Most of us focus on the obvious when it comes to wellness, what we eat, how we move, and how much we rest. But there’s another daily habit that could quietly be affecting our health: the water we drink. We often think about diet, exercise, and even sleep when it comes to our health, but how often do we think about our water?

In this episode, I talk with Cydian Kaufman, water quality expert CEO of Pure Water Northwest, about what’s really in your tap water and how it could be affecting your energy, skin, and long-term health. Cydian explains the difference between “legal” and “healthy” water standards and shares practical tips on improving your water at home, from reverse osmosis systems to dealing with PFAS and other hidden contaminants. Know what you drink. Tune in now.

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Tapping into Health and Water Wellness with Cydian Kauffman

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Growing up on Long Island, my family, we always used some form of a water filter. It was always –– it was before Brita but there was a predecessor to it, now a lot of people use Brita, or we would use bottled water. However, living in Denver, we recently had a project where we reconstructed our water pipelines to get the lead out of the water. Since then, I’ve actually drank all my water out of the tap here in Denver, Colorado. Whether that’s the right decision or not, I am not sure, so I’m going to introduce to you my guest, Cydian Kauffman, who is one of the owners of Pure Northwest Water, to tell me about water as well as whether or not I’m making the right decision with this current situation.

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Cydian, welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me on. Appreciate being here. It’s Pure Water Northwest, by the way, just so you know. I love talking about water. I’d be happy to jump right in and talk about Denver specifically, if you like, however you want to approach it.

Yeah, I mean, I didn’t know. All I do remember is that a few years ago, they reconstructed the pipelines here in Denver and they said the project was to get the lead out of the water and that, since then, I’ve, at least, in my head, felt like just drinking the water out of the tap was perfectly fine.

It might be. What zip code are you in? What, if you don’t mind saying that?

Oh, wow. Yeah, we’re getting fine-tuned here. I’m in 80205.

Right. Let’s get specific. So, you’re on the Denver Water Board, water quality ––

Yeah, but I’m not elected to any water position here. I just ––

Yeah, I know. I mean, you’re on the main water in Denver, Colorado,

Yeah, I assume. I mean, I’m only like a mile and a half east of downtown.

All right, so if you look up, and most people in the country can do this, you can actually go look up water quality reports for whatever water quality you’re on, and there’s two ways to go about this. One is to just literally look up the water quality report for your municipality, which I’ve got right in front of me, two seconds of doing a Google search, I got the Denver Water Quality Report. Yeah, that’s going to bring you to a page with a bunch of lists of what they do and how they do it and, eventually, you’re going to get to exact contaminants that they test for and their results. If you don’t want to just take their word for it, though, you can go to a website called the EWG, the Environmental Working Group, then go to their tap water database, type in your zip code and find your municipality that way, and then you can kind of compare those two. Now, unfortunately for most people, this is going to be more annoying than good experience because there’s so much confusion in these lists, like what does it mean to have eight parts per billion of bromodichloromethane, which happens to be in Denver water. If you talk to someone like myself, we will know right away, bromodichloromethane, it’s a chlorine byproduct. It happens when you put chlorine in the water and it’s one of the total trihalomethanes, which is basically a category of chlorine byproduct that can be in the water. At really, really high amounts, you can have cancer from that. At the amounts that tend to be in municipalities, you would have to be very susceptible in order to get cancer from the amount of bromodichloromethane that happens to be in most municipalities. Some municipalities, though, have it at extremely high amounts. So, the particular water that you’re dealing with, it’s so much about your susceptibility to it and it’s so much about the amount that’s in the water, and it does require some expertise to interpret it and understand it, but doing that is definitely worthwhile. There’s a lot of solutions to get you there too.

You mentioned certain chemicals, and I don’t think it’s going to be that easy for anyone listening to follow bromodimethyl –– I’m probably ––

Bromodichloromethane, yeah.

You know what I mean? To follow all those chemicals. What are the general dangers that, say, the average person in any city across North America can face by drinking their city’s tap water on a daily basis?

