From Leaving Dyson to The Washing Machine Project | Navjot Sawhney

0:00Hi, I'm Hayaatun and this is What We Don't Know, all about better leadership in a chaotic world. Thanks so much for joining. What the washing machines teaches about leadership? Today I'm delighted that we're joined by Navjot Sawhney, Nav to his friends. And Nav is the founder of the Washing Machine Project and we're going to find out how that came to be the entire centrepiece of his life in the course of the conversation. Nav has been an engineer at Dyson. He has gone on to win Time Invention of the Year. He's partnered with some huge companies like Whirlpool and Santander. He's managed to enrol celebrities.

0:38He has worked with universities around the world as well. He has been on the BBC, on Sky, he's been at Davos. Anywhere you can think of, he's probably been there wearing his washing machine project T-shirt. So let's find out what we don't know about Navjotsony. So Nav, it is good to be sitting here with you today. The last time we saw each other, I mean, just to name drop, we were at number 10 with Jensen Huang of NVIDIA and Secretary of State for Science and a bunch of other very distinguished people in the field of AI and engineering. Yeah, I remember. And I had my little mini Divya. Of course you did.

1:18And I gifted it to Jensen, which he took, and he's very, very complimentary about it. Yeah, that was a surreal day, National Engineering Day, wasn't it? National Engineering Day. So it started at number 10, ended it at the palace. It's a day in the life, right? It's amazing where life takes you. That's where engineering takes you. Yeah, and I think for me personally, like, the journey of the Washing Machine Project's been so interesting. to be in a position where EastEnders actors have reached out. We had Netflix chef reach out. There's been some interesting collaborations. Some really people that have been inspired by that want to support the mission.

2:04It's been a really humbling experience. I think you have a bit to do with that now, but I'm glad to hear that the world is waking up significance of what you're doing. We like to generally kick off with giving our listeners and our viewers a bit of a sense of what our guest is currently doing. So why don't you tell me what being the founder and leader of the Washing Machine Project involves? Yeah, it's a really interesting journey that we're on right now. We've been going for the last six or seven years and we're kind of just at this tipping point where we've been bubbling away and we're just like at this inflection point where we're going to scale significantly and right now a lot of my days are spent talking about trying to manufacture thousands of of these washing machines that we produce also speaking to really interesting people that want to fund the washing machine project i've just come back off a 25-day tour from india to kenya to the US and yeah it's been it's been a it's a it's been a really busy month.

3:11Well we're looking forward to hearing more about what you've been up to and and more about the project itself of course but we have to rewind a bit first and I want to know more about what was little Nab like? I was a monster according to my my mum I was a very curious child I would I would be fascinated with how things worked. My father was an engineer, he was an aerospace engineer, and I'd be taken to air shows. And I'd be like amazed with these big aircrafts in the sky, I'd be looking up and just wandering in amazement of these massive objects in the sky, I would come home, I would take the toolbox out of the cupboard, and I would use the screwdriver and just take apart all the appliances that I would come across, whether it be the fridge or the TV remote or plugs, and I would just not know how to put them back together again.

4:07And they used to make my mum really, really angry. And I was just fascinated with how things worked. And, you know, going into engineering and figuring out how things worked worked and you know just applying my my curiosity to real world problems was a natural transition for me see I'm conflicted here because the side of me that has spent 20 plus years trying to get people in engineering going yes yes this is what children should be allowed to do but I also had an older brother that did that and there were some favorite toys that I only had a brief opportunity to play with before that they were taken apart never to be put back together exactly yeah kind of split between empathizing with you and with your your sisters yeah exactly i had two older sisters and uh and my mom uh like single-handedly raised me uh my father unfortunately passed away when i was a kid um so how old were you i was eight years old so slept and never woke up so you know that kind of early trauma in our lives really kind of shaped our existence and uh you You know, being raised by women, especially brown women, was a fascinating experience.

