Torbjørn Pedersen: Traversing the Globe for Global Goodwill

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0:49I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me today is Thor Peterson. I hope it's Peterson, not Pedersen. I should have asked him in an interview, but I completely forgot. And I cannot definitively find the answer, because all the YouTube videos in which he's talking, he never says his last name. Alas, that is probably not the biggest problem we face in the world. So let me tell you about Thor. He is a Danish adventurer. He made history by visiting every country in the world without flying. His decade-long journey is a testament to human connection and, oh my God, the spirit of exploration.

1:41His blog, Once Upon a Saga, chronicles his adventures across all these countries, oceans, war zones. He even got married atop Mount Kenya in 2013. And throughout his travels, Thor engaged with local communities, shared stories, and really fostered cultural unity. He also shone a light on the critical yet often unseen work of the Red Cross societies. Thor's Odyssey demonstrates our world's deep interconnectedness. And it echoes his belief that a stranger is a friend you've never met before. Join me, Guy Kawasaki, the Remarkable People podcast, as we delve into the incredible, remarkable journey of Thor Peterson, or Pedersen, who visited every country in the world without flying.

2:48my wife is danish so i've had many an evil skeever in my life so what does that mean you don't know what an evil skeever is maybe i'm saying it wrong no i'm sure you're saying it exactly as it's supposed to be said, but I'm just not from the US and I speak Danish on a day-to-day basis. Wait, I'm having an out-of-body experience. Eppleskiver is that thing that's like little donut pancakes. That's a Danish thing. Ah, okay. Now I know what you're saying. Oh, okay. No, your pronunciation is very good. It might be a different dialect. Where I come from, I say ebelskiver. That's Hawaiian pigeons saying ebelskivers.

3:39Yeah. Oh, I wasn't ready for you speaking Danish just yet. I'm very impressed. First, I want to start way back when, and I read that you were the lifeguard at the royal palaces. What the hell kind of job is that? Tell me about that. Denmark is a cute little country with a very small population and very old traditions in some directions at least. And within our military service, you can get drafted or not. And that's through a lottery. So you put your hand into a box and you pick a number. And if the number is low, then you have to do your military service. And if the number is high, you can go out and get a job if that's what you want.

4:23And my number was really low. And then I signed up for what I thought would be the most interesting branch within the Danish military, which is to stand as a guard in front of the Queen's Palace. And that's in an olden day outfit. So I think that uniform has not been updated, certainly for a very long time. It's with the bare skin hat on top of your head and it wouldn't be good for warfare. They would spot you a mile away. It looks nice though. Wait, so you get drafted by the Danish army and they say you can either go fight the Russians or you can stand in front of the palace. You get that kind of choice?

5:04So within our military service, you can go Air Force, you can go Army, you can go Navy. And then if you feel like it, you can do something a little bit more special. So that's actually a 12-month military service duration, which is longer than any of the others. But that's the kind of country that then... Herein lies the problem. So when I read that in your bio, I read lifeguard. When Madison and I, or people basically in California, Hawaii, when we read lifeguard, we think swimming pool or ocean. You meant palace guard, right? Yes, it's a palace guard. Oh, I thought you were watching the Danish princesses swim for your military duty.

5:49You were picturing Danish Baywatch. So you're the Danish Hasselhorf? Yes. Not as buff as him, though. Okay, first serious question is, you've been all over the world, obviously. And I want you to explain, because I don't think many people understand. It's not clear I understand. What exactly does the Red Cross do around the world? I'm very happy that you asked me that question because I've done a great deal of interviews and most they skip directly over that. I was given the honor of traveling as a Goodwill Ambassador of the Danish Red Cross, which is the National Society of Denmark. And the National Society of the U.S.

6:42would be the American Red Cross, and the National Society in Syria would be the Syrian Red Crescent, and so on and so forth. And the Red Cross is the world's largest humanitarian organization and found in 192 countries around the world. So that's basically every country. And my job was to promote the humanitarian efforts and raise money and awareness. I donated blood. But I shared as much as I possibly could about the Red Cross throughout the entire journey. And if you have any specific questions about the Red Cross, then I'm more than happy to answer them. So let's say there's a tsunami or something.

