm five. Like, how does. How does reverse osmosis work? And in that, maybe you can kind of explain how the product actually is deployed. Right. Is this something that sits on top of your kitchen counter? Yeah. What exactly is it?

Zach HamiltonReverse osmosis is, in my opinion, and I think a lot of opinions, is the gold standard of water filtration. It's probably easiest to explain if you explain what it's not. So, you know, in a standard water filter, if you. You think like a Brita, right? So you've got the water that is flowing through a filter medium. In a Brita, that's carbon. So when water flows through that carbon, the contaminants get caught in the carbon, Right? So you have to change the filters every once in a while purely because things build up in the carbon, they get stuck in there. Whereas reverse osmosis, you have kind of the same method. You use pressure to force. To force water through. You know, something with a bunch of little holes. But where it's different is that there is a secondary flow in there that has a waste component. I call it waste. It's. It's really just slightly less clean water. But the idea is only some of the water that you force into the filter will end up in the product stream. The rest will be kicked over the side with the contaminants that's in it. So it's more of a sorting mechanism than it is something where contaminants get stuck. So this wastewater kicks off to the side, and it kicks off all the salts, it kicks off all the PFAs, everything that didn't fit through the tiny, tiny little holes in the membrane that are infinitely smaller than the holes that are in, say, a carbon filled.

Ravi KuraniSo if I'm just kind of going to say that back to you, it's still, at its root, a very similar technology to, like, a Brita filter or a carbon filter. Where you're basically pushing water through, through a membrane and then the stuff that's bad is basically getting caught inside there. And then what ends up after is your, is your cleaner water. However, in nro, what's happening is the sorting mechanism basically discharges or kind of removes the water that has the bad PFAS and the other chemicals inside there and then leaves you with ultra pure water. And that's because the kind of filtration holes in RO is just so much more smaller than what you have in a carbon filter, correct?

Zach HamiltonYeah. So it's filtering at the molecular level. You know, you can't see the holes. Like if you, if you unroll an RO membrane, you, you can't see holes in it at all. You open up a carbon filter, you'll see, you know how it works? It looks like carbon, it looks like a sponge because it is, you know, it is, it is specifically designed to trap things where RO is designed to only let water through and then flush out everything else.

Ravi KuraniAnd when you look at the, the pore size or the membrane size inside of an RO filter, that, that's small enough to filter out the pfas and the pfas, I mean, those, those molecular structures. So it is solving for this, this issue, correct?

Zach HamiltonYeah. You know, most PFAs can, it can be captured by carbon, you know, which is, which is great. So, but even then they are large molecules that won't make it through an RO membrane. So like I said, it's the gold standard because it filters really everything except water. It does it so well that we have to add good things back to it, you know, after the RO process. The only hard part of this is the RO membrane is fragile. You know, it, it won't accept water with chlorine in it. It will accept it, but the chlorine will eat through it. So we have to do a lot of pre filtration of say, sediments and other, you know, chlorine, things like that, that the membrane doesn't like. It doesn't react well, it lessens its life. So, yeah, it's a, it's a very fragile thing, but it works exceptionally well if you're able to feed it the kind of water that it wants to filter.

Ravi KuraniWhat is the replacement schedule on ro? I mean, it seems like the mechanism is a little bit different because you're not actively trapping the stuff inside of the filter like you would a carbon filter. But I mean, after so many uses, does it, does it like have any sort of sticking, does stuff get out stuck on the Membrane. What's, what does it look like?