Well, they can face radium. They can face arsenic. They can face hexavalent chromium, which is that Aaron Brockovich chemical, nitrates, pesticides, PFAs, forever chemicals, pharmaceuticals, all of those things are in city water. Some of them are not properly or fully, let’s say, restricted by the Environmental Protection Agency. So, all of these things can be in city water. Additionally, the infrastructure of the city that you’re in may have wood pipes, may have old metal pipes that have lead in them. They can have over-chlorination, they can have under-chlorination. They can have any of these problems, and it becomes so burdensome to people that they just use a shorthand, “My water is good,” or, “My water is bad,” or, “The water in our city is good,” “The water in our city is bad.” The water in Denver is considered pretty good. And it is considered pretty good despite the fact that it has a little bit of radium in it, and that’s known by the municipality, and radium is radioactive. It’s got a ton of chlorine and chlorine byproducts, and it’s got some other volatile organic compounds, some metals, some herbicides, hexavalent chromium is in the water at very low amounts. Now, the reason why this doesn’t get reported or have anything done about it is because the human body is incredible at filtering. So, the EPA sets two standards for drinking water. They set a legal level, which is called the maximum contaminant level, and then they set a health level, which is called the maximum contaminant level goal, so it’s the MCL versus the MCLG. The MCL is less restrictive than the MCLG, so the legal level is less restrictive than the health level, meaning you can get water that is exceeding the EPA’s own health level but it’s legal, so the municipalities are allowed to have that be in the water. And the reason is, is because the cost of those municipalities actually removing it down to the levels that are healthy is virtually impossible for some of them. So then a choice is made. The EPA had to make a choice. They were like do we insist that they get us to the health level and risk that municipalities literally have to close their doors and hundreds of thousands of people don’t get water or do we allow some water through and put it on the homeowner to treat their own water if it’s over that level?

So, obviously, they chose to not bankrupt these municipalities.

Right.

Now, if there is some contaminants, okay, I would say, I’m assuming that the EPA legal level, the relatively looser standard, if a municipality exceeds that, then it’s likely a really, really extreme health risk that people can encounter. But for the ones that are in between those two levels, in between the gold level and the standard level, what kind of health risks can occur, say, someone decides to drink that water and how effective is things like using a Brita filter or buying bottled water on preventing some of those?

Great questions. How likely are those things to have an effect on people? Very unlikely. That is why they are at that level, because the majority of people do not feel effects from it.

What effects have I seen? I’ve seen people have miscarriages because of it. I’ve seen people be sick, consistently sick, and not know why. I’ve seen my own daughter actually got eczema from very low levels of hardness in the water. And so the actual effects are very person based.

These are rare occurrences that I’m noticing because I am in water treatment so I have customers talking to me and telling me what they’re dealing with, then I test their water and then I have to research outliers and kind of help them figure out what the cause is and then help them fix it. As far as standard solutions, like the simple solutions that you buy off the shelf, like Brita, that’s helpful a little bit with some things. The tricky part of that is this is science so we can’t just throw one thing at everything and have it work. Brita is carbon. It’s called granulated activated carbon and all it is is literally really finely chopped-up pieces of carbon. And carbon is amazing because a single gram of carbon, if spread out, the surface area of it is spread out, it would cover three tennis courts. That is how much filtration capacity it has. It’s incredible at filtering, but it’s not incredible at filtering everything. EPA level of arsenic, for the legal level of arsenic is 0.01 parts per million. If you’ve got 0.005 parts per million in your municipality, which I’ve seen a lot, carbon may remove it or it may not. You may be drinking arsenic, you may not be. If, on the other hand, you have chlorinated water, like you do from a municipality, it will convert the arsenic into a form that’s easier to bond with and then carbon may remove it, but it also may be more removed by reverse osmosis. So the best catch-all is not actually carbon, the best catch-all is reverse osmosis. That is removing the highest level of contaminants. It’s going to be the best quality of water that you can get for your drinking water under your sink. So if you do an under counter solution for your water, reverse osmosis is going to be one of the best ways to go. And if you’re like, “I really don’t wanna deal with all this testing and figuring out,” then doing that is great. I will tell you though, there’s some failure with OR and if you don’t test beforehand, you run a very small risk of it failing, but, for the most part, for most people, if you are just feeling, “I really just want to solve it with a single solution,” reverse osmosis is the best way to go.

