Liquid Assets

Ravi Kurani
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Business
  • Updated Biweekly

From policy to profit, Liquid Assets uncovers the business and technological implications of water in a changing world.

  1. Jul 19

    Zach Hamilton: What's Really in Your Tap Water and Why PFAS Break All the Rules

    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/

    Zach Hamilton: What's Really in Your Tap Water and Why PFAS Break All the Rules

  2. Jul 2

    Alec Ajnsztajn: The Reactor That Destroys PFAS Instead of Just Capturing It

    Between 97 and 99 percent of all humans have measurable levels of PFAS in their blood. Every major watershed on Earth has tested positive, including the Arctic and Antarctica. Until recently, every technology designed to address that contamination just moved it somewhere else. Alec Ajnsztajn is trying to end that, by destroying the molecules entirely. As co-founder and CEO of CoFlux Purification, Alec is commercializing a covalent organic framework reactor that captures PFAS and then destroys the carbon-fluoride bonds under UV light, converting the molecules into fluoride and CO2. No concentrated waste. No hazmat landfill. No incineration truck. The contamination is gone. What we cover: Why PFAS compounds are nearly indestructible: carbon-fluoride bonds are among the strongest in organic chemistry, which made them invaluable from Manhattan Project equipment to Teflon cookware to semiconductor photoresists, and also why they accumulate in human tissue indefinitely.How every mainstream treatment technology today (granular activated carbon, ion exchange resins) concentrates PFAS rather than eliminating it, and why that concentrated waste still has to be incinerated or injected underground.Why CoFlux is starting upstream at contaminated aquifers, AFFF foam change-outs at airports and military bases, and industrial wastewater, rather than at the drinking water tap, where new materials face the highest regulatory bar.How the Department of Defense's March 2025 guidance carved out an explicit procurement pathway for novel PFAS destruction technologies, and why that distinction between a paid pilot and a real contract is the difference between runway and revenue.Why scaling PFAS capture nationally on granular activated carbon effectively means scaling coal mining, and what it would take for regulations to create on-ramps for destruction technology before the market ratifies incumbents for another generation.The physics of a deep-tech startup: CoFlux was built out of Alec's PhD and postdoctoral work at Rice University alongside co-founders Jeremy Daum and Dana, and after roughly two years of materials science development, the company's first field skid is heading to a government site in New Mexico this summer.Alec Ajnsztajn is the co-founder and CEO of CoFlux Purification, an Activate fellow company developing a covalent organic framework reactor that captures and destroys PFAS in contaminated water streams. He holds a Ph.D. from Rice University, where his work on porous photocatalytic polymers became the scientific foundation for CoFlux. Connect with Alec on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alec-ajnsztajn-ph-d-a6667564 Book rec: Robert Caro's "The Power Broker" on how infrastructure gets built, who gets to decide, and what happens when accountability disappears from that process. Alec read it in high school, again in college, and says it still shapes how he thinks about where CoFlux fits into a 30 to 40 year infrastructure transition. Also available on: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

    Alec Ajnsztajn: The Reactor That Destroys PFAS Instead of Just Capturing It

  3. Jun 24

    Terry Arko: Why the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Keeps Turning Green

    The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has been turning green since the 1920s, and the reason is baked into its original design. The pool stretches roughly a third of a mile, sits one and a half to two and a half feet deep, holds about 6.5 million gallons, and was built on Washington D.C. marshland that has been slowly sinking ever since. Ravi Kurani brought in Terry Arko, Product Training and Content Manager at HASA Pool with over 45 years in the industry, to diagnose what is really going on and whether it can actually be fixed. What we cover: Still water is algae's best friend. The pool was intentionally designed to stay still to function as a mirror, which means strong surface circulation, the intervention that would help most, directly conflicts with the pool's purpose.The 1920s design got the basics wrong. Built on unstable marshland with asphalt paving and no meaningful filtration, the ground shifted so badly that engineers later had to drive large timber beams beneath the basin to stop it from sinking. The pool has been leaking roughly 16 million gallons of water per year.Nutrients have gotten worse over a century. Phosphates and nitrates in the Potomac watershed are significantly higher today than in the 1920s, driven by population growth, industrialized agriculture, and runoff, giving algae more fuel than it ever had.Nanobubbles buy time, not a cure. Nanobubble ozone systems stay neutrally buoyant in the water column for days or weeks, and combined with hydrogen peroxide generate hydroxyl radicals that destroy a wide range of contaminants. Terry is skeptical the technology alone can fully solve the problem given the pool's underlying design constraints.Chlorine still has no equal on green algae. After 45 years in the pool industry, Terry has not seen a more effective algaecide than chlorine for green algae. The challenge at the reflecting pool is the cost and logistics of daily liquid chlorine dosing at that scale, plus concerns about chloramine odor in a public monument setting.Offline circulation could be the workaround. Terry's proposed fix is to route water through a high-flow filtration loop located off-site, then reintroduce it gently so the surface stays still, preserving the mirror effect while giving the water the turnover and treatment it needs.Terry Arko is Product Training and Content Manager at HASA Pool, a manufacturer of liquid chlorine, liquid acid, and specialty pool chemicals, with over 45 years of experience across field service, chemical development, and water treatment formulations. Connect with Terry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terry-arko-32ab65187 Book rec: Terry recommends "The Hidden Messages in Water" by Masaru Emoto (2005), which explores how environment and human behavior can affect the very structure of water, bridging the scientific and the personal. Also available on: Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