5:17You know, I saw firsthand, single-handedly, how they would navigate society. You know, the struggles and stresses and strains that they had to go through. You know, like my mom, you know, was passed over on so many different promotional opportunities just so that she could, you know, tend and care for her kids, you know. And, you know, my sisters navigating life as brown girls in a society where, you know, they're often the only brown girls in the room, you know, and how to manage that when you're self -conscious about your image. And, you know, my mom making sure that we, you know, grow up reasonably responsible and educated and trying not to get into trouble is really tough, you know.

6:06But she did it. you know she worked so hard um she always made sure that like we were home on time do you can you empathize possibly uh yeah you know i was gonna say so so it sounds like she was a very very strong influence in your formative years yeah what were what were your other aspects of uh you know being a teenager now of like you know what what sort of um memories do you have from those years yeah I think so for me personally like I was a very misunderstood kid I think you know I was you know very distracted I would say if you were to diagnose me today I would have probably been diagnosed with some sort of neurodivergent I don't know what the word is but you know there was obviously something there that that needed to be addressed but my mum being an Asian mum didn't diagnose it she was like Nav just needs responsibility and so she wrote to my my primary school teachers and my high school teachers and said can you please put him in charge of anything any position of authority so you know I became a school counsellor for my class in primary school.

7:33I was a hall monitor, you know, having that badge. I took that really seriously, you know. And then in high school, I was a junior leadership team member. These types of things, you know, psychologically made me have a bit of a belonging, you know, and made me have some responsibility, as my mum said. so I think she found a hack to try and figure out what I needed at that time to to stay focused on what she felt like was wasn't was an important thing so so fascinating because I was going to ask you about early experiences of leadership you've already volunteered them I mean primary school that is early to be self-identifying as a leader yeah actually come to think of it yeah it's a good example of early early leadership so you were you thanks to your mum you got going early yeah um do you think it made a difference if you look at your peers and other people who maybe had some of the same challenges in their life at the time yeah I think so I think um you know I look I look back at it now and you know my friends were brilliantly smart you know some of these guys were like top set um students but you know they've kind of fallen off you know some were really unlucky and made really bad decisions and later on in life and have have hate the consequences of that and I don't know what is it about me and what happened to me personally where I've followed this path of purpose and leadership and I'm in the position I am today and I spoke to one of my early friends I caught up with him last year he'd seen some of my stuff online and he was like Nav the difference between you and us was that you were you know you dedicated yourself and you are always really really passionate about what you wanted to do and that was the difference and I think that was so so important compared to some of my peers at the time.

9:28So you realised early on you had that that spark and that when given a position of responsibility that you could step up so talk us through how that then took you into a career. Yeah I also want to mention that my mum put me into a scout. she's going for the full bingo card and leadership positions so yeah following this kind of you know we are one person in society right so you know how do you give back my culture and background is that I'm a Sikh and you know Sikhs believe in selfless service this is translated as Siva which is you know giving back to society in one way shape or form now that's not just a Sikh principle that's just a you know that's just being a normal human being and things like scouts really help you emphasize that at a very young age you know you go every week every every week to to give back to society whether it's you know packing bags at a supermarket for for people that need help or you know raising money for a local organizations that need it or doing something more international focused.

10:43And I think these types of experiences, whether it was a position of responsibility or giving back to society, really helped shaped me at a very young age. And so you decided to study engineering. Yeah. Was that an easy decision to make? Did you have a sense of direction you wanted to fulfil in your career at that stage? Yeah. I mean, I was good at maths. I loved how things worked. And so whilst, you know, being a delinquent at a very young age, it was a kind of natural transition. And I was just lucky that I made it through and I got into university at a time where some of my friends didn't. Did you find it easy to meet the requirements?

11:30Quite an academic course you were on. How was that? yeah I didn't get my first choice I was devastated by that but again I kind of just found a way through you know I got through onto a course that was my second or third choice and I just tried to make it happen and I think this philosophy of just trying to find a way through uh it's called jugard which is spelt j-u-g-a-a-d which is loosely translated as problem solving with limited resource um there's whole like phds written on this philosophy so i hope i do it justice um whether it was my mum trying to guard her way through a time where you know at times she only had 10 pounds in her bank account or me trying to make my way through when I didn't make the grades for my first choice.