And if someone’s worried about something a little bit more subtle than, say, something like cancer or miscarriage, let’s say a common situation for someone listening might be, “I just am worried that my energy levels aren’t as great as they could be,” and, of course, if someone having that issue, they’ll probably try stuff like diet changes. They’ll probably try stuff like exercise. Is there any chance that some of this reverse osmosis solutions to even, say, moderately or pretty good drinking water could actually make a difference in this area?

If we’re talking about energy levels, it’s really interesting because now we’re talking about neurological functions, mitochondrial recovery, hormone balance. We’re talking about those things when they’re talking about energy level, right?

Yeah.

So lead exposure is linked to fatigue and brain fog and irritability. Chlorine, which is the most common thing anyone in the entire country is going to run into, has been shown to cause some oxidative stress affect the mitochondria which can affect energy level in some people. It can interfere with thyroid function in some people who are a little bit down on the autoimmune spectrum, a little bit closer to the autoimmune disorder area or who might have iodine deficiencies because maybe they’re not taking iodized salt or because they’re not eating enough of really deep greens. Fluoride is a really tricky one, because it has only been recently shown that that can cause some problems, but some people report sluggishness and fatigue from fluoride, but I’m going to throw that out there as a way out there idea. Biofilms can be chlorine resistant and, if they’re in your pipes, they can alter your gut flora. They can cause you to have an inflammatory reaction. Arsenic in water, chromium in water, those things can have an anti-inflammatory reaction. So, yes, it is actually true that water is going to carry with it things that will either help remove stuff from your body if it’s really clean or add stuff to your body if it’s not that that can, in some people, affect energy level or fatigue level, for sure.

And I’m assuming, just like everything else that you’re saying and a lot of things that we’re discovering about health advice in general, that a lot of it depends quite a bit on the individual and some people respond one way and another way, and the same way, like I feel like one of the directions we’re moving with regards to health in general is just away from this idea of a one size fits all program, a one size fits all set of advice, and so with everything being so individual, what is the easiest way for someone to figure out without having to go so deep into the research where there’s all these chemical names that people don’t understand and you brought up fluoride, where there are people who seem convinced that fluoride has a certain impact and then other people are saying –– and they can end up being some information confusion in that particular sense, so what’s the easiest way for someone to actually figure out, okay, individually, is the water I’m drinking a problem for me or do I need to just really focus on dietary stuff, kind of like when you talked about deep greens?

Yeah. Stephen, I’m going to answer you exactly what you’re asking me. I’m going to answer it as if it was five years ago first. Five years ago, I would have told you go to the Water Quality Association website and ask them for a local expert, get your water quality report and just beg the expert to explain it to you. And, usually, you’ll get free advice. We do this all the time. People call us with reports and say, “Can you help me interpret this?” Local labs also, if you get reports and you just take it into a lab, they will pull a nerd from the back, like myself, I’m a water nerd, pull a nerd from the back, walk up and say, “Yeah, this means this, this means this, this means this.” And then you got to tell them, “I am very concerned. I want to be based on the health level, not the legal limit. I want your answers to be based on the health level,” because if you go into a lab where you talk to most people, they’re going to tell you, “Yes, this is legal,” and they’re not going to really focus on the health limit, because most people avoid that whole topic. So, five years ago, my advice is get a water quality report, either by looking it up or paying for your own, for 300 bucks, you can get a full spectrum test done, then take that report either into a lab or to someone who is recommended through the Water Quality Association of America and get them to help you interpret it based on the health guideline, not the legal guideline, and then you can then determine for yourself, “Is this acceptable to me?” Nowadays, though, you can drop a PDF into ChatGPT and have it be 80 percent accurate. I mean, it’s really not 100 percent accurate but it is going to help clarify things for you in a way that you can then check what it says against data and you can say, “Prove to me this is true,” and it will get you a link and you can look at the link and say, “Yes, that’s true.” So, that’s a way people can do it by themselves. But don’t just take its first answer, because it is still inaccurate unless you ask it to clarify. So that’s how people can do it by themselves now.

