Why this man spent 3 years driving to Australia

0:00Today on Nudge, I am interviewing an adventurer. So my name is Wiebe. I'm an adventurer and a speaker. And I've done various adventures. My biggest one was Plug Me In, which was driving an electric vehicle from Netherlands to Sydney, which took over over three years. And that incredible journey generated a lot of attention.

0:29A man who set himself the ambitious task of traveling around the world in his electric car has finally finished his journey today. How far can you come with an electric car? To the other side of the world, thought the Netherlands Wiebe Wacker. A Dutchman has driven from Amsterdam to Sydney.

1:02Today on Nudge, we'll explain not only why he does these adventures, but also the psychology behind how they make people feel. We'll talk about dedication, patience, and how Veeba's painstaking adventures stand out in today's AI-dominated world. All of that, coming up. most businesses have an overwhelming amount of data it's typically scattered across the business in different tools with different teams but because it's scattered no one can use it that is where hubspot come in hubspot connects it all every interaction every support ticket every conversation and they connect it into one platform that every team can work from because when you know more you grow more check out hubspot.com the agentic customer platform for growing businesses how did you decide to drive an electric car to australia was it had you decided when you set out that that was what you wanted to do yeah so it started as my graduation project uh so i was this was 2014 I was in the final year of my graduation I just felt that I was not ready to you know do the ordinary nine-to-five life so back then I had the opportunity to finish my studies in the entrepreneurs lab and then you write your thesis on finishing your or starting your own company or project unfortunately back then as a student I had enough funds to go for a weekend trip to brussels or so but yeah my ambition was a bit farther away and i wanted to go as long as possible so i thought okay why not travel without money and um so for me as a creative student was a challenge to come up with an idea to get support from from people so honestly speaking back then i was not a sustainable guy i was not a sustainable person at all but in 2014 sustainability was really a buzzword.

3:07It was a big team in politics, in companies. So kind of use a sustainability team, honestly speaking, as a kind of higher purpose linked to my desire to go on an adventure. Also at that time, here in the Netherlands, people just started speaking about electric vehicles and it was really a new thing. People had a lot of prejudices. They thought they're not reliable or you cannot cover a long distance with them. and I'm kind of pragmatic so that you know a car is four wheels electricity is everywhere why not drive one across the world so then I came up with the goal to drive one from the Netherlands to literally the other side of the world Sydney and Australia to prove that electric mobility has a future the the obvious thing people will think when you think about driving to Australia is what what route do you pick i mean not only obviously have you got oceans across as well but but war strong nations and yeah how did you figure out the route i didn't set out a route at all i really wanted to leave that completely open so the idea i came up with uh was what was it called plug me in plug me in project so i asked to so to make it to i just set my goal sydney australia and to make it to Sydney, I asked people to plug me in with energy.

4:31So I set up this website and on this website, there was a map and there people could drop a pin to select a location and they could plug me in, as I called it. So offer me a meal, a place to sleep or electricity for the car. Because those were the only three things that I actually needed to survive. And so I created a video trailer to explain my story in like 90 seconds. I need you to plug me in. Go to plugmeinproject.com and select your location on the map.

5:08Now he can visit you and you can plug him in with food, a place to sleep or energy for the car. I started posting that on Facebook groups and on blogs related to sustainability or electric mobility. So they got really enthusiastic. So they started resharing, spreading my story with their base. And so to my surprise, like people actually started to plug me in. So when I started after a year and a half preparation in March, 2016, I had about 180 offers from people around the world, mostly from Netherlands, but also countries around the Netherlands and even farther away, like Mongolia, Thailand, and even in Baghdad in Iraq.

5:53Like there was someone who said, like, Viva, you're welcome to charge up your car here. When I started on March 2016, I had no, I didn't know where I would stay in three days, let alone in a week or later. I had no idea which route I would take to get to Australia. Would it be US? Would it be Africa, Asia? I don't know. So I just looked every day on that map on my website where somebody had plugged me in, and then I would just travel from plug to plug. Like, yeah, just hoping and trusting that my adventure at some point will bring me to my destination. And that really went in the most unlogical way.