12:27I think this kind of philosophy is needed when you're a leader. Yeah, and it sounds like something you've carried forward into your career. So you ended up working at Dyson. Yes, I did, yeah. Which is a very prestigious place for an engineer to work. How was that? Yeah, I mean, I had no clue where I wanted to work and what I wanted to do. All I knew is that I wanted to get onto the best graduate program available. And when you go to these career fairs at university, you just go to the companies that give you free pizza, you know. It's all based on the merch. Yeah, exactly. So I didn't figure out until very late on into my time at Dyson that, you know, what do I want to do and what fulfills my purpose and my passions and what's going to keep me going at 3 a.m.

13:23when the going gets tough or you know a Saturday or Sunday or like just working my way through and I was really lucky that I got a job at Dyson at a time where you know a lot of my friends didn't you know and I just you know went all in and chucked myself in the deep end and I got it at a time where I just graduated and two weeks later I'd already moved out at the house to go move closer to Dyson. What was Dyson like at the time? It was a fascinating experience um I was the only brown person in the room so that was also very quite very interesting but you know you know I was I felt like I was on cloud nine um I remember um looking at the organization chart and I was seven from the bottom and I was like how how do I this is my job for life I am I am going to stay in this company forever and I will move my way up the up the the rungs of the ladder that's what I generally thought you literally join as a graduate and you're like okay just seven rungs to go before I see you yeah exactly and you know and that was just from a kind of job point of view but you know on a day-to-day basis you you were given so much freedom to innovate and try new ideas and test and fail.

14:54And, you know, failing is good. You know, it's really, really good to fail because you get closer to knowing what works. And I think that's missing nowadays. Oh, and of course, Dyson famously, I don't know how many thousands, like 4 ,000 failures before he, you know, achieved a prototype that he felt was worthy of pursuing. Yeah, and I think those kind of simple ideas about just trying and testing and putting physical stuff together and then seeing what works and what doesn't and putting it in the hands of someone who's going to use it as quickly as possible was really, really instrumental in what we are doing today.

15:40Yeah, that focus on user experience again, a real feature of great design. Exactly. You were living the dream at Dyson and just, you know, ticking off the rungs of the ladder before you could take over from the big boss. What happened? Yeah, I mean, that dream went up into smokes when I think two or three years into my roles at Dyson, I was sitting around a table and there was 20 engineers, 20 brilliant engineers, some of the UK's best engineers in the room. and we were talking about how to reduce the cost of a 500 pound vacuum cleaner by 20 pence and I realized that you know every bit of good engineering that I'm doing in this room right now is basically making a vacuum cleaner for a rich person and you know I felt that surely there's more to life uh you know i've been blessed with skills that can help or hinder the planet i can create something with my with my ability that could help people on mass you know and at the same time uh you know i was traveling to india every year my mom uh was used to take us to india every year and i used to see poverty everywhere and i thought you know i this is a brilliant opportunity for me to at least try uh help the planet through my through my engineering so i so i took the plunge what did your mum think of your decision to abandon a very secure prestigious well-paid job to do something that was much more motivated by your passions yeah um she obviously could see both both worlds but she'd worked very hard to get you to have those opportunities i mean and and my mum sacrificed her life for her kids and and for me to turn around to my mum and say mum i'm not happy in my position and then i want to quit my job something that i've worked 20 plus years to to be at uh was a really tough conversation to have um she didn't speak to me for over a week but it was she's like you're making the biggest mistake of your life what are you doing I had no support from any of my friends and my family they thought I was making the biggest mistake but I genuinely was unhappy you know and I wanted to at least try you know and I was lucky enough to apply for an opportunity at an organization called Engineers Without Borders and at the time they had this global program that sent engineers around the world to existing organizations and I was lucky enough to be sent to India to make a clean and efficient cook stoves in South India.

18:40Okay we should continue I've got a cook stove related comment. Go for it. I'm going to hold it I'm going to exercise self-discipline. You're going to have to tune in later.