And what kind of information about your own health do you need to have an accurate assessment of what does this mean for me. Like would some of the things, like results of a blood test from an annual doctor physical exam help inform what this level of this in your drinking water means to you specifically?

I can’t really speak to the health questions because I’m not a doctor, but I have had customers who have gone to doctors with Parkinson’s-like symptoms and customers who have come to us with Parkinson’s-like symptoms and we’ve identified manganese in their water, and I’ve suggested they talk to their doctor about excluding Parkinson’s because the manganese was there. And I’ve had the reverse where people have gone to their doctor with Parkinson’s-like symptoms and they’ve said, “Check your water for manganese,” and they’ve reached out to us, just by way of example. That’s acute. That’s easier. Energy level, there’s still not doctors who can identify problems with energy level with scientific accuracy. This is still not a thing. They can get close, they can get generalities, and they basically give you a list of things to try and, yes, water should be one of the things that you try. And you try one, it doesn’t work, you try another, it doesn’t work, and you go down the list, and, eventually, hopefully, your energy comes back. I know some doctors make claims that they can solve that, but –– I mean, that is –– this is like in the realm of we haven’t gotten quite there yet when it comes to just the word energy level, because energy level is very difficult.

Well, it’s also difficult because it means different things to different people. And what someone, one person might accept is like, “Okay, this is the energy level that happens when I age through my 30s into my 40s,” or something, another person might say, “Well, that’s unacceptable. I think I can do better.”

Yeah. And so much of it can be mental too. My daughter yesterday, I mean, I know this is a kid, but my daughter yesterday was talking about how tired she was. She was like half asleep and resting against something, saying, “I’m too tired to do anything,” and then my other daughter suggested she was going to go on the trampoline and, instantly, my daughter jumped up, had tons of energy, her face brightened, and she just ran out of the room to go get changed.

Yeah. I mean, so many things impact energy levels and, for some reason, I just imagine this weird scenario where someone goes to the doctor, they check everything about their water supply, they get Brita, some other things as well, and then the doctor just later on tells them, “Well, maybe don’t drink five nights a week,” and it turns out when they cut from five nights a week to one night a week, their energy level just kind of comes back to where it should be.

Yeah. Water is definitely only one part of the equation. And doing a reverse osmosis system, you may notice a huge effect or you may notice nothing at all. It’s got to come from the person. If a person’s sitting there going, “I don’t care about my water, I’m sure it’s fine,” that’s fine. Unless they’re on a well. I’m going to put a caveat to what I just said. If they’re on a well, they should not do that. In well water, you can have pretty much anything. A municipality is going to get, anything that’s in the water down to a level that is still in a range that could be not great for some people but, for the majority of people, it’s going to be fine. Even really bad municipalities, they can have some bad stuff in their water and some people can get really sick from them, but those are some people. The majority of people are going to be fine, and if you’re a person who thinks that you’re fine for most things, then great. But if you’re on a well, a well can have anything in it. Literally anything. We had a customer who called us because they had moved their cattle onto a land that they just bought and then they left for vacation. This vacation saved their life, by the way. They left for vacation. They came back from vacation and 50 of their cattle were dead.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. Now, just the body weight of cattle alone, that is dangerous water. Turned out that they had one of the rarest problems we’ve run into. It’s a naturally occurring cyanide spring. So, vegetation was decaying into the water in such a way that it was releasing cyanide into the water at high enough levels to kill that many cattle. You’re not going to notice cyanide right away so that guy’s going to be drinking his water and getting sick. He might keep drinking water to make himself feel better, because he doesn’t taste anything in the water. He’s dead if he did that, for sure. And so –– now, that’s a very rare example, but we’ve seen well water that has arsenic, super high levels of arsenic, radioactive elements in it. We’ve seen crystal clear, great smelling water have chromium and arsenic that are so high they would definitely cause you to get some sort of cancer, in well water, and some municipalities, when you buy a house, they do not even require to check for those things. So, don’t assume your well water is good.