6:32First, I traveled from the Netherlands to Italy. Took me five weeks. So I thought this is good. I'm already heading south. I'm on my way to Australia. So probably in a few months, I can see those beautiful white beaches. But unfortunately, at this point, when I was halfway down Italy, there were not enough of these plug means to continue. you more more south so then i looked on that map and i saw that uh in scandinavia there were a lot of people who signed up so i thought you know what i just take the scenic route in italy i turned around and i drove all the way to the north cape which is europe's most northern point all the way in the north of norway that took me four months to get from italy to to to norway and i was even now it's time to start heading down otherwise this was going to take a decade so then there were basically two routes possible from norway i could go to russia and then go hard go continue east to russia then through kazakhstan and china and then all the way down or i would go from norway to eastern europe and then via turkey iran middle east india to to south southeast asia on that first route through moscow i had zero offers and on this the second option i had one offer so that was a huge majority so i decided to take that route and uh yeah so from the north cape i started driving down uh to the baltics to ukraine rumenia turkey iran and then i just kept going and going and and give us just an understanding of when you arrive at someone's house in baghdad for instance what i mean i imagine it's different every time but what does that look like you roll up you've never met these people before yeah yeah that's amazing because for it i only have seen their their name sometimes they leave a short message sometimes they don't at all and then just send them email like hey can i come by and they respond yeah you're welcome and and I have no clue who these people are but every time they're quite open-minded people, very friendly people.

8:48They're mostly men who sign up actually and mostly they said like, yeah, Riba, what you are doing is something that I always dreamed of and I've never done it so that's why I decided to help you out. I think it must be an amazing experience just to roll up at a place and probably build a relationship very quickly as well over that. exactly i'd love it i also imagine it wasn't all plane saving i imagine you had some problems along the way even just driving a car for three years is going to put the car for a few problems so definitely yeah what were some of the challenges the first major challenge was in india so at this point i'd been on the road for what year and a half something like that it started with flat tires simple of course that's something you plan on that's you know that's going to happen from some point in the trip but then when we inspect the car turns out that the rubber bushings in the arms were completely worn out so i could not continue continue driving and then at the same workshop we wanted to charge the car and i saw this mechanic of this workshop with this screwdriver ready to turn on the electricity and i had some suspicion that this is not not going right and there was a huge short circuit there were like flames and and and buses all around and a huge explosion this explosion was my second charger that um that just blow up but we were in in a just a tiny village and there was no decent workshop where we could could fix that so now we needed to transport the car to the next city where there was a VW workshop.

10:33It took us three days to actually convince a truck driver to actually transport that car. And he kind of like reversed his truck against the excavated hill and we pushed the car and started driving. And when we arrived there, it appeared that these drivers didn't have tools with them to offload the car. Those didn't really find it their responsibility to find a solution. so to get that car from the truck to the street became a story on its own and first there were some bloggers who heard about me they came to me and they started a Facebook live video which was popular at that time and all people were commenting like hey I will bring you some food you can stay at my place tomorrow we'll help you find a solution and also when I posted about the situation on my own social media there were people commenting like with ideas how to get that car out of that truck.

11:27It was just incredible. It eventually took about three days to find a solution to get that car truck. And we tried first moving it from the truck to a recovery truck, and then we put it in a warehouse, but then it was stuck in the warehouse. At the end, we found a train station, and with some help, we lifted it. We made a DIY bridge with bags of sand and pieces of wood to get it on a train platform. where for them we could finally get it back to the street. So that was a problem. Then later in Indonesia, when I arrived there, it was rainy season and I ended up in a fluid road. There was a truck in front of me and because of that, I could not see how deep or long that tunnel was.