18:53So you went to India with engineers outboard, which was a fantastic way to think about how to use your engineering skills. You'd honed so carefully and diligently over those years for a completely different purpose. So what happened then when you went to India? I genuinely thought I made the biggest mistake of my life. That your mum was right. Yeah, so a weekend, I was in this remote village in South India. It was thunderstorms pouring with rain. There was a blackout, so no electricity. It was 40 degrees, so it was humid, and there were mosquitoes, and there was no air conditioning because there was no power.

19:41and what did I, I remember having a conversation with my sister at the time and said, I've realized that I've made a mistake. I'm going to come back home and go back to Dyson. At the time, Dyson didn't provide sabbaticals. So I made a conscious decision to quit my job with nothing. No safety net. No safety net, exactly. And I remember I had to just, again, throw myself in the deep end. I chose to live in the most rural village to really try and understand people. And that's what I did. And I'm so lucky that they welcomed me with open arms. I didn't know the language. My mom was born in Mumbai, so I speak Hindi.

20:35and tamil speak tamil so so it was chalk and cheese um but you know it was a such a brilliant experience and on monday we would have an idea on tuesday we would be able to prototype this idea and the prototype would be in the field being used by a a person that needed our cookstuff by wednesday and by thursday would already already get some feedback about how rubbish our idea was and so by Friday we'd already have a new prototype being worked on and this kind of testing, learning, failing was... It was a fast iterative cycle. Yeah, it was what I learned at Dyson but it was very close to the end user and you'd see the difference to someone's life.

21:25They would have to gather less wood. There would be less smoke in their eyes, less smoke that they'd be breathing in and it was a brilliant experience. So having done vacuum cleaners and cook stoves, you went on to your next household appliance. Yeah. Did you ever think, maybe I've done my bit for household appliance? Yeah, I mean, I think everything in my life has been very organic. It's never been, you know, I've never had a long-term plan. I mean, yeah, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a child. And then I realised that it'd probably be a bit hard for a helmet to go over my head, is what my sister teased me with.

22:14So, yeah, I don't know if you saw Artemis 2 being launched in the sky. That was pretty exciting. That is sort of peak cool, isn't it, really? But, OK, so you couldn't go to space. So instead you decided that the mission for the next chapter of your life is going to be washing machines. Yeah, and it was, again, completely organic. So in the village I was staying in, people lived such humble lives. And whether it was when there was no power, people just got on with it. They were just like candles. And the people were amazing. And my next door neighbor was a lady called Divya. And we became best friends.

23:03You know, her English was amazing. My Tamil was rubbish. So she was the only one of the only people I could communicate with on the streets. And, you know, she spent every waking hour on unpaid labor, whether it was foraging for wood to cook her food, standing in line for water or handwashing her family's clothes. and she wanted to work but she just didn't have the time you know she'd spent every waking hour on unpaid labor so i said to her i will divya i'll buy you an electric washing machine why are you spending so much time on this and she said i don't have a generator and i don't have running water and i said i'll make you one and that's that's the the kind of penny drop moment that's when the Washer Machine Project was born.

23:54So I mean I think lots of people can relate to those divvier moments if I call them where you suddenly have your eyes open to something that you just didn't realise was an important issue that people are grappling with or that you see an opportunity to do something that could be worthwhile but not many of us choose to make it then the entire focus of our life. Where did your conviction come from? Yeah, I think going back to, you know, being raised by women and this serendipitous moment where, you know, like I saw my mum in Divya and I figured that, you know, my mum was lucky because she was in a society where she had appliances to make her life a bit easier.

24:41Can you imagine if in 20 years Divya's family could also prosper in the way that my mum and my aunties have prospered? And I figured that this is the kind of inflection point moment that I was looking for. My time making cookstoves was coming to an end. I had to go back to the UK. And I realised that this was completely, there's a massive gap in this market. there was no one looking at this at scale and I spoke to as many people as I could and everyone said the same things you know we don't have running water we don't have electricity it's too expensive and so I said yeah I'll make I'll make one so I came back home back to the UK and I started the washing machine project so I will I'm sure you've been on tenterhooks I will give you my cook stove related comment yes um so i for many years was involved with something called the saint andrew's prize for the environment and um for every decade and i cannot tell you how many cook stoves we saw during that time i think every year maybe a third of the applicants would have interesting model of cook stoves in all that time i never saw anybody who came forward with a novel idea for a washing machine that could um provide the kind of benefit that you have decided to focus on interesting um in the global south so give us a reminder for those of us that aren't familiar and don't know all the stats why why is this so important like there's this has a huge impact yeah people live around the world i think that's a fascinating story by the way thank you But it kind of scares me, though, because I'm thinking to myself, why or not?