Oh, if it’s well water, your own private well, get it tested. Do a full spectrum test, not the basic test. Share on X

Do not sleep on that advice. But other than that, if you’re on the municipality, it’s got to be based on your own interest, your own desire for making sure your water is the way you want it to be. So once you’re at that point, then you got to get information and go from there.

And then you talked a bit about municipalities, and I’m sure a lot of people listening are probably thinking to themselves, are there any specific municipalities, are there any specific regions where different people are going to care different amounts, and, for a lot of people, the quality of the water they drink every day is probably not on their radar, I think a lot of people think a lot more about their dietary and exercise-type regimens. But is there a spot, is there a spot, a city, a region where someone listening should be like, wait, you need to think about it now because this spot has been like a red flag for me?

Well, I’ve got a little bit worried about calling out some municipalities, and I don’t think it’s needed, because if you go to the Environmental Working Group and you look up their tap water database, they will give you a list of things that exceed health guidelines. Now, they are on the extreme end. So what they consider exceeding a health guideline is not the same thing as what other people would consider. So what you consider the EWG to be is the worst case scenario. If they list it, it’s in a sky is falling kind of viewpoint. You don’t have to listen to that but that’s your one extreme. And then also go to the municipality’s own water report and look at that. And then now you have the two ends of the spectrum and you have to decide which end you want to be focusing on. So, the reason why it’s not necessary for me to call out a specific municipality is, for example, I recently went to a home where a customer was on municipal water. It’s very near here where I am in the northwest, in one of the Sammamish City water quality areas, and they were complaining about their hair falling out and their shower was getting, their glass shower is getting caked in this white buildup, this chalk buildup, and so extreme that I had to do some research on what was going on, and it turns out they not only have just a massive chloride level, it’s not just hardness that’s building up, they have a lot of chlorides as well that are building up so the scale buildup would not just be solved by a softener. I knew some people in that area who put in softeners and it did nothing, almost, for the scale buildup. So they were like, “Why is my hair being affected? Why is this happening?” I looked it up and, behind all of that stuff, like being like, “Oh, we just need to solve the aesthetic problems,” no, they had forever chemicals in their water, PFAs, forever chemicals so like fire foam byproducts and Gore-Tex and Teflon byproducts were in the water, considered extremely harmful at this point. The EPA last year in April of 2024 reset the standard for PFAs levels to have to be below the parts per trillion which extremely small and incredibly rigorous for a legal level. Very rare to see that. But municipalities do not have to uphold this new restriction until 2029. So now we’ve got five years where people are living with PFAs in their water, and there are hundreds of thousands of homes that are drinking water with PFAs and forever chemicals, hundreds of thousands that are currently still legal and they’re drinking it. Rather than calling out a specific area, I’m just calling on everyone, just when this podcast is done, when you pull over in your car, look up the Environmental Working Group, type in your zip code or look up your municipality’s water report, just see what’s listed there. If anything looks alarming, then do my suggestion, call a local expert, ask them to help you interpret it. Go to a lab or, if you want to try it, use ChatGPT. You can call me too. I don’t mind short calls.

That’s a good segue to that. If someone did want to call you, what would be the best way to get a hold of you? What’s your website and your service?

Yeah. You can go to purewaternorthwest.com. We have helped people nationwide, even in other countries before. 99 percent of our customer base is in northwestern Washington state but I don’t mind calls from elsewhere as long as they’re short because I’m so busy. As long as they’re short calls and I can help direct you or guide you or say, if you have quick questions about contaminants, I can help you with that. But, yeah, the purewaternorthwest.com, all spelled out. Or if you type Pure Water Northwest into Google, you’ll find us. Actually, if you look up Cydian Kauffman, luckily, it’s such an unusual name, you’ll also usually find us that way.

Yeah. And let’s talk a little bit about your story. How did water quality become something, is it something you’ve always been interested in or is there a story about why it’s a task you decided to take on?