Zach HamiltonYeah, they do have a life, right? Like they have a lifespan. Generally, the machines that you see on the market, the lifespan of the RO membrane itself is about double that of the pre filters. I build all these machines to last for about a year and then I also build them so that everything's changed at once. Right. So, you know, if you're going to be taking, taking filter canisters out, you're going to get some water around, you might as well just replace everything at once. So, yeah, that's, it's something that is a wearable item on the machine, you know, depending on the, the input water. Right. So if your input water has a lot of sediment, has a lot of other stuff in it, you're, you're looking at a faster filter change schedule. I like, like I said, I like to build my machines with the capacity of a year. I think that's a good amount of time to where, hey, you'll actually do it, you know, rather than it happening every three months. I'm sure everyone here has bought like an air filter or water filter or something, or refrigerator filter. And that light's blinking all the time, but it blinks every two months. So, you know, you start looking at this like kind of printer and ink model of, you know. Yeah, they sold me the filter for $200, but it cost me $100 every three months. Like that doesn't, that doesn't seem right. So, yeah, that's another one of the core tenets of, of our research here is all of our filter media and all of our consumables are commodified. So they use the same size, the same interface, the same, you know, everything as any filter you can buy at say, Home Depot or on Amazon. So we don't do the printer and ink model. Of course we will sell the filters, the replaceable media, but it's not something that you have to buy from us. And that's one of the big beefs I have, I guess, with the existing residential systems is, you know, it's $100, $200 for the machine and then like I said, 50, $100 every time you have to change the filters. And you know, sometimes that that machine is no longer used, you know, that interface on the filter is no longer used. And now you have a machine that you can't get new filters for. And that happens every couple of years, every three years. So, yeah, I just want to kind of break that cycle and build machines that are meant to last 1020 years. Things that are maintainable. You know, you can replace the seals, you can replace the motor, you can replace the things that may go wrong after, you know, five, ten years. But your, your routine maintenance is all done by anyone. Done by anyone who's like I say, plumber's apprentice level.

Ravi KuraniRight.

Zach HamiltonSo as long as you could say, swap a faucet in your house, you could, you could replace these or have the plumbers apprentice come out for, for 100 bucks to do it.

Ravi KuraniAnd when you. Let's kind of jump over to actually how this looks. The plumber's apprentice. What am I installing here? Does this go underneath like my, my kitchen sink and I'm, you know, taking the little U pipe and kind of unscrewing it and then going ahead and putting this in. Like what is it? What does it actually physically look like?

Zach HamiltonYeah. So, you know, we, I haven't built any of the under sink systems yet. Like that problem is it's really a plastic only solution. You know, if you're, if you're shipping a box to someone's house and saying, hey, install this here, I can't build a stainless steel, you know, feed pipe that will be bent to the correct dimensions. That would have to be something that's done on site. So I build all of these machines right now as freestanding machines. Actually. I'll show one of them here. So this is the prototype that's in my house. So that's I think seven stages uv, you know, full RO system. So that sits just in my kitchen. It's about the same size as say, you know, water cooler. And it just, it needs electricity. It needs a feed line and a drain line. It uses a very small amount of electricity when it's running like 2,250 watts. But it does require that electricity. It needs pressure to operate. So yeah, I like the freestanding thing because it lets me use the full size filter media. It lets me use things that are very commonly available rather than miniaturizing into a countertop version. When you miniaturize filter media, you just get less filtration capacity. There's no physical way. It's a physics problem. Right. So I need to have water moving past something at a certain rate and certain things need to be taken out. So the bigger my filters can be, the longer they last. It's a compacting scenario. I wish there was a way to say, like, change the physics of it, but there isn't. It's time in contact with the filter media. You need certain sizes to do things. So I have made the decision to build these freestanding machines also because they don't need to be custom installed to every house. Right. You don't need someone under the sink, bending pipes or drilling holes in countertops. You just, you set it down, you move, you can go to the next house. There's no, it's a non destructive install.

Ravi KuraniAnd people have water coolers. Right. They're familiar with what the general use case or kind of the look of this is. And so swapping it into whether your water cooler may already be. Is not the end of the world.