7:23What does the Red Cross do? It would very much depend on the country. So the Red Cross plays an auxiliary role to the government. So in some countries, the government might be very strong and there would be less of a need for the Red Cross. And in some countries, the Red Cross would take over the entire operation. So the backbone of the Red Cross would be volunteers. And within a tsunami, for sure, lots and lots of volunteers would be sent in and they would immediately start to help those that are affected by the tsunami. Maybe people, they cannot return to their homes. Maybe they need a hotel.

8:05Maybe they need a shelter. They would set up shelters. They would hand out food and blankets, clothing, sanitary pads, toothbrushes, soap, anything that you can imagine to get people back on their feet. In some cases, the Red Cross might contact your employer on your behalf and explain to your employer that your life has been destroyed because you might be dealing with trauma or something else. And they might have arrangements with hotels and they would set you up and they would contact insurance and help you. The Red Cross is there in place to help people. And the level of the Red Cross engagement really depends on the country.

8:46And let's suppose that you're with the Danish Red Cross and you're sitting in, I don't know, Copenhagen, and you're drinking beer, and then there's a tsunami in Indonesia. So what? Does your phone ring and they say, Thor, get on a plane. We got to go to Indonesia. How does it work? That could happen, actually, because I was trained to be within the ERU. I was a logistics delegate within the ERU. The ERU is the Emergency Response Unit. So that's a team of specialists that are trained to be deployed on short notice. So that could very well happen. Then I would get deployed along with some doctors, some engineers, some technicians, some nurses probably.

9:33And then we would set up camp near the area in Indonesia. And then we would go to work immediately rebuilding the country and supporting the National Society of Indonesia. In that case, the Danish Red Cross would be a PNS, which is a participating national society. But the more likely scenario I would imagine is that the Danish Red Cross would immediately start raising funds within Denmark, and then all these funds would be directed to Indonesia. And who decides whether it's the American Red Cross or the Danish Red Cross or the Finnish Red Cross? who gets involved? Does the people in Thailand say, well, let's call our buddies in Denmark, or let's call our buddies in New York?

10:18Who gets the call? That's another good question. So the way it works is that if a national society is not strong enough to handle the emergency on its own, then it would put out an appeal. And then participating national societies, PNSs, they will answer that appeal. So it might be whoever's already within the country. It might be that in Indonesia, that the American Red Cross is already there operating, and then it's easy for them to deploy or redirect some of their efforts to the tsunami. It could also be that you would have a country traveling across half the planet to go and help and assist.

10:56So within the Red Cross, you have the IFRC, the International Federation of the Red Cross, which is headquartered in Geneva in Switzerland. And they help coordinate in these cases. So when this appeal is raised, then the IFRC would probably reach out and find appropriate national societies to go in and help and support. And the IFRC also has its own funds. Okay. You about quintupled my knowledge of how the Red Cross works in the last 60 seconds. Okay. I can tell you a fun fact. If I wanted to pursue a Guinness World Record within the Red Cross, then I could probably be awarded the one person on this planet who has visited the Red Cross in the most amount of countries.

11:42Because I did visit the Red Cross in 198 countries around the world throughout this journey. Wow. So that's a good segue. So explain what you did. Yes. So back in 2013, I found out that no one in history had gone to every country in the world completely without flying. And that basically infected me. I just couldn't shake the idea. And it grew and it grew within me. And I spoke to friends and I spoke to family. And no one I spoke to had the same interest within the topic as I did. But I was smitten and I eventually started planning. There was a wonderful woman within my life. I'm happy to say that today she's my wife.

