And then it just launched me straight up, and I was suddenly like 200 meters higher—I wouldn't have wanted to climb into that—and the local staff, of course, had never seen anything like it, and their first reaction was just, "Now he's dying." It only took me a while to realize that the whole thing was a controlled flight, because I started circling and then slowly, after about an hour, I flew out into the flatlands looking for a nice spot where I could land so we could pick me up, and where I assumed there weren't any mines; that's definitely not an issue, that you have to watch out for mines.
Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast.
Stories from the cosmos of paragliding.
Today with Oskar Lehner and Lucian Haas at the microphone.
We often forget the great privilege of our lives in the center of Europe, far too often, in the face of the various annoyances of everyday life. We live in peace. And that is truly something that cannot be appreciated enough. Because in many countries and regions, armed conflicts and other crises mean that people can be much, much less sure of their lives. At least there are people working to ensure that peace and perhaps a somewhat fairer order can prevail in such countries. One such person is, or was, Oskar Lehner from Linz, Austria. I say was, because Oskar retired in 2016. Before that, however, he spent 23 years in crisis zones around the world.
Including Rwanda, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Kosovo. He worked for the United Nations, the OSCE, and the EU as a project manager deployed for human rights, democratization, and security. In one respect, however, Oskar differed from all his colleagues on the ground. He always had a paraglider in his luggage. And he actually managed to find ways to get into the air in all those crisis regions. In this 43rd episode of Podz-Glidz, Oskar Lehner tells of various adventurous experiences from that time. But it's also about what role the sport played for him in getting the psychological stress of some of the atrocities he witnessed out of his system.
Oskar is 65 today. He doesn't just do paragliding, but also practices other extreme sports, including whitewater kayaking. What each of these different disciplines gives him is also a topic of this podcast. Finally, the conversation turns to Oskar's ongoing project. He has been traveling the world by car since 2016. In three years, this has already taken him from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska. In 2021, he wants to set off from Austria to Asia. Before we head off with Oskar to the most unusual flight spots, I'll take the liberty of a brief personal note. Presenting such crazy stories from the world of paragliding in the podcast gives me great pleasure, but it also involves a fair amount of effort.
I would be happy if you could support me in this. As a financial supporter of Podz-Glidz and the associated blog Lu-Glidz, you help maintain and expand this offering in its professional and ad-free form. You can find out how to become a supporter on the Lu-Glidz website, specifically on the Support page. The contribution amount is completely up to you. If you're unsure how much you'd like to give, I recommend a non-binding one euro per podcast episode and two euros per reading month on Lu-Glidz. Even when calculated annually, that's significantly less than what a subscription to a classic paraglider magazine costs.
Oskar, to what extent would you describe yourself as a fearless person?
Good question.
Dealing with danger has always fascinated me. But it depends on always keeping it under control.
With different sports. For example, when I'm climbing and I'm high above a bolt and don't know if I'll reach the next one, I get incredibly nervous. But things that are dangerous, I can control because I have the corresponding skills and ability for it. I'm not afraid of that. It's even interesting that it also comes to a standstill. I've had some very dangerous assignments both from my sport and from my profession. That even challenged me. Taking a bit of a risk and also dealing with fear and
In different sports. For example, when I'm climbing high above a bolt and don't know if I'll reach the next one, I get terrified. But I can control things that are dangerous because I have the corresponding skills and ability for them. I'm not afraid of those. It's even interesting that this also applies to my job. I've had some very dangerous assignments in both my sport and my profession. That even challenged me. Taking a bit of a risk and also feeling fear and
I was
I spent a total of 23 years abroad on missions for the UN, the OECD, and the EU. Mostly in conflict or post-conflict countries. Often in war situations as well.
That included Afghanistan, Somalia, the Balkan wars, Tajikistan, the civil war in Somalia, and then Sierra Leone after the war. There were terrible conditions everywhere. But for me personally, the worst was the mission in Rwanda. Shortly after the 1994 genocide, where I worked for the UN human rights organization for ten months. And there, I saw maybe 5,000 dead in total.
Many had been dead for a few weeks or a few months. But that's terrible. I mean, the state of the bodies, how they had decomposed. There were often hundreds lying in heaps. But often, I was there just hours after the massacres, still standing in the pools of blood. And that was something that, when I quit after ten months, I realized I was already so emotionally involved that I often couldn't make a rational decision anymore. I went back to Austria and spent six months—back then, there was no such thing as supervision yet—to get over it. And one experience that particularly affected me was that, for months, you're always just a day or two behind the perpetrators at the crime scene.