Zach HamiltonCorrect. Yeah. It doesn't need to be actually even that close to the water source. You know, it does have to have a line running to it, but there's already a line running to your refrigerator. There's all sorts of stuff that you can tap into. Doesn't really matter how long those runs are. So yeah, anyone who has a water cooler right now, imagine you just replace that and then you don't have to lug those five gallon jugs anymore. One of the big things is making this clean water less precious. Over the years I've had a bunch of different offices and whatever where I am getting the five gallon jugs delivered. And you just think about the infrastructure, right? You've got, you've got a guy on a truck that is hauling water around and you've got all of the environmental impact from that. You've got the plastic from the bottles, those bottles need to be sanitized, all that stuff. You have to store them in your house. It's like, why are we doing that when we have water running literally three feet away that we can filter. Yeah. Use it to cook with. Like our Christmas tree gets fed RO water. Your pets should be drinking it. You know, we want to make it less precious so that you're not treating it like a bottle of evian that costs $5 at the airport or at the airport, depending on which one. It's like 10, $10 now.

Ravi KuraniRight.

Zach HamiltonSo, you know, rather than, than using this, this good water, this, you know, stuff that's, that's coming in bottles and throwing the bottles away, why don't we just make it ourselves? You know, it doesn't take that much power. It's possible, right? We, we have a solution to this problem.

Ravi KuraniYou mentioned UV just a second ago. Just kind of replaying that back to you. There is a, there's a pre filter that basically takes out the chlorine because the chlorine is bad for the ro. It goes through the RO and then it goes through a uv, which is ultraviolet. What is, what's, what's the purpose of that?

Zach HamiltonYeah, so we actually, we do, I do the UV treatment prior to the RO stage here just because, you know, we want no bacteria in the RO filter that can, that can cause some harm for it. After the pre filtration stages, we go into UV and uv, it's a miracle. Right. So it's just light, it's just high intensity light and it's very, very good at killing living organisms. You know, if you put too much UV light on yourself, you'll notice that you get a sunburn. Right. So it's bad for your eyes, it's bad for everything. It's bad for all living creatures. You know the old phrase that sunlight is the best disinfectant is true from a scientific standpoint as well. So I love UV purely because all it does is shoot light into water and it kills things. So you know, with these living contaminants, we don't, we don't have to deactivate them, we don't have to change their chemical structure. We just have to make sure they're not living anymore, not able to replicate. Right. I don't know if people consider viruses living or not. I think that's an argument. But we don't have to change the structure of the virus, we just have to make sure it's inactivated. So UV does a great job with that. It's almost like radiation, but it doesn't leave any traces, it just leaves dead things. And those dead things aren't bad for you, luckily.

Ravi KuraniRight.

Zach HamiltonAnd the new systems I'm building also, we're doing two stages of uv. So the UV before we go into the storage tank and then a UV function on the spout as well. Spouts are always hard because you have air and water exposed the environment. And that's how life is. Right. Like you take air and water, you put them together in a warm environment and you get life. So we're adding UV stages to the rings around the spouts so that that bacteria doesn't build up there. It's, you know, you're always fighting it. There's no real way to fight it in a non enclosed system, but we do our best to help that environmental bacteria die on, on the spout.

Ravi KuraniI mean, and water is the petri dish for life. Right. I mean it's kind of have something that, that life needs to grow through. So. Yeah. Yep.

Zach HamiltonSo you know, when we, when our product water is sitting in that storage tank, it's Sealed, right? So we have no environmental bacteria. We've already killed everything on the UV stage. But we have really, really clean water. And life really likes clean water. So with no disinfectant in the water, it doesn't have the ability to fight for itself the way that it would in, say, municipal pipes. So yeah, we, we have to take quite a few step that clean water stays clean once we've generated it.

Ravi KuraniTotally makes sense. I want to jump into the why, why. Why do you. How did you get into this? You started researching water. What's your. What's your story?