Yeah, no, honestly, I didn’t do well in chemistry in school and I have not been interested in it. The truth is, seven years ago, I was working as a property manager, and so a property manager’s job is supposed to be an advocate for both the tenant and the owner, like they’re supposed to advocate for both sides, not just one. So the tenant came to me and was like, “Yeah, I’ve got this brown water that smells like rotten eggs. What’s the deal here?” And I had no idea, I didn’t know anything about water at the time. Turns out it was just iron and iron bacteria that was releasing a hydrogen sulfide gas. It was actually not super harmful to drink but it was disgusting, and so might have given them a tummy ache at worst, but, obviously, didn’t know that at the time. Went and talked to the owner. The owner said, “I’m not fixing it if it’s not outside the legal limit so go get it tested.” I didn’t know how to get it tested. I went and got it tested, I figured that out, and it was within the legal levels. It was all like technically legal and I was like how is that possible? So, I reached out to Pure Water Northwest, was founded by Chris Pelton, and Chris explained to me what I explained here, that there’s two standards set by the EPA, and if this might be above the health standard or the recommended standard or the aesthetic standard, but it’s below the legal limit and I was like, “Okay, well, can you start working out a way to fix it? Because I’ve got to convince this owner to fix it.” I went and talked to the owner and he was like, “I don’t wanna fix it if it’s not illegal.” I was like, “You’re gonna lose the tenant and you won’t be able to get another one,” and so he agreed to fix it and we worked that out, but I was so interested in how all that worked, I started wondering what other effects was water having on people’s lives? Like a skin issue, like she had dry skin, nummular eczema, actually, from hardness in water, really low levels of hardness, and I didn’t know it was from hardness, we were always doing creams and stuff, but as soon as I got a softener, she has not had a problem like that hardly ever since.

Oh, wow.

And since then –– and that got me so into water quality that I just started getting involved and I went back to Chris and I kind of worked my way into the company and now I’m one of the owners. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about how much people’s skin and hair are affected by water quality. I had a customer who had suffered from rosacea almost all her life go away entirely just from a simple softener. So, yeah, like really red, deep red, inflamed spots all over her cheeks, gone. So, yeah, water can be a reason, that’s for sure.

So you saw how this was impacting people’s lives and that motivated you, and so do you still do the property management or are you solely in Pure Water Northwest?

I love that you asked that because I haven’t been asked that before. I actually still do property management from time to time. I used to have hundreds of doors that I manage. Now, I manage a few, and that’s just because some of the people from before liked me so much they weren’t really willing to let me go as a manager, but, yeah, Pure Water takes so much of my time, I really have to focus most of my attention on it.

Yeah. And then what did you start out doing with Pure Water and what are you doing now? How did that progression work?

Well, when I came in, Chris was running the company basically by himself, and so I was pretty good at operations and systems development, systems design, so I started, because I didn’t really know anything about water, I had him to stay with the company and keep doing his good work and developing systems around him so that he had a chance to actually leave. And then I had to work on sales. I did a lot of sales. I developed the system in the company and grew it. In 2022-ish, we had 10X what we were in 2019. Now, in 2025, we’re nearly double that. So we are growing quite a bit.

And if someone out here listening is hearing your story and thinking maybe they have something that they’re motivated towards to, maybe they have just kind of where you were seven years ago, “I’ve just observed this phenomenon and I’m seeing it is interesting me, it’s motivating me, I’m seeing how it’s impacting people’s lives, and maybe I wanna try to work my way into a company or an organization that kind of tackles that particular issue,” so if someone wants like kind of following that general path, what advice would you give them?

Oh, that’s –– wow, that’s a great question. To tell you the truth, it is all about communication. If you show interest in a company, they’re going to be interested in your interest but they’re also going to be, if you come on too strong too fast, somewhat suspicious or, I guess, rejected a little bit ––

So like dating.

Very much like dating. The reality is, even though you may have the story in your mind of what you can do for this company, (a), you don’t know who you’re talking to and whether you’re going to be overwhelming them, (b), it’s a little weird to just jump out of the gate with, “I can do everything for you and I am so passionate about this, you should hire me just because my passion will help your company so much.” They’re like, “I don’t know about any of these person’s other skills and they’re going way too fast for me.”