26:29So give us a sense of scale for how important this is. Yeah, I mean, so everyone has to wear clothes at one point in their life, you know, and everyone has to wash their clothes at one point in life. Electric washing machines were invented over 100 years ago. but if you look at lower to middle income countries 80 percent 80 to 90 percent of those those populations still hand wash clothes if you're looking globally that's 50 percent so one in two global globally hand wash clothes and the burden of hand washing clothes unfortunately is disproportionately placed on on women and girls like a lot of the unpaid labor chores in the household and we think that's so unfair that is incredibly unfair because it's an opportunity killer and i think you know in this day and age where we're sending people to the moon you know but there's a mother that has to travel to a stream and spend up to 20 hours a week doing this back-breaking activity we need to do better as a society to help so you really put your money where your mouth is on that and you decided that you needed to have um a sort of second bite of the cherry in terms of your own studying and development so you trained in humanitarian skills alongside your engineering skills is that correct yeah i realized that i have no clue about what i'm about to endeavor into you know i have some engineering knowledge but i needed to learn and i needed to surround myself with people that know more than me and I think I think you know this is a quality that leaders need to have which is you know surround yourself with people that know more than you and are that willing to help you on your journey and I've been really lucky that that when I enrolled onto my course I started pitching this idea to my peers who had you know decades of more experience than I did in the humanitarian sector and they taught me everything that I know right now.

28:37And it was just one conversation with one of my peers who was a senior director in one of the large NGOs in Iraq who said, why don't you come over and test your machine with some of our refugees in Kurdistan, which is northern Iraq. And so we did that. I just said yes straight away, even though we didn't have a prototype. so you then went on to create the washing machine project tell us a bit about where you've got to so I mean to fast forward seven years we've kind of iterated our machine it's called the Divya washing machine it's now patented as the world's first flat packable manual washing machine It saved 75 % of time and 50 % of water compared to hand-washing clothes.

29:31Last year, it won the Time magazine Invention of the Year. Amazing. Yeah, and we've now impacted over 100 ,000 lives. Moving forwards, we want to get to a million people by 2030. And we have some incredible partners who are helping us along the journey. you know whirlpool is one of them they invented the electric washing machine over 100 years ago and we've had jaguar land river help us and there's been others as well that's really extraordinary and um your leadership challenge is very different to some of the people that have sat on that chair before you yeah so when i think about people who run organizations with 100 000 people there's a complexity that comes with that but you have a different sort of complexity to grapple with because you're leading in a sort of blended movement you've got your core staff teams of engineers you've got uh your volunteers you've got your partners like you know given whirlpool as an example who are bringing kind of pro bono effort and sweat equity um you're also trying to stay very connected with your end users tell us a bit about how you have learned to lead a movement Yeah, I think for me is just trying to inspire as many people to prioritize this problem.

30:57You know, Divya's story is the key story to unlocking support and inviting people along the way to help. And just trying to get as many eyes on the problem as I can. So I remember in the early days, I would write to my primary school, high school saying, I'm working on this idea. Can you get it into the newsletter? That became speaking to local newspapers. That now became national, then international. And last year we launched a BBC documentary. You know, this type of ripple effect and continuous communication with people, every single day being consistent is where I get my joy. and asking for help you know do you know someone that can help with this problem that I have and just being really relatable and having no ego so people does that come naturally yeah I think so but if you speak to my my my mum and my sisters now they have they could not care less about any of the awards or or um any like the bbc documentary or the time magazine invention of the year i remember when that launched my my nephew said his first word and on the family whatsapp group it was more about kian than than uh you know the award that i won so i like that i mean i like that i'm getting the sense that you might be banned from talking about washing machines at the kitchen table.