    Terry Arko: Why the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Keeps Turning Green

  4. Jun 19

    Why AI Data Centers Have a Water Problem: Stanford's Newsha Ajami

    Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, a data center somewhere uses water to cool its servers. Most people have no idea, and neither do the utilities supplying that water. Newsha Ajami, a hydrologist and founding director of Stanford's Governance for Risk, Resilience, Recovery Program (GR3), has spent years tracing water through the hidden seams of the economy, from the electricity charging your phone to the chips powering the AI boom. The U.S. still has no national water strategy, and emerging technologies are arriving faster than the water systems built to serve them.What we cover:- Water's hidden footprint in nearly every product and service, from gas and lithium extraction to electricity generation to data storage- Why the U.S. has no unified federal water mission, and how the Colorado River makes that problem impossible to ignore- The six-pillar national water strategy framework Ajami co-led through the Aspen Institute's National Water Strategy Initiative, two years in the making- How states are welcoming hyperscale data centers for jobs and tax revenue without tying those decisions to water or energy availability, leaving small utilities unprepared- Why standardized water disclosure and a new utility business model, more like a service plan than a metered drip, could unlock the sector the way transparency unlocked startup financeNewsha Ajami is the founding director of the Governance for Risk, Resilience, Recovery Program (GR3) at Stanford's Doerr School of Sustainability, and a commissioner at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Connect with her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/newsha-ajami-phd/Book rec: Newsha recommended Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (2021), a novel weaving three storylines across radically different eras, including one set aboard a generation ship guided by an AI, as a reminder that imagination remains the one thing no system can replicate.Also available on:Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

    Why AI Data Centers Have a Water Problem: Stanford's Newsha Ajami

  5. May 25

    Robert Strand: How a Film Festival Builds Political Will for Global Water Policy

    A film festival launched because one filmmaker couldn't find a place to submit his short about pharmaceutical pollution in New York City's water supply is now pursuing official UN Water partner status, operating across four continents, and screening PFAS films to law students in Tanzania before they even know they have a PFAS problem. Robert Strand built the World Water Film Festival from a cold email to a UN groundwater research center in Delft into an organization with over 400 film submissions and events in Wellington, Guangzhou, Rotterdam, London, and Buenos Aires. The bet is simple: data and white papers stay in people's heads. Film brings water crises into the body. And once it's personal, people move.What Ravi and Robert cover: • How a cold email to IGRAC, the UN groundwater center in Delft, seeded a partnership that brought Henk Ovink, lead architect of the 2023 UN Water Conference, to deliver opening remarks at the festival's New York launch, and why that single exchange became the organizing model for everything that followed. • Why film accomplishes what white papers cannot: Ovink's framing that film takes data out of the head and brings it to the heart became the festival's informal mission statement, tested across 90 films in five themed screening spaces at Columbia University's climate school. • How the festival's global footprint grew almost entirely through relationship chains, from a water journalist in Tanzania opening East Africa, to Water New Zealand hosting in Wellington, to the Dutch Consulate General requesting an event in Guangzhou, to a World Toilet Day screening at Museo Moderno in Buenos Aires. • Why Robert's team is now working with the Law Society of Tanzania to bring PFAS films to environmental law students, because contamination has already been confirmed in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania while legal frameworks to fund remediation barely exist. The film profiles Amara Strande, a Minnesota woman who lobbied the state to ban non-essential PFAS before dying of cancer. Minnesota passed the law three to five weeks after her death. • How Robert got his own blood tested at Quest Diagnostics, found himself in the low-to-intermediate PFAS exposure range despite never living near a Superfund site, and what that reveals about bioaccumulation through drinking water, inhalation, and PFAS-treated athletic wear. • What the gaps in over 400 submissions reveal as a roadmap: water footprints and PFAS in women's personal care products are almost entirely unrepresented on film, and next year's World Water Day theme of gender and water is the opening to fill both. • The story of Green Warriors, a film following activists who bought enough stock in a polluting company to earn a shareholders meeting seat, stood up when the company announced record profits, and demanded cleanup funding on the spot. That shareholder pressure contributed to France banning PFAS.Robert Strand is the Founder and Executive Director of the World Water Film Festival, a nonprofit that curates films exploring humanity's personal, communal, societal, and environmental relationship with water.worldwaterff.org Also available on:Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