So, the first thing you got to do is hold back and ask a lot of questions and provide value at the rate that they are able to accept your help and do all the work for them. Share on X

So you can’t go up to someone and say, “If you provide me with a list of people to call, I will call them for you,” because they don’t want to give their list up. But if you instead say, “If you have time, I’d be happy to come in and when you’re already doing calls, I could sit with you and help you with some of those calls,” that’s a little more tangible. So, with my specific example, though, with Chris, luckily, he was actually kind of looking to move himself physically to another state so I was helping solve a problem for him. I identified that and I said, “Look, I’m really, really interested in this and I have a way to negotiate this,” because I had another company that I was connected with who wanted to buy a company so I kind of brokered a deal, but I couldn’t have done it without that. I could have said, “Look, I see how much you’re doing by yourself and I see how much you are trying to accomplish and I know you wanna grow this, and I know you wanna leave. If you have time for it, I could help you by doing the work to help expand your company and then helping to replace you so that you can go. And if that’s of interest to you, I’d love to have a meeting.” And that was kind of what I did with him and that solved his problem, but I didn’t do it in a way where I was showing my passion was so high that I was going to overwhelm him or make him go, “This guy’s a little bit much.” That is all just basic communication. I mean, that’s the basic understanding of how people work and that you communicate enthusiastically but you match people’s level. You try to match where they’re at.

Yeah, because it seems kind of counterintuitive but, say, you have a job, a business, just anything, it does feel a little bit like it could rub you the wrong way if someone comes in and they’re suddenly more passionate than you are or something that where, I guess the mechanism of the brain for that probably is that you’re just wondering, “Is this real? Is this person doing this everywhere?” It somewhat reminds me of the mistakes some people make in sales where they push the product before they listen to the person they’re selling it to.

Absolutely, absolutely.

That’s exactly right, because if you are trying to push a product rather than a solution, then they are aware that you are only trying to meet your needs, not theirs.

They’re aware of that. If, however, you’re pushing a solution, you cannot do that without listening to them first, because you don’t know what the problem is. So, obvious, when you look at it from an exterior perspective, that’s what would be happening. So I totally agree with you on that. Yeah. I mean, I really think that any situation where you may be doing more than they are doing is where you run into problems, even if you’re trying to get a job and your skill is so high, you are, quote/unquote, “overqualified,” if your skill is so high for the job, the person who’s interviewing you might be lower skilled than you, it’s very likely that they’re going to be. And so just the fact that you are overwhelming them with your skill could actually prevent you from landing the job. You have to invite them to allow you to brag before you brag, because if you’re bragging out of the gate, you’re probably done.

Yeah, and that seems to go for any type of connection, any type of conversation, even in the case of I’m just trying to make friends and it’s a very, very juvenile, like junior high type of mistake that a lot of people make, they’re like, “Okay, I wanna make friends so I’m gonna show off. I’m awesome at this. I’m awesome at that. Look at me. I’m awesome. I’m awesome, I’m awesome,” but that’s not necessarily what a person looking for in a friend wants and that’s kind of on a really basic level.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s exactly right. If you’re going off and showing off your kickflips when no one else is skateboarding, then that’s going to be a little bit weird. But if everyone’s skateboarding, then there’s that invitation. There’s that invitation. Now you can show off.

People listening won’t be able to listen to hand gestures I’m doing but like if everyone’s already at this level, let’s say everyone’s already at level three on a theoretical ten-level thing, then like, okay, level four and level five, maybe they’re ready to look at that and they’ll say, like, “Oh, look, wow,” but if everyone hasn’t even gotten onto level one, they’re not even onto the platform yet or whatever and then you’re going into level eight or nine right away, it just seems like a foreign language, yeah.

I agree, yeah. Yep.