32:40Yeah, no washing machine talk. They couldn't get less about what I do. And I think that's important to remain humble. And, you know, I'm here to serve people who hand wash clothes. And that's what I'm going to do. So that connects with the next area I wanted to explore, which is that obviously all leaders can benefit from being good storytellers. You know, that's one of the best ways just to connect with people. And you just described how you've had to marshal that storytelling skill and effort to create this movement to create the energy around the movement to you know bring more people in alongside you and it's interesting that you have very much centered this around Divya so you've kept her at the center of the story as to why the washing machine project exists your your machine is named after her it is yeah do you ever worry about having personalized it so much I think in the early days yes you know when we started getting massive exposure people were knocking on Divya's house you know there were people that were interested in her and it was only back in 2024-25 when I went back to Divya's village gave Divya a manual washing machine and everyone in the village the same machine.

34:07She said something really important. She said, Nav, you've made this promise to me. You've honored this promise now. You've had millions of women just like me around the world that need this. Go find them. That's what you need to do now. And that's what we're doing. And I think it was like a bit of a, you know, thank you for doing this for me now go find the rest of the people that need it so that's what we're doing and you've been successful in getting a lot of high level attention the time example is just incredible but those of us that live in London would also have seen your posters around and about the billboards, yeah tell us more about that yeah, we've got this really great partnership with JC DeCow one of the largest out of home billboard companies in the world and we're one of their partners and they put our advertisements on some of the most interesting places around the country.

35:06So I think last year it was about 10 ,000 billboards. But yeah, we've had some incredible partnerships come out of that. Most recently, Domestic and General, who are an appliance insurer. and so one of the CSR employees saw it at Wimbledon station, googled it when they got to the desk and then 18 months later we have a partnership with them. So these types of exposure really do work and it just happened on a conversation through a LinkedIn message. Goosebub stuff. yeah you know because that that changes thousands of lives you know and I say to my team you just do not know who's in the room so always show up to the places where you need need to to tell the story there's a lot to unpack in that before we do that I just want to ask you a question around our perception of the type of engineering technology that you and your team innovate in.

36:17So, you know, we live in this, I would say, AI obsessed world right now. What you're doing is almost antithetical to that. So some people use the term frugal technology or frugal innovation. But essentially, you're having to engineer for very difficult requirements at a very low cost base. So do you think actually that this is something we should be more interested in collectively rather than think it's all about global south end users yeah we know we live in an era where i think our vulnerability in terms of supply chain and energy um and climate has become ever more visible to us do you think we we view that in the right way i um i believe that um we're innovating for the wrong people.

37:06I think, you know, large companies are innovating for a saturated market. There are already products available for the top 5 % of the world. And there's so much more impact that you can make for the bottom 50 % of the world. I'm talking about income per capita in some of these countries you know the people living on a dollar a day you know giving them another dollar would completely transform their life and that's what I encourage in my in my conversations is like especially the next generation of engineers is how can we innovate for these these people because we have you know as a planet we cannot all have cars you know we cannot all have refrigerators we cannot all have air conditioning units so how do we innovate for the next generation of people that want access to those products that's that's that's going to be the key priority for the the next I would say next 25 to 50 years is to continue to innovate for these people that you know me and my family have benefited from for the last 50 years so it's something that's on top of my mind and you know we're we're working on laundry care right now but you know there will be a day where we work on other appliances that are more appropriate for people like Divya so you know listening to you looking at you wearing your iconic washing machine project t-shirt that I've come very used to seeing you in you know you you don't interpret leadership as a nine-to-five yeah you live and breathe this yeah you advocate for wherever you can you don't want to let an opportunity pass you by to make a difference through the work that you're doing that's a lot of pressure for one person it is and it's hard to separate me from the washing machine project as the individual and it's something that I'm grappling with I think and it's probably something that I need to do more of is who is NAV as the individual and what's the washing machine project.