    Robert Strand: How a Film Festival Builds Political Will for Global Water Policy

  6. May 5

    Cydian Kauffman: Cold Fusion, Deuterium, and the Future of Water

    One cubic meter of seawater holds enough deuterium to yield energy equivalent to 300 barrels of oil, and cold fusion may be the key to unlocking it. Cydian Kauffman, founder of Pure Water Northwest, traces the full arc from today's fragile water-energy grid to a future where coastal seawater simultaneously powers cities and produces drinking water as a byproduct. Along the way, he gets practical about what is actually in your tap and what you can do about it right now. What we cover: - Power and water are tightly coupled. A grid failure quickly becomes a water crisis, and most people who have spent their lives turning on a faucet have no backup plan. - Deuterium makes seawater a dual resource. At roughly 0.015% concentration, one cubic meter holds energy equivalent to about 300 barrels of oil. Cold fusion, recently achieved in a controlled lab environment, is the mechanism that could unlock power generation and deliver clean drinking water as a byproduct of the same process. - Cold fusion sidesteps the cooling constraint that conventional nuclear reactors face, dramatically reducing the water demand of power generation and opening the door to more distributed energy systems. - Reverse osmosis removes 85 to 99.9% of most contaminants, including microplastics, PFAS forever chemicals, chlorine byproducts, and oxidized arsenic. Units with a reservoir tank are the right call; the first draw from a tankless system is often not fully filtered. - Legal limits are not health limits. The EPA sets both a health limit and a legal limit for drinking water contaminants. For arsenic, the health limit is zero, but some level is legally permitted in tap water across most states. If you don't have a filter, your body is the filter. - Flint, Michigan's water crisis could have been addressed for roughly one million dollars using a government-backed coupon system to source and install 30,000 reverse osmosis units while infrastructure was repaired. The fact that it did not happen that way still puzzles Cydian. Cydian Kauffman is the Founder and CEO of Pure Water Northwest, a water treatment company based in Seattle. Connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cydian-kauffman/ Movie rec: The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999). Cydian's pick for a film that rewired how he thinks about perspective and communication, mapping directly onto how he translates complex water science into actionable decisions for homeowners. Also available on: Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

    Cydian Kauffman: Cold Fusion, Deuterium, and the Future of Water

  7. Apr 6

    From Uganda to Northeastern: How a Student Engineer Is Building Clean Water Access for 4,000 People

    What does it actually take to do charity work that lasts? Ravi Kurani sits down with Dhwani Bhatt, a fourth-year chemical engineering student at Northeastern University and President of Engineers Without Borders, who grew up in Uganda and returned as a student engineer to build a solar-powered water distribution system for the village of Nakyenyi. In this episode:→ Why EWB surveys 50+ households before touching a shovel→ The 3-phase build: hand pump → solar pump → gravity-fed distribution→ The borehole siltation crisis that forced the team back to the drawing board→ The 5% community contribution model that creates real ownership→ Why broken, abandoned NGO boreholes line the same village roads→ Imposter syndrome as a second-year student presenting designs to a community in need→ Book pick: "Not the End of the World" by Hannah RitchieThis episode is sponsored by HASA, the leader in water treatment solutions. Learn more at hasa.comConnect with Dhwani Bhatt on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dhwanikalbhattEngineers Without Borders USA: ewb-usa.org Follow Ravi Kurani:→ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kuraniravi→ Website: liquidassets.cc

    From Uganda to Northeastern: How a Student Engineer Is Building Clean Water Access for 4,000 People

  8. Mar 15

    He Scaled a $500M Product. His Advice for Water Tech? Slow Down

    A working prototype means nothing if you can't manufacture it at scale. Brad Augustine — VP of Hardware Engineering at Inspiren, former VP of Hardware at Lululemon — is the engineer who scaled the Mirror connected fitness device from startup to a $500M acquisition. In this episode, he shares the product development playbook that water tech founders and engineers need to hear. Brad spent 20 years in hardware product development: building LED lighting and ergonomic furniture at Humanscale, leading the engineering team that cut Mirror's production costs by 40% before the pandemic supply chain crisis, and now building AI-powered senior care hardware at Inspiren. We cover: → Why "hardware is hard" is actually "hardware is fun" → The real gap between a working prototype and mass production → How Brad's team cut 40% of Mirror's BOM cost — and why that saved them when the pandemic hit → Why water industry engineers need to think like product managers → The PFAS trap: are you building for wastewater or drinking water? Two very different customers. → How AI is finally helping engineers navigate tangled regulatory requirements (UL, IEC, FCC, SCADA) → Why "me-too" products die in hardware — you can't pivot a mold → What's next: AR beauty tech, AI inside physical products, and solving problems in your own community Guest: Brad Augustine → VP, Hardware Engineering at Inspiren → Former VP, Hardware at Lululemon (Mirror) → Former Design Engineering Manager at Humanscale → LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-augustine Host: Ravi Kurani, LiquidAssets This episode is sponsored by HASA — the leader in water treatment solutions. Keeping communities safe one drop at a time for over 60 years. Learn more at hasa.com.

    He Scaled a $500M Product. His Advice for Water Tech? Slow Down
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About

From policy to profit, Liquid Assets uncovers the business and technological implications of water in a changing world.

Information

  • Creator
    Ravi Kurani
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    64
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Ravi Kurani
  • Show Website
    Liquid Assets