Then you get this kind of hatred. You really want to catch and kill the people who are slaughtering everyone there. Once, I was in Höherweite—that's in Gesine, in the northwest of Rwanda—where a hospital was attacked and the doctors and nurses inside were shot. I was nearby with a German police officer who also worked for the UN. We both went in unarmed with a radio and a training aspect to somehow confront the perpetrators. Because we would pounce on them and bring them to the ground. Possibly beat them to death or whatever we would have done to them. When you get emotionally involved like that over months from all these crimes... we were just completely insane to run in there. If we had run into them, we both would have been shot instantly.
And thank God they ran out the other side of the hospital. We had no direct contact with them. We just saw the seriously injured and the dead lying in front of us. And we did something, and then provided first aid. And that was somehow the sign for me where I said, now I have to stop there. Because my decisions were no longer rational. And then coming back to Europe—that was actually the worse time. Because there on site, we still had other people who had experienced it that same day. People we could grumble with, have a beer with, and somehow release the tension. But coming back to Europe was harder. Because we looked at people like we were coming back from the moon. And I didn't have any conversation partners anymore. So I did a lot of sports.
For six months, I just did climbing, parkour, kayaking, hiking, and windsurfing. And after those six months, where I actually got my stories out every night at the campfire with my friends at the time, and later with my wife—they had the patience to listen to me. Then I was okay again. And then I went on the next mission. That was actually the worst experience for me.
So, sports were really like the outlet for you to release all that pent-up frustration, fear, and whatever else all those feelings were piling up. Not to live them out, but to get them out of your cells. Absolutely. It was like a...
To work through it and just deal with myself. Because sport, especially when you're climbing. Or riding a heavy bike. Or flying. Then it's always a bit of dealing with yourself. Your own decisions. Focusing on making sure nothing happens. And also being able to let go. And experiencing nature. I know that others had pretty strong post-traumatic symptoms. And my way of dealing with it was simply doing sport for half a year. And that worked wonderfully as therapy. Another thing that also worked well. This sounds weird now. It's simply sex. And not just that I didn't have my girlfriend back then. But I know of colleagues who were in Afghanistan during an attack on a hotel where several people were killed.
The whole team was evacuated to Dubai.
There's a crisis intervention team now. All the psychologists came from New York to take care of the survivors. But what they did... they just... they got a lot of money for the evacuation. And they just turned it into sex. So the sex workers from all over Dubai gathered together. Because there were a lot of people who wanted to get rid of their money. And that was the therapy. And I spoke with psychologists later. They said that's actually a very natural reaction. And probably also the most sensible one. And they
People just did what they needed to do. When you see such horrific images, like you did in Rwanda... how do you then end up going back again and again to—I'd say from a Western perspective—to very unstable states to work there? Why did you do that? What drew you to it?
My
My career actually started out rather modestly. I studied law and then got a job at the university relatively quickly. I was an assistant professor and then habilitated in the field of Austrian legal history. Alongside that, I often went to Central America as a freelance journalist to report on the civil wars and human rights violations there. And by chance, in 1993, I was contacted by the Austrian Foreign Ministry, saying that the UN was looking for people to help manage Cambodia. It was being managed for two years by the UN due to the peace agreement. So they were looking for lawyers and administrative specialists to step in on short notice to help conduct the elections and set up the administration.
And I was then seconded, went over there for half a year. And that was an absolutely fantastic experience. It was an adventure, it was a bit dangerous, but not really dangerous. You could let your inner explorer out in the jungle a bit. And the elections... the elections themselves... those were a great success.
And back then, people were already telling you that you... you get hooked. That means, if you enjoy it, you stay with it. And when I got back to my university and looked out the window, every day at the end of the day, the question would arise: why should I stay there and look out the same window for the rest of my life? Because we're basically always the same colleagues, the same work, the same workplace. Why should I always look out the same window when the world outside is so colorful and adventure is calling? So I quit, which is rather unusual for a pragmatic civil servant, because most people say, "I've made it and can have a secure job until the end of my life."
But that was just enough for me. And it was kind of like the air went out of it, in the sense of: do I really want to do the same thing for 30 years? And then it was a tragic coincidence. Shortly after I quit, the genocide in Rwanda began. And they made another worldwide appeal, saying they need people for a human rights mission who can leave within days. And I signed up for the undercover work. And on Saturday, I already flew out to Rwanda. And I built all my subsequent deployments on that mission. And once you're in there, it's practically very difficult to return to a normal civilian job. Because you're just missing something. You also miss that feeling of constant excitement, that something could happen at any moment.