Zach HamiltonSo I was living in Detroit during the Flint Water Crisis and like, living in a little city called Hamtramck. If people know Detroit and you know, my water didn't taste good, I never really thought anything of it, personally. I've never been a big like plastic water bottle person. I. I find them annoying. You know, I drink too much water to where it's. My car would just fill up with them, you know. So I was like, all right, I. The Flint thing was happening. I got to figure out, all right, is my water bad here? And then I was like, all right, well, it's $300 for a test to see what's in the water or it's $300 to buy a reverse osmosis system. So like, well, that's an easy choice. I'll just. I'll buy the thing that. That takes care of it. And I was just blown away that even with these cheap RO systems, I'm able to get really good water for a very good price and I don't really have to worry about what the contaminant is, right? So if my water has lead coming into it, then it doesn't really matter because it's going to take care of that. So it was. The Flint Crisis was the impetus for this, but it was more about how the Flint Crisis was handled, right? So it was almost a full year, I think just over a full year before the government of the city of Flint notified the citizens that the water was unsafe to drink. A full year after they had scientifically proven that the water was unsafe to drink. And that got me into kind of how the EPA regulates water and more into how the EPA enforces violations to regulations. So you've got these massive time frame between when something happens and the water becomes unsafe to drink and when the action is taken. And that action, usually it's just a letter in the mail, right? So like, during that whole time, everyone's drinking this water thinking it's Fine. And I was like, well, that's a problem. And when you look at the structure of how water districts work in the U.S. you know, there's 150,000 separate water districts in the U.S. you just start to see this, this problem of, hey, even if these people are doing their best, you still have this giant delay between contamination and notification that is unacceptable to me. So, you know, you won't see me at political rallies holding signs that says clean water now.

Ravi KuraniRight.

Zach HamiltonI don't think they're going to solve that problem. I think the problem is up to us to solve. And after, after, you know, installing that first system, I was like, wow, this, this is a solvable problem, right? Like, I can build machines that solve this and solve it perfectly. You know, really. Since then, everywhere I've moved, you know, I don't own a house. So like I've always lived in apartments. There's a, you know, restriction there for what I should build. And then, Yeah, I mean, what, 20 different prototype machines later, I, I've got this stainless steel one here. So, yeah, I just have a passion for solving it because it's it again, with some fairly simple science, you can solve a problem and then you don't have to worry. Right. Like once it's installed, once you've got that machine, you, you really, that's just taken off your mind. You just are drinking perfect bottled water for everything. Yeah, that's, that's really where I come into it. It's not as heavily from the health aspect. Obviously drinking water is better for you than drinking soda. It's, it's just such an overwhelming amount of your body. You know, depending on your age, it could be between 60 and 90% of your body. It's, it's the number one chemical you drink or I'm sorry, it's the number one chemical that you're made of. It's the number one thing that you consume. So if we're looking at chronic exposure or volume of exposure, it's not like you're just drinking one beer or something. You're drinking this all day, every day. You're eating it. It is your life. So it's the scale of the problem from a overarching society perspective. It's the scale of the problem from your body's perspective and that it has a solution. We can solve this.

Ravi KuraniWhen you look at the infrastructure problems in water, you'd mentioned Flint, Michigan, the issue between contamination and notification, if you had a magic wand to wave, obviously aqueduct research is working on the in home, I think we understand why you're doing what you're doing, but if you were to have the ability to change the system, what would you do? If you had this mandate, what would you change?

Zach HamiltonIt's a really hard question because you run up against financial limits really quick. So if it were up to me, I'd wave the wand and replace every feed, water line and, you know, water treatment plant in the country or in the world. Right. The problem with that is there's, there's not enough infrastructure to do that. There's not enough companies out there that have enough carbon to create the size and scale of filters that would be required to even hit the current EPA projections, right? So, you know, you have this problem that's just so large and then you just have the structural problem, right? So is as long as you're centrally filtering water and distributing it, you are affected by every single thing that that water touches downstream, right? So if my water, I'm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn right now, if my water is treated in the Bronx, that means it has to run through all of the pipes to get to me. And it has to be disinfected from that central point or perfectly sealed, which is not possible in a real environment. It has to be chlorinated from that point enough to where it reaches the furthest tendrils of that water system. And in these big water system, that's, that's a lot of chlorine. You know, you have chlorine injection stations everywhere. But that means that even if you're the first person on the list, right after the water treatment plant, you're getting a huge load of chlorine. Not as many disinfection byproducts, but you're getting a huge load of chlorine. And then at the end, you're getting all the byproducts from, from a chlorine doing its job. You know, I think that we're going to move to a more decentralized system. You know, if you think about how, you know, back in the day used to get steam heat from the steam facility and that was pumped around the city to heat your house. And now most apartment buildings that are being built have split units to where you're not even heating your own apartment with one system, you're heating it with a system per room. You know, you can let rooms be colder during the winter that you're not using, right? So this is the way I see it for drinking water is, you know, I don't think the problem of, say, the whole city filtering water is Solvable. It could be possibly solvable at, like, a building level. I would love to see a building do a full RO system in the basement and then, you know, have like a luxury. You know, hey, our water is the best in the city, right? But realistically, I think we're going to be moving to a more decentralized point of use, filtration rather than, say, point of entry or, you know, centralized municipal filtration.