12:14But after a few hundred meters, alarm signals went on and I immediately knew that something was wrong. Water came into the battery pack. so from all the disasters i could think beforehand problems with the battery was by far number one because there's really specific knowledge we require to to fix that so now the only solution to continue was to fly in mechanics from the netherlands to indonesia to to come repair it but yeah i was in the middle of indonesia with with no money so this time i i asked help from from my followers so i started a crowdfunding campaign i just downloaded the plugin from from the internet i installed it on my wordpress website and um started asking for help on on on social social media and to my surprise also that was really easy because in within 10 days or something the required 5000 euro was was was already there and three weeks later these guys were indonesia yeah it was just also incredible to see how many people wanted to you know to get me further i wanted to wanted to to to support me on that um so those are really the biggest problems with with the car itself and later in australia when i got there after over two years of of traveling the problem became the distance of course this was like a first generation electric car a converted car also which had a range of 200 kilometers which is australia absolutely nothing that's just that's especially when you're in the red center of australia often i just what this i needed to cover from from a to b was way more than than the range of my car so i just had to do everything to to save to save energy i had a weather app and for for example one time i saw that the next morning i would have a tailwind so i waited like 12 hours to get that tailwind uh drove 60k an hour all the time to be as efficient as possible get as far as possible and then yeah run out in the middle of the outback and then just yeah put your thumb up wait for somebody to pass by and then um yeah there to tell me tell me a bit to the to the next spot so you see so they would you put your phone out and then ask them to because i mean it's one thing to ask for a hitchhike but you'd be like no can you take me and the car yeah yeah yeah and the funny thing was that when you tow an electric car it actually charges because of a regenerative braking so first they they will be like i had to explain them that my electric car is empty which at that time there were hardly any electric cars in australia so i had to tell them all about it and how that worked and then they will tow me for 20 kilometers and i will release the cable and then i would wave and say goodbye and we're looking like what's what's going on here because then my battery was almost charged for like 25 % or something.

15:05So you get some funny faces. But then eventually after doing that a few times across the outback, you made it to the finish line. Was your finish line Sydney? Is that right? Yeah, right in front of the opera house. And what was that like? What was that like getting to the end, both emotionally for you, but also the news that that caused? Because it kind of went a bit viral, didn't it? Yeah, definitely. it was crazy before that I was just like a known person still kind of him of course actually it started like I really wanted to make something special of the finish I asked the help from all electric car owners in Australia to drive together with me from the north of Sydney to the opera house and for me that had more of like a symbolic meaning because I always had been traveling alone but I never could have done it without the help and energy of of other people uh but i thought like maybe you know five five cars will join me uh but eventually we drove in a parade of 50 electric vehicles over that world famous harbor bridge and there was even uh two television helicopters above us who were like reporting live on a national television was absolutely crazy and then in front of the I was at the Bodine Gardens.

16:25There was a small stage where people were waiting. And then, yeah, I got there after three years, 33 countries, 95 ,000 kilometers. And that day everything came together perfectly. Like the weather was great. People were waiting for me. And then, yeah, the media was there to report on the arrival. And then, yeah, by accident, became a bit of a global news for one day. got featured on bbc cnn and the guardian whatever what was was everywhere the funny thing is that almost that all that that that mass news coverage that almost failed that was just before the start that was not going going to happen like i contacted some some media and in australia before the finish i already got some good coverage so i thought like for the finish media would would show up but nobody confirmed to attend the finish.