Because you're constantly on edge. And once you've experienced that feeling, if you enjoy it,
Once you've experienced that feeling and you like it, you can't let it go. I did a bit of looking into your stuff. You have a website where you recount your life and your missions. If you just look at this list of countries alone, it's already very impressive. So, you've already mentioned Cambodia and Rwanda. Then there's Bosnia, Croatia, Tajikistan, then Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Tanzania, Afghanistan, Somalia. I think I've pretty much got them all together now. That's right, yeah. In all these countries, where you probably worked for months, sometimes even years, did you always have your paraglider with you? Because you said after Rwanda, you were always paragliding. So if that's such a part of your life, did you basically always have it with you at the same time?
Have
did you maybe take that? In the
taken? In the
In most countries, I had my sports equipment with me. So many different sports. In Rwanda, I had the paraglider with me. I did one short flight. It was actually a field launch where I was pulled down a meadow because the terrain isn't really that favorable for paragliding, as it's relatively low-lying. And I had small clearings with crosswinds. And none of that went very well. But basically, I always have all the sports gear with me on missions. Especially if I'm somewhere for a longer time. I was in Kyrgyzstan for four years, in Afghanistan for three. I had my kayak with me, the paraglider, the ski touring gear, the climbing gear. Whatever is possible in that country. And there are always ways to get the stuff there.
For example, in Afghanistan, I did some flights in Bamian in 2012 and 2013. That sounds a bit bizarre. And that was probably the only flight there that year. Now, Afghanistan is a terribly gruesome war zone, and it's extremely dangerous. But it's not the entire country. I worked in Afghanistan for the preparation of the 2014 presidential election as part of a UN team. And of course, we had the information on where it was dangerous and where it was safe. One area that was assessed as safe was Bamian. That's the high valley where the famous Buddha statues were. Because an ethnic group lives there called the Hazara.
And they are the Taliban's arch-enemies. And it's very difficult for the Taliban to operate there. It's relatively safe. And I just went hiking, ski touring, and paragliding there. Although, of course, you imagine that differently than back home. I had some local staff with me. A security officer who looked after me. And we did some joint, let's say, fourth or fifth caravans up the mountain. And when I looked at the wind direction somehow... Afghanistan is relatively barren. That means you just need a slope somewhere where you can take off. But there's hardly any forest. That means you look at where the wind direction is. And then I went to a mountain near Bandar Amir.
This is a great story in that high valley. It's a chain of lakes that act like Athenian wells. Water runs underground from the surrounding mountains, which are about 5,000 to 6,000 meters high, and meets in the valley basin at about 2,500 meters. Right in the middle of the desert, there's this chain of really blue lakes. I went up one mountain because I thought I could take off there. We went up a few hundred meters in altitude, and then I put on my glider. The wind was pretty strong. The local employees helped me out, and then something funny happened. I took off—it was a bit of a wild start because the wind was so strong—and I went up. Then I was immediately beamed upwards and entered the thermals a few hundred meters higher.
And the local staff, of course, had never seen anything like it. Their first reaction to me was, "Now he's going to die," because they realized, "That's enough, he's going up to some altitude of a few thousand meters. The wind is going to blow him away." And they thought I'd just disappear into the height. It was only slowly that I realized the whole thing was a controlled flight, because I started circling. I flew along the mountain range, and eventually, after about an hour, I flew out into the plain. I looked for a flat spot so that I could land nicely even in the strong wind. A place where we could pick up what we were looking for, and where I assumed there wouldn't be any mines. In Afghanistan, that's just the problem—you always have to watch out for mines.
So they were extremely relieved. Because they had obviously had a huge heart attack. If something had happened to me. And they actually saw for the first time that you can make such great flights with your uncomplicated paraglider. And there's a funny story about that. I flew there more often. In different directions. It's a small village. The lake chain is so famous. Like a small local tourist spot for Afghans to go to. Because it's one of the safest places in Afghanistan. And it was of course a sensation. How I landed right there near the village. People gathered together and all that. And everyone attacking with a paraglider. It was so exciting. And a woman there wanted to marry off some of her daughters to me right away.
Because she thought: Someone who can do something like that, coming from abroad... That's the best way to provide for her daughter on earth.
Something like the gods must be crazy. If someone just flies in like that.
That's pretty much how it was. It was unimaginable for them that someone would just fly in like that and then land so gently.
You just said you were out there with the local staff. What's that like? You're basically in this international community, probably. And all kinds of people who work for organizations like the UN or OSCE.
Were you, in their eyes, sort of... not with the local staff, but with your colleagues there, like that crazy sports nut? The one who still takes the time to swing around on his sports equipment here in these weird risk zones. That is absolutely...