Ravi KuraniAnd are you thinking about kind of water supply and water production from a decentralized standpoint, or you're just thinking only about filtration and cleaning it up? Like these, these kind of RO systems that we could deploy, you know, kitchen top countertop or like under the sink. Or are you just referring to, like, atmospheric water generation? Right. We've had that on the podcast a few times.

Zach HamiltonYeah. Yeah. So I, you know, I'm of the opinion that the United States, like the vast majority of the United States, does not have a water quantity issue. We have a water quality issue. You know, you ask someone how much water costs on the street, you're going to get a different answer for every person that you ask. The fact is water is so cheap that we spray it on our lawns. It's. If you think of that like gasoline, like, you would never take a gasoline hose and spray it all over, you know, anything, right? Gas too expensive for that. You would never buy a bunch of Evian bottles and pour those into a pot to cook pasta. That, that, that's a crazy person thing, right? You know, we, we have this resource that is available, and I hope I'm not talking down about municipal water treatment people, because they, they do amazing work, right? It's. They just have a problem that is insurmountable. So I think that the people at the municipal will get us water that is, you know, technically potable, but then we'll have to polish it at home. So, yeah, the scale is just so large of that issue. You know, there are places with water scarcity problems. Oddly enough, the places with water scarcity problems are using a lot of RO to reuse water, Right? So rather than letting water go to waste down the waste stream, you can actually take sewage and put it through RO and reintroduce it to the system. Orange county did this. They call it toilet to tap. Scientifically perfect, right? That, that toilet water that has been filtered is cleaner than the water coming out of the ground, but people don't like it. You know, it's. That is a science versus perception issue that is cropping up in different Places around where water scarcity is a problem. Las Vegas, great example. You know, you've got all these pools, and on the Strip, you've got all these water features. And, you know, most of those casinos or most of those places with huge water features have their own water plants where they're reusing their. Their water, not necessarily their sewage or black water, but they're reusing gray water and they're using it in their water features and things that people aren't drinking. So, yeah, like I said, the problem is solvable. It's just more of is it worth solving or will people care if it's done that way? So, yeah, the water scarcity problem, not as big for drinking water just because it's 1% of the water that even comes to your home. It's just such a minuscule amount of water in the grand scheme that the quantity is not something I worry about.

Ravi KuraniTotally. Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. Zach, I ask everybody one final question before we shut down the podcast, and that is, do you have a book, a movie or a TV show that has had a profound impact on the way that you see the world?

Zach HamiltonOne of my favorite books is it's kind of a philosophy book, but it's called Finite and Finite and Infinite Games. It's by James P. Carse. It's a book about the games we play and essentially how there's two different types of games in the world. One is played to win, one has an end, it has a scoreboard. It has an end. You can declare a victory. Right? And the most interesting and most important types of games are those that you play to keep playing. I really, really took a lot from that book. I've read it ten times now, and I've given it to a bunch of people. And it really helps you kind of think about, all right, is this something I want to win? Do I want to declare a victory here and move on to the next, or is this a game I want to keep playing? Right. Am I. Am I continuing to win or continuing to hit milestones because I want to say I'm the best or because I want to keep going? And that's really, really shaped a lot of things I've done in just business the day to day as well.

Ravi KuraniI love that we'll throw those into the show. Notes, Zach. Absolutely insightful conversation. Thanks a ton.