17:21There was just one photographer from Getty Images, and he came to the star place of that parade in the north of Sydney, and he came to me, and he was like, man, it's amazing what you're doing, but why is there no press here? I said, yeah, I don't have any clue. I said, oh, wait, wait, I will call a friend. 10 minutes later a tv helicopter was was circling above us and i was like what the fuck is going on and i was a bit scared because a few days before me someone told me like if you want to finish in front of the opera house you need all kinds of permits and you need to already start doing that applying like months ago and it can get a bit uh dodgy or something or complicated complicated when i saw this helicopter i thought this is a police helicopter or something but then this this photograph came to me so here's here's my friend said what you yeah yeah yeah i just i caught up one of my friends he's there he's now live on channel 7 or something you're live on national television and we're going to broadcast this whole trip so then we started driving this whole parade because there was somewhere in the city was a cameraman of abc news or something like the national tv and he saw that helicopter so he thought there must be something going on so he followed that helicopter and that brought him to the to the finish yeah he was there to record that and that was those images were spread with like uh some big like news agencies and because of that it yeah got like viral around the world it was crazy wow but it wouldn't have happened unless that one photographer had called exactly the helicopter yeah yeah yeah quickly where's the car now is it still in australia no it it got back and we shipped it back to to the netherlands and uh this car was was never mine i i i borrowed this this from someone a really nice guy and he told me oh he asked me like how much time do you need this i said maybe a year year and a half maximum well then it became over three three years but he was always really cool with it I shipped it back and a funny thing is that when I just got home I went to see him I was first met his family for the first time and the car was still on a container somewhere on the ocean back to Rotterdam and I entered his home and then his daughter came to me she looked at me really angry and she said daddy told me when I will turn six the car will be back and now nine and it's still not here

20:00it is an incredible journey a journey that changed viva's life now i think it's it's fairly obvious why this journey captured the attention of so many people after all it is the first time an ev car had traveled across the world but there is a lesson in here that i think is very easy to overlook the reason why viva's journey generated attention isn't just because it's creative it isn't just because it's wacky. It is simply because the adventure required an awful lot of dedication. There is a study I wrote about in a recent newspaper that I think nicely proves the effect dedication has on us. It was a study conducted at the Stockholm School of Economics.

20:37Here, the three researchers asked 113 participants to imagine a scenario. I'll read out the scenario to you. Imagine your hometown football club booked Swedish footballing legend Ibrahimovic to host a two-hour training session with local children. That is pretty exciting, but there's a twist. Half the participants in the study were told that the football club spent almost no time persuading Ibrahimovic, with the manager saying, it's fantastic that it was so easy to persuade you to come. The other group of participants were told that booking Ibrahimovic took extreme dedication and extreme patience, with the manager contacting dozens of people, flying to Sweden and negotiating over the course of the year to get Ibrahimovic to come.

21:23In this scenario, Ibrahimovic only agrees after the manager offered to act as his personal tour guide for the full weekend. Now logically, all participants in the study should rate the actual training session the same in both scenarios. After all, it is the same training session with the same person. The dedication required to get Ibrahimovic to the club does not change the quality of the session. But that is not how people ranked the session. Those told that Ibrahimovic needed almost no persuading ranked the event at 7.49 out of 10. But those told about the dedication and patience needed to create the event ranked it at 8.32 out of 10.

22:05That is 10 % higher. Veebers benefited from the same principle. By dedicating himself to three years worth of travel, of problems, of challenges, is he captured attention in a way that no normal traveller ever could. But Weber wasn't done there. He used the same approach, this extreme dedication, to give what I imagine is one of the most memorable conference presentations that has ever been given. All of that after the break. The Ross Simmons Show is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. I've been following Ross for a while. His podcast is great and an episode I'd highly recommend is called Mastering Time, Prioritisation Over Productivity.

22:49He gives some really well thought out tips on how to prioritise your time, including something I care a lot about, which is how a small percentage of your efforts can drive the majority of your results. So go and listen to The Ross Simmons Show wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew, and the brilliant adventurer, Wiebe Walker. Three years after his drive to Australia, Wiebe got invited to give a talk in Dubai. But he didn't want to travel there in the way that most people would expect. 2022, I received an invitation from the Dutch government to speak at the expo, which took place in Dubai back then, 21 and 22, I believe.

23:32It didn't make sense anymore to fly to speak about the trip for what, 30 minutes and then fly back didn't feel good anymore. So I started to research if it was possible to do it without flying. That car that I used for the trip that ended up in the museum, in the Volkswagen Museum, so that was not available at that time. So I thought, oh, why not take public transport? So I started researching if that was was possible it was kind of hard to to research that you know there's not one app or website where you can just plan your route from from amsterdam to dubai so i had a lot of you had to use a lot of sources like google maps seat 61 which is an amazing website for train travel yeah i found out that it was was possible i figured out a route which will start in amsterdam then go to vienna and then from Vienna to Bucharest.