You have to imagine it like this. Especially in those two countries, Afghanistan and Somalia. You don't live somewhere in a house; we all lived in a camp and had to work. It was strictly guarded, surrounded by a high wall with barbed wire. And we had 36 armed guards sitting up there in the camp watching over us. And when we went out, we were in armored vehicles. We were attacked repeatedly, whether we were in the camp or outside. I was lucky; nothing ever happened to me. But I had colleagues who were killed in attacks. So, from that perspective, if you're doing sports, for many of those inside, it's completely incomprehensible. Or rather, I worked in Afghanistan for over 6 weeks.
And then had a break. In Somalia, it was 4 weeks. You worked straight through.
Then you can use your normal vacation. Plus, you get an additional 9 days of leave every 6 or 4 weeks. Most of them then went to a wellness spa. And after the container life. After all the hardship you have there. They looked for nice hotels. And I just... I got my sports gear. Trekking or flying. Or kayaking or mountaineering. Or ski touring in Kashmir. Or flying in Yemen. That was completely incomprehensible to them.
I had a funny experience with that. This flight to Bamiyan—I have to tell you. In every region, there's a UN security officer. The one responsible for security in the team. I had to register with him, of course. I didn't tell him that I was going flying. So I just went and flew, and then the next day, I sent the photos of the flight. Some were taken from the air, some were taken by my colleagues. And when he saw the photos, he was completely blown away. Everyone who goes to Bamiyan sends photos of the statues. But when he saw this, he said it's the first and only time someone has ever sent him such shots of flying. And he told his employees right then that whenever anyone needs a security clearance in Bamiyan, they should do it immediately.
...approve it. You can also rely on the fact that he knows what he's doing, or rather, give him the freedom to do it.
Maybe to explain, I wasn't allowed to do all these things just for fun as a hobby, of course, but I went skiing in Bamian in the winter and hiking and flying in the summer, and I always had to justify it as official business. And we agreed on that with security with a bit of a wink. I was responsible in our team—there were 60 internet halls—I was responsible for the legal stuff and for setting up the security system and construction measures and so on. But we had a large department that also did voter information and voter education for the elections. And the reason I gave to go out into nature, which security agreed to with a wink, was that I said, I have to check the impact of our voter education projects.
That means I also have to see how effective our voter information is. And you can only determine that if you really go into the furthest valleys, into the last villages, because in the capital, of course, everyone knows how the elections work and how to vote and so on. But whether you really have such good outreach, you have to find out by going into the rural areas. And that was the official reason when I went on my ski tour and my hike: to assess the impact of our voter education projects. And that way I was also covered by insurance, because the insurance only applied to official activities. The life insurance we all had taken out through the UN. I was covered with that, and that's how I had the long line. And the others were happy because they needed information. So, how does the information we send out via radio, via leaflets and so on, does it really reach the small
villages. You were traveling in these countries for sports and also for flying. But if I understood that correctly, you were mostly alone. Or were there any countries where there was something like a flying community that you could join? There was one country...
...given, where I really had a very close connection to the flying community, and that was Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan was a bit of an exception among my countries. As far as I can remember, it was still relatively calm. It was somewhat considered the Switzerland of Central Asia, first of all because of its beauty and because it was actually relatively stable until the mid-2000s. But just then, it had its first crisis revolution. I was an eyewitness on the main square as the presidential palace was stormed and the president was driven out, and I then co-organized the subsequent elections with the electoral commission and was there for four years. And since it's very mountainous there and the mountains have almost no forest, meaning you never run out of launch sites, a small local flying community had already formed there around the turn of the millennium, and I came into contact with them; they were my main leisure partners for all those years, and they are great pilots.
has become. Under conditions that are much more demanding than here in Europe, and they are more demanding because they have much less accurate weather forecasts. The community is much smaller, so you can't... and it's not flown as much, which means you can't rely on the experience of others.
The weather phenomena are much more massive because the mountains there are between 5 and 7,000 meters, and if a gust hits somewhere—if a wind comes in or a thunderstorm starts or a downdraft picks up, which are the "Tieren Scharnberge"—then it's much more powerful than here. And we had a case where a cold air mass somehow came over from China, which happened often, and suddenly a colleague of mine, who wanted to land down in the village, was blown backward at 70 km/h and only had the luck of getting caught in a tree. The wind was 70 km/h, he was blown back maybe 20–30 km/h and a tree caught him, and he's still hanging there; otherwise, he would have crashed into a 4–5 story building and probably fallen there. It was completely unexpected, it came out of nowhere, and another challenge is that...