And then, finally, I just want to touch base really quickly on the impact of your business as well as the kind of the future of where this whole thing is headed because your individual water, your tap water is something that, as you mentioned, most people just think of as a binary, of, “Okay, this municipality has good water, I can drink out of the tap,” or, “This municipality doesn’t so I’m gonna Brita filter it, reverse osmosis it, or buy bottled water.” Some people do that, they just buy bottled water for everything as well.

Which is a microplastic problem, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and that’s something we didn’t even get a chance to discuss it but I’m sure people have heard so much about the microplastic and stuff like that. So, as we kind of progress, as more people are looking at health, mental health, I think they’re becoming way more of a focus for people, especially on an individual level, a focus of my individual health and mental health, where do you see this going in the next several years?

Well, I think that water quality is gaining traction as a topic, but I think that it’s really, really, really slow. Flint, Michigan shocked everyone with all the lead in the water. The Red Hills problem in –– where is it? Oahu? One of the Hawaiian Islands, people with the jet fuel that’s in some of the water there. I think there was a recent thing in Illinois, I can’t remember, but a recent problem. It’s all that infrastructure stuff. And so people hear about infrastructure things because they’re always giant problems when they come up. And so that kind of obfuscates that there are little problems everywhere, and water quality will get a little bit worse before it gets better. And, because of that, the awareness of it will increase, but it does take podcasts like this or other podcasts that are trying to do similar things to really show people that you do need to look and care about your water quality a little bit. You need to do more than just assume or guess, you need to do a little bit of personal investigation, and that’s why we try to give those hints and tricks earlier about how to do that. But, yeah, that’s what I think is going to happen as far as water quality goes and how people interact with that, at least for the immediate future. In a couple hundred years, I mean, we will probably be using seawater to create energy and perfectly pure water will come as a byproduct of that fusion.

There’s like this balance between where we’re headed and I’ve thought about other technological advancements such as the thing a lot of people hear about, about toilets that will detect cancer through your stools eventually, which will be an amazing step forward for health as well, but also the chance to appreciate that like my city, we redid our water pipes to not have lead in it, essentially, that’s kind of the base of the product and I feel, even after this conversation, I feel a lot more comfortable with the water I’m drinking on a daily basis here in Denver, which is really good. Cydian, I’d like to thank you for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, getting us to think about something that we haven’t thought about too much but how it could really impact our health and energy and these are some of these concerns that tend to be a slower burn, like, obviously, cancer is an extreme example but some of these other things, it’s like little by little each day, much like the technology addiction problem that I’m tackling right now, where every time you spend three hours on social media, it’s not killing you, it’s just a cumulative effect of day after day over years that can really get to it so I’m glad we’re taking some time out to pause and look at it.

Yeah, I agree. I appreciate that too. I appreciate the opportunity to be on and talk about it.

And, as always, I’d like to thank everybody out there for listening. I’d like to thank you for taking some time out to listen to these interviews on Action’s Antidotes. Obviously, there’s way different things you could have been doing with your time so I appreciate that you’re engaging in these interesting topics and these topics that can really impact your life for the better.

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About Cydian Kauffman

Cydian Kauffman is the founder of Pure Water Northwest, where he helps homeowners, families, and communities take control of their water quality using science-backed, practical solutions. With years of hands-on experience in water treatment and a passion for public education, Cydian has guided clients across the Pacific Northwest through challenges like industrial runoff, high iron levels, bacterial contamination, arsenic, iron bacteria, and even mysterious health issues tied to hidden toxins in household water.

What sets Cydian apart is his commitment to demystifying water. He believes people shouldn’t be forced to blindly trust experts or marketing claims-they should understand what’s in their water and what really works to make it safe. That’s why he’s unafraid to tackle complex and often controversial topics like fluoride, PFAS (“forever chemicals”), structured water, and hydrogenated water, cutting through the myths and misinformation to deliver clear, actionable insights.

Cydian is a passionate educator and problem-solver who believes water clarity should mean more than just how it looks-it should mean transparency about its true contents and impacts. Whether helping families protect their drinking water or working with communities to improve group systems, his mission is to empower people with knowledge so they can make confident, informed decisions for their health and well-being.