Your tap water passed every government test this morning, and it still contains contaminants the EPA has no mandate to remove. Zach Hamilton built 20 prototype reverse osmosis machines trying to solve that problem, and his answer is a laboratory-grade, all-stainless-steel RO system designed to last 20 years in your kitchen. His core argument is simple and a little unsettling: 150,000 separate water districts are doing their best, but the infrastructure is too old and too slow to protect you from modern contaminants. The solution has to happen at the tap.
What this episode covers:
- Why water is location-specific: source water, aging pipes, and your home's own plumbing all add their own signature to what comes out of the tap, making every water supply a different "soup"
- How PFAS break the dose-makes-the-poison rule: as endocrine disruptors that mimic hormones, even trace concentrations at the parts-per-trillion level can trigger whole-system effects in the body
- Why the regulatory clock moves too slowly: in Flint, the city waited more than a year after scientific confirmation before notifying residents, and that delay is structural, not exceptional
- How reverse osmosis filters at the molecular level, forcing water through holes too small to see and diverting everything else to a waste stream, resulting in water so pure that minerals must be added back
- Why Zach runs two UV stages in his prototypes to handle living contaminants like bacteria and cysts, and how he sees point-of-use filtration following the same decentralization path as building heating
- The case against the printer-ink filter model: Aqueduct Research machines use standard, universally available filter media so owners are never locked into a proprietary replacement cycle
Zach Hamilton is the founder of Aqueduct Research, a company building residential reverse osmosis systems from durable, non-leaching materials. https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachhamilton
Book rec: "Finite and Infinite Games" by James P. Carse (1986). Zach has read it ten times. The distinction between games played to win and games played to keep playing reshapes how you evaluate almost every decision in business and in life.
Also available on:
YouTube: https://youtu.be/fvY6jZDabjc
Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/