24:30And from Bucharest, I need to reach Istanbul. And normally there was a train, but that was banned because of COVID. So I had to take a bus to Istanbul. From Istanbul, then I should have taken a train all the way to the east of Turkey. From there, continue by buses to Iran, travel by train all the way to the south of Iran, to the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and then take a ferry across the Persian Gulf to Dubai. So I started that journey on, I think, the 3rd of January 2022. For a long while, it went smooth. I hopped on those trains, hopped on those buses, got all the way to Istanbul. And then I received a phone call from the organizer of the Dutch government.

25:18And he said, Biba, I know you started the trip, and I feel a bit uncomfortable to say it. but unfortunately we had to cancel the event in in Dubai

25:32yeah so that was a bit of a bummer of course because yeah I was halfway down and I was feeling I was not feeling down or something but it was of course it was a bit of a bummer so I sat down had a had a chai had a had a kebab to eat and then I decided that I just that I would get going I already bought all that all the tickets for that trip I thought maybe there will be another possibility or there will be something and it will be a cool trip anyway so i kept going so from istanbul i took high-speed train to ankara and then from ankara i took a train ride all the way to the east of turkey which was definitely the most beautiful train ride i've ever done in my life it was like i think 18 hours or 20 hours i only saw like snowy mountains and frozen lakes and everything, which is incredible.

26:18So 18 hours for three euro, I believe, the train ride was, like less than a kebab in Amsterdam. It was absolutely crazy. Took a bus to the border with Iran. And the thing was, just before I left, Iran announced that they will close their border for 15 days because of COVID. I adjusted my planning a bit. I started two days later. so I would get to the border on day 16, so after these 15 days. And that morning, everything looked good. There were local Turkish people who were going to the border and they said, yeah, the border's open again. So I got to the border. I checked out on the Turkish side and I was going through this no man's land between the two borders.

27:04And on the Iranian side, I said, yeah, sorry, but for tourists, the gate is still closed. So I couldn't go into Iran. So I had to turn around and make a new plan. I went back to Turkey and then took a bus to the Kurdistan region of Iraq. And yeah, this is a place I knew little about it, but it was amazing. Like I was a bit nervous to get there, but soon I got out of the bus, people welcomed me with tea and with food. And I really felt super welcome. People were super friendly over there and I had a really good time there. It was an incredible area. Unfortunately, from that region, I couldn't continue by land because for federal Iraq, you need a visa or the other option was Syria, but that was closed or it was a problem with the visa, which you had to obtain beforehand.

27:57You couldn't get it on arrival, but I needed to keep going because by then I did receive another invitation to speak at another event. Erbil, I had to fly to Jordan. From there, I continued by bus to Saudi Arabia from the north of Saudi Arabia, I took a train and that was incredible. It was a super modern station and it went like hundreds of kilometers just straight through the desert and we passed like four train stations and every train station was like exactly the same. It was almost like it was like same city, you know, that just clicked here, station, station, station, train, like just put it all down.

28:40I reached Riyadh, capital of Saudi, and then continued my bus to Dubai. And I got there after 16 or 17 days or something like that. The funny thing was that when I was on this journey, there was someone from the UITP, which is the Global Transport Union Organization or something. And they just had their annual global meeting in Dubai, of course, about public transport. and they heard about my trip so then they asked me to become the keynote speaker for for that event i was going there for an event which was canceled and i felt there was maybe some other opportunity and turned out to be this so it was yeah it was kind of amazing you give that talk i mean what you're talking about in general is impressive because your your trips are impressive but it must have been so much more impactful for the people in the room when you gave that talk because they know you took so long to get there.