12:29But back then she was my girlfriend. And we had a talk about how long we thought this would take. And I planned it out. I did the logistics. I raised the funds for it. partnered up with companies and set out on the 10th of October 2013 at 10.10am, thinking it would take four years to visit every country in the world completely without flying. And it got very complicated, very fast. And sometimes it was easy. Sometimes it was hard. It was by far the biggest ordeal I've ever had within my lifetime. It ended up taking nine years, nine months and 16 days, in part because of the global pandemic, in part because conflict and strife broke out in certain countries and regions, in part because I was sick, in part because of the Ebola epidemic, which I think most people might have forgotten somewhere behind the global pandemic.

13:25But yeah, I was delayed in many places around the world.

13:31and when you were stuck in hong kong for two years what did you do in hong kong for two years yeah so i didn't know it was going to be two years when the virus broke out in wuhan i was on board a container ship heading towards hong kong and i was blissfully unaware about the outbreak. And then when we reached Hong Kong, I went up on the bridge and I was standing next to the captain and I saw the captain was wearing a face mask. And I look at him and I asked what's going on. And he handed me a face mask and he said, you better put this on. There's been a virus outbreak in Wuhan. And I say, okay, so what's Wuhan?

14:11He says, that's a city in China. And I say, okay, how far away is that? And he says, that's more than a thousand kilometers away. I'm sorry, you might have to calculate into miles on that. But so it's really far away. And I figured I think most people would. That would never have anything to do with me. That would be a local incident in the city very far away from where I was. And I entered Hong Kong where I was supposed to be for four days just for transit between two ships. And then eventually those four days were extended to 11. And then eventually countries started closing their borders. and I couldn't get on board ships.

14:49And then I was in Hong Kong for a duration unknown. And what I did was network. And I networked and I was shaking hands and meeting people and sending emails and calling, trying to find out who could help me on a ship and get me to the next country. And after a good 11 months of networking, Hong Kong immigration said that I had to get a job or get married to someone in Hong Kong or start studying. but I couldn't keep extending my visa. So I got a job and I worked for the Danish Siemens Church. I was an assistant servicing container ships and seafarers. They couldn't leave the ships. They were quarantined on board the ships.

15:28So I could go shopping in Hong Kong for anything they needed and bring it to the ships. I could also help and support the Danish community in Hong Kong. There's a bit more than a handful of Danish people, about 300 Danish people living in Hong kong and they were missing all sorts of danish delicacies so i imported that and i was selling it out of the church to fund the activities and i did a lot of hiking hong kong is 75 percent nature so i took to the mountains to get some fresh air and taking the view of the beautiful territory which is hong kong yeah i made a lot of good friends a lot of collaborations many interviews while in hong kong suddenly press started taking interest in this man who was only nine countries from becoming the first to reach every country in the world without flying, now stuck because of the pandemic.

16:17And during these two years, but also all nine years, where is your fiancé, girlfriend, wife? Yeah, that's the right order, actually. When I left, she was my girlfriend, and she came out and visited me several times. And on her 10th visit, she came to Kenya, and I brought her up on top of Mount Kenya, which is the second highest mountain within all of Africa. I got down on one knee and I gave her a ring and asked her a question. And she said yes. So beyond that, we were engaged and we thought we would have a nice wedding somewhere in the world. And then the global pandemic broke out. And in order of having her come and visit me inside Hong Kong was very tightly closed.

17:00We had to be married. And how do you get married when one person is in Hong Kong and the other one is in Denmark? It just turns out that the USA came to the rescue, that in Utah, you have an agency that marries people online. So we were able to have an online wedding and that was good enough for Hong Kong. And then we could arrange and she came to Hong Kong and hotel quarantine for three weeks. And then on the other side of that, we were together for about 100 days in Hong Kong. But Denmark didn't accept this online wedding. So at a later point, when she came to visit me in Vanuatu, we got married on the beach.

17:39And what happened was that a German woman living in Vanuatu was helping us. And she was supposed to process this wedding with the government, with the registry. And unfortunately, the government in Vanuatu was attacked by hackers. So there was a ransomware attack and all their data was locked and they couldn't move anything. And it's very close to a year now. And we're still not officially married in Vanuatu. So we can't process the paperwork in Denmark. But we do know that we're married in Utah, in Hong Kong, and in Vanuatu.