39:35And I think for my team as well, they'd benefit from me, you know, giving them space, you know, giving them more space and to innovate and to flourish within their own role. So I'm really conscious of that and I step away from, you know, the day-to-day as much as possible to allow my team to do their work. and I think over the next few years as I settle down, start a family, I think my own priorities will change but I've always said this is the last thing I'll do. I want to do this for the rest of my life and I'll do it for as long as I can. And how do you keep, the well replenished is a phrase I sometimes use, but how do you keep your energies topped up, your emotions stable?

40:28I mean, it's not just the hours in the day and the sort of, you know, putting some distance from you and your work challenge. What you do is often also inherently emotional. I mean, you've got your products being shipped out to refugees and to camps in conflict zones. There's a lot to process in your role. How do you keep yourself sane? yeah and um i think um apart from the basics of you know having seven and a half hours sleep and making sure i'm keeping active and eating well i think you know there's an emotional resilience that that um that that you need and i've just told myself that this is my duty you know i found my calling and I'm so lucky that I found it so early on in my career I've met people that are retiring now that have been so frustrated for decades in their jobs and they want to help but they don't know how and I think Covid was the turning point for people where they found out that life is mortal you know life is there's a limit to life and you see it with people taking you know two three days off a week to do something else spending more time at home spending time with family or their friends and I was just so lucky that I found that out early in my life and how I stay resilient is you know a concept called Charudikala which is forever in rising spirits and I think for me you know the people that I meet they're the happiest people I've seen You know, people that have had so much done to them You know, life has been so tough for them They've had, for no fault of their own Have had, you know, things taken away from them And they are the happiest people I've ever come across I met a lady in a refugee camp in Lebanon Who lost her house, some of her family members And she was staying in this tent And outside her tent was a little bush and I said to my translator what's this bush doing and and the lady said this is my garden and she said I used to have a big garden back in Syria but this reminds me of my my house and for me that's that's what matters you know I'll keep showing up for people like that yeah I think there's something around the almost excessive abundance that so many of us have in our lives that makes it almost harder to remember to feel gratitude yeah um but that's a very a very moving and um grounding story you just told us how do you invest in your development as a leader i mean your your your job has changed over time yeah your passion is clear your your sense of clarity around why you're doing it is clear but the practicalities of how you lead people and make sure that you know the machines get shipped and they're manufactured to the quality level that you want you know this is there's there's quite a lot of nuts and bolts to that and you have um taken this from an idea to something that's touching the lives of a hundred thousand people how do you invest in your development yeah and i i i think for me we're trying to do something that has been done before with other products, but no one has really scaled a solution like ours, which is a manual washing machine.

44:14We're all sort of like category creating again. You know, this is something that people are not used to. And so there's an education piece. I find so much comfort in talking to people that have already done it for other products. So I spent some time in Kenya recently and I spoke to one company who makes a cook stove every three seconds and their first cook stove that they ever made took them three days so that this year they're going to be making three million cook stoves so you know the scale is just insane and I spoke to the COO of that organization and And I just learned, I wanted to absorb and be a sponge and just create those connections and those relationships.

45:02And I have, you know, hundreds of these relationships now that I could just call up at any time I want and just say, I need some help on this. How do you do? How did you do it? And I believe like the reason why the Washing Machine Project has got so far off so little is because of the relationships that we keep. And I encourage my team to also build their own black books because, you know, they're not going to be at the washing machine project forever and you'll need those contacts wherever you go. So you've already accomplished a lot. You know, you set out to create a product that would work for Divya and the other women in her position.

45:44You've done that. You're scaling. You've got more to do. but beyond that what are your aspirations I I want to be happy I think first and foremost is like um in my own uh in my own my own self I I want to separate me and the washing machine project more and more um you know I want to settle down uh so I'm excited for that next chapter in life and the washing machine project is you know it's it's I'm so excited about what we're doing there's some incredible innovations in the pipelines and we'll be laughing at the day that we only made washing machines so so yeah and for my team I want them to keep developing and you know keep living a life of purpose whether it's at the washing machine project or whatever they do in the next chapter and I'm really excited for them as well.

46:44And when you look back on your hopefully long and very successful career many years from now, what do you want to be able to say about it?