29:38Could you feel that? Did it sort of feel quite momentous when you gave the talk and did people in the room sort of feel that as well? Yeah, definitely. People were really amazed that I did that. Definitely for that region, people don't travel a lot, I had the feeling. Yeah, I wrote a story specifically for that event about that trip and the theme of the talk was travel by plane changes your day, travel by train changes your life. That was what I came up with. And it was funny, like after my talk, a local Emirati man came to me and he said, well, Viva, if I have done what you are doing, it will be traveling by train, change your life.

30:30jokes aside i think that weber's journey really did affect how people viewed the talk i think the effort the time that he took to travel to the event really does change the perception of his talk there was a brilliant study from 2004 by researchers kruger vert coven and altamart for the study 138 college students read the same poem it was a poem by the american poet michael van wolhaehan half the students were told that the poet took four hours to write the poem half were told that the poet took 18 hours to write the poem the poem is the same obviously in both scenarios but the time the students were told the poet took writing the poem dramatically influenced the perception the students had they rated the poem as 10.1 percent higher quality if they were told it took 18 hours to write.

31:21When asked how much do you think this poem would fetch if it was sold to a magazine, those told that it took 18 hours valued the poem 80 % higher. They said it would fetch$90 in a magazine, whereas those told it only took four hours said it would only fetch $50. Telling participants that the poet worked for longer nearly doubled the poem's estimated value. And I think the same is true for Weber. His three-year drive captured the attention due to the dedication it required and his three-week no-flight trip to Dubai led to a better received talk due to the time he spent traveling to give the talk and all of this got me wondering what does Weber have planned next?

32:04I have something like in my in my mind which I think can be one of the biggest challenge I had I want to set a Guinness world record to circumnavigate the world by public transport. And public transport excluding planes, of course, because that's always also public transport. So only trains, buses, and ships. And I have this in my mind for a while. I know the route. The challenge is to find someone or a company who can take me on a... needs to be probably a container ship from Asia to the US and later on a ship from America back to Europe. I tried contacting all these big companies like Maersk and CMG, but they are very hard to reach.

33:01I haven't found yet a way to come across these oceans. So maybe somebody is listening and says like, yeah, I can take you. I can take you as a passenger or crew on one of my ships and then we can set the world record together. So the rest of the route is fine. All the trains, all the travel on land is fine. It's those two trips between America and Asia. Exactly. Yeah. That's the only thing. And if you find out that, to set the record, I need to do it in under 80 days. And it's a really fun challenge because for circumnavigation, you need to cross all kinds of check marks. So you need to travel at least 38 ,000 kilometers, across the equator at least once and you need to visit two anti-poids points and anti-points are two points which are exactly on the other side of the world of each other.

33:57It's kind of hard to find because not a lot of landmess is connected to each other but I found one point. Yeah, and that makes those details make the challenge really, really interesting and fun. I really hope that it's going to happen. Best of luck with that. If anybody listening can help you out with cargo ship travel across the Pacific, where should they reach you and what can people do to find out more about you? Easy through my website, webelwacker.com, or I'm very easy to find on all social media channels, LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever. Just find my name. I'm the only one with that name.

34:38Just send me a message and we're happy if someone will do.

34:44That is all for today's episode, but Wiba and I didn't actually stop our conversation there. In today's bonus episode, you can hear Wiba talk about the burnout he felt after finishing his drive to Australia. I was just exhausted, you know, like I really came back with a huge burnout. And you can hear about his most recent adventure on an iron ore train across the Sahara. slowly got dark and then in the night you just sleep on that iron ore and you wake up one of the best experiences i ever had in my life of course just being out there in in the open to access that bonus episode all you have to do is click the link in the show notes enter your email and you'll be taken straight to that bonus episode you have to click the link in today's show notes and then when you enter your email it will subscribe you to my newsletter and it will send you straight away to the recording which you can listen to right after this you will be subscribe to my newsletter but you can unsubscribe straight away if you like if you're already a newsletter subscriber then you already have the bonus episode in your emails just check the ps of today's email that is all from me thank you for listening to today's episode of nudge i'll be back next monday with another episode bye