18:24This organization in Utah, was it the Mormon Church? no that was my first thought as well i think that was my primary reference to utah back in the day but now i know that they're a bit of a las vegas organization and i i don't understand so you do this for 10 years or something like are you are you using the money that you raise from sponsors or are you working in these countries or how does it? It turned into a big mix over time. But initially my thinking was that I wasn't going to set out and do a thing like this unless I could have the finances covered. I was 34 years old when I left home and I thought it would take four years.

19:14So I didn't want to come home as a 38 year old and be in debt. And some friends and I, we thought that there had to be a company out there that would take interest in something of this magnitude. And we were able to find a company that focuses on geothermal energy. And they're called Ross Energy. And they decided to fund 20 US dollars per day, which was set as an average. 20 US dollars per day? Yeah. That's two cappuccinos. yeah in some countries it's two cappuccinos in other countries it's uh accommodation a meal and transportation so worked as an average and yes 20 a day for almost 10 years but what happened was a couple of years into the project oil prices were real low and ross energy um they were hurting from that so they had to pull the sponsorship then i started spending my own money and until i had nothing left.

20:16And then I did some crowdfunding campaigns and I gained a little bit of finance that way. And I sold some articles. I did some speaking engagements. And then when I got to Hong Kong, I was able to make some money back working at the Danish Siemens Church. And then eventually Ross Engineering was strong again and they were able to come back on again. So it's been a mix of my personal funds and donations and corporate sponsorship. Wow. And literally, were you carrying cash or was it like a atm card or apple pay how did you literally spend the money all of the above so i would always have u.s dollar because it's a universal currency that you can use in any tough spot around the world i would also always have a euro on me so euro and u.s I would have that tucked away somewhere.

21:10And then I would have a MasterCard and a Visa card, which I could use around the world. And then somewhere between 2013 and now 2023, the world kept on developing. And more and more countries would have access where you could use Apple Pay. By the end of the project, I wasn't using cash anywhere. I was just tapping my phone. And do you know what your wife's parents' opinion was of this son-in-law doing this? Unfortunately not. My wife no longer has her parents. She lost them before we got married. But I do know that her friends and the friends of her parents and extended family, they pretty much all thought I was crazy.

22:05I think very few people didn't think that I was crazy to do this. And even the ones that saw a little bit of light in what I was doing, that I was chasing a difficult goal or that I was inspiring and motivating people around the world, or that I was trying to look for the positive to promote every country around the world or raising funds and awareness for the Red Cross. Even the people that could see some sanity within that, they saw absolutely no sanity in hanging out in Hong Kong as the sand ran through the sand glass. Now, when you say most people thought you're crazy, there's two kinds of crazy, right?

22:45There's, oh my God, he's crazy. And there's, oh my God, he's crazy. He's an idiot. Was it like the negative kind or the funny, humorous kind? Since you're asking me, I would say that I'm the good crazy. But I'm pretty sure that plenty of people out there think it's irresponsible that I should have taken a job, I should have started a family, I should have contributed to society in other ways. And today I have about a quarter of a million followers online that are very supportive of what I've done and are lovely. So it really depends on who you ask. We recently interviewed a woman who walked across the U.S.

23:29and she had similar things to say. Different strokes are different folks, right? Yeah, absolutely. That's a good way to put it. I'll tell you this. When I left in 2013 and when I reached 2015, so two years in, I couldn't take it anymore. I was recovering from cerebral malaria. I had lost the financial backing. The long distance relationship to my then girlfriend wasn't going well. We were really struggling. I wasn't getting the sleep I needed, malnutrition mentally and physically. I just couldn't cope with it anymore. I've been living out of a bag, going from a bus to a train, trying to deal with the bureaucracy.

24:05I've been held at gunpoint. Several of the ships that I traveled with had sank to the bottom of the ocean by then. There was a great deal of racism towards me in Central Africa, more than likely due to hundreds of years of colonialism. I really couldn't take it anymore. And at some point I just decided the system wasn't going to beat me and I was going to find a way and I was going to prove everyone wrong. Everyone who said that I couldn't get the next visa or I couldn't enter the next country, I wanted to prove them wrong. And I kept fighting for it. But since 2015, I've always wanted to go home.

24:43And I thought the final country was just around the corner. Eventually it would get a bit smoother. I'd have the support. I'd have the backing. It was just around the corner. So imagine pushing since 2015 and only setting foot back home in 2023. Didn't you fly home twice and then fly back to where you flew from? No. So I left home on the 10th of October, 2013. And I returned home on the 26th of July, 2023. And in between, I didn't fly at any one point. I didn't return home and I spent more than 24 hours in every country around the world. Oh, someplace I read you had to fly to the UK twice for something.

25:31No? I think you're confusing me with a British gentleman. His name is Graham Hughes. He's from Liverpool. And he attempted to visit every country in the world without flying prior to me. I think he must have started out in 2008 or 2009. And he had to fly back home several times. He also flew on holiday in Australia. He spent four years and 31 days completing his project. I met the guy. He's a really nice guy. I met him in Panama. He's good crazy too. Okay. I read a report recently that said that of the 200 countries in the world, you can safely drink tap water in only 50 of them. Now, did you find that to be true?

26:24Did you drink tap water everywhere and get sick all the time? Or how does water work around the world? I can tell you this. I went to every country, every beautiful island nation within the Caribbean. And I believe that most of them told me that they have the purest drinking water in the world. so you talk to locals and locals will say it's fine because they've been living there for their entire life and their bodies and their immune defense their immune system got used to the water and bacteria and this kind of stuff and you come as a foreigner and you might have to run to the toilet for a few days but then in many cases your stomach your system will also get ready for it i really wouldn't recommend drinking tap water all around the world if it's 50 countries around the world?

27:14I don't know. That might be true. I traveled with a water purification kit, a bottle called Lifesaver. And at a later point, I had a filter, a soft flask from Salomon that had a filter within that too. And I just made sure to filter all my water all around the world. I'd say throughout all of Africa, if you can get to a borehole and you get water straight from the underground there's no issue you can just drink that if it comes from let's say 100 feet below or something like that no issues wow so those filter things i see them at rei they really work yeah they must because here i am talking to you i still have all my teeth my liver is functioning what's the hairiest story you have about trying to clear customs into a country trying to clear customs that might have been between ethiopia and somalia where they were chewing cat which is a leaf a green leaf that you chew it's a drug basically from nature you look at these people who are chewing cat and it looks like they had 40 cups of coffee or something like that.

28:32They seem quite tense. And they looked at me and they started taking my bags apart. And they found I had a GPS, which I was using to plot my route around the world. And they said that was military equipment. And I said it was not. They found a couple of knives, which I was traveling with. And basically, I have them to cut rope or cut an apple or something. But again, they looked at it and said that was military equipment. And they got real suspicious real fast and they just took everything apart. And then they guided me away from the road and over to sit with some officers. And they were sitting there chewing cat and they told me to sit down next to them.

29:12And I was sitting there in the shade, sitting next to them, just wondering, okay, what's going to happen now? And after 45 minutes, they said, okay, you're good to go. and I just got up and I packed my bags again and I left. I'd say the hairiest situation that I experienced wasn't necessarily with customs. It would have been a checkpoint in the middle of a jungle in the middle of the night in Central Africa. And I'd been driving, just me and a taxi driver, we were driving throughout the night and we got to these guys and they stopped the vehicle. There were three of them and they were drunk out of their mind and they were armed to their teeth and they were vicious.

29:54And from the moment I stepped out the vehicle, I was commanded out of the vehicle at gunpoint. And from the moment I got out of the vehicle and they saw that I wasn't a local person, but I was a North European, you could just feel the hate. You could absolutely feel hate coming out of their eyes and the rage from these men. They just had it in for me. And that was definitely the Harry's situation being at gunpoint by angry, emotional, highly drunk adults. That was terrifying. And I was there for a good 45 minutes before, for some reason, one or the other. And I'm not sure I understand why. They just let me go.