The land is very sparsely populated, there isn't a good road system, there's a poor communication system, you don't have mobile reception, the hospitals aren't very well developed, and if you somehow get lost, it takes much longer to get help or receive help than it does here in Central Europe. I experienced this when I organized the club trip to Kyrgyzstan in 2008 for the Linz Kayak Club and for the Micheldorf Paragliding Club, which I'm a member of in Upper Austria. We went all the way to the furthest corner, way to the east, right to the Chinese border, and then by chance, there was a rescue helicopter—it was a large Russian one—and they invited us to fly along because they were looking for a French tourist who had gone missing somewhere. She had made an emergency call and we searched the whole area, and even though it was partly glacier, partly it was rocks, so no trees, I saw it relatively well, but in that massive tangle of mountains and so on, how quickly you can get lost there and how difficult it is to get out again, whether you have to get out yourself or, in other words, how unpleasant.
The rescue chain there is insufficient because they don't have mountain rescue like we do, who know the trained areas, but at the time it was, these were the first projects to train mountain guides, because since the collapse of the weather, there hadn't been anything like that, and therefore flying there is significantly more demanding, but it has the advantage, I mean, the landscape is great and you don't fly in a large group, but you go up a mountain somewhere alone, assess the weather, wind situation, and start situation yourself, and then you just fly for yourself alone and have a beautiful, great nature experience with two or three friends, which really combines nature and solitude.
But when you fly in such exposed areas, it's obviously associated with a high risk. What did you do, or what do you do in such situations to minimize your own risk? Or do you say, I'll just go for it, I'll just fly? And I'll come down safe, and if something happens, then it happens. I admire the
Pilots who do that, who just fly into a lightning storm without a plan B. In some areas, you're just lucky. I've seen a few reports about people who flew over the Himalayas or with friends in the village of Michel, in the club, who flew all alone in northern Pakistan for two weeks and had wild experiences. I don't dream of that. I always try to minimize the risk and somehow still be able to control it. That means I've tried to have communication systems with me. I usually had a satellite phone or a tracker-spot or something like that. I have the corresponding first-aid kits and so on.
I also always told my friends or local staff what I was doing, where I was, and roughly where I was flying to. And then... This doesn't just apply to flying, but I also went skiing in Kirchstein, and you just can't take that much risk. You can't go into slopes that could potentially become dangerous. You have to stay much more on the safe side, and that goes for flying too. You have to consider how far I can fly, what the weather situation looks like, and in an emergency, decide not to fly because the situation is too hard to assess. But overall, I... it actually went well, and I don't think it was just luck; I also tried to use a risk minimization approach.
to make hazards manageable. And I learned that in my profession, among other things, because since our work was always in risk areas, we had an approach of always thinking in a matrix. Namely, how high is the risk? How high is the probability? How high is the probability that it can occur and what means do I have to buffer the risk? When you put these three vectors together—in the UN we have a matrix, a risk matrix—if you put that together, you somehow come to the result: go or not go. So you can do it or not do it if it's above a certain level of danger, and where then the question is also: how important is it to do it? Although with paragliding, it's actually never important.
It's not like you're delivering life-saving medication somewhere and saying you absolutely have to take a risk, that you have to save people's lives; it's not about whether you have a nice flight or not. And I've actually made the decision quite often to say, no, the risk is too great and it's not worth it. And then
I just didn't do anything. Despite everything, despite the risk assessment you did with that matrix, did you ever have any negative experiences with your flights in any of those countries? Actually, no. It's always been...
everything went well and I've never had an accident in those countries. The only, only stupid thing I did, unfortunately happened in Mittelarpen in Germany. And in hindsight, it was really my own stupidity. I think it was 2017. I wanted to do a little trip through Bavaria, Switzerland, and Austria, just going to a flight area every day, and I somehow had my Excel sheet in my head, so on that day, that. And I started in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and headed uphill, and I'd already been told by the locals beforehand that thunderstorms would come in the early afternoon and we wanted to head out early. And I saw that storm clouds were already gathering behind the mountains and I was the only one there in the flight area, so I took off, flew around—it was thermally rather weak, and so on.
Then, after about an hour, I headed towards the landing field and then it was exactly what you're always taught in training. You learn that the cold air wedge from thunderstorms, when they discharge, travels that far ahead and is deflected through the valleys. And I then landed into a pressure wave from a thunderstorm that was in the next valley, and then in the landing area, despite the spoiler system, I flew backwards and the ground got closer to the collapse and I chewed down the last few meters and then with the... L2 lumbar vertebrae broke, so a nice piece broke off. That was actually the worst experience I've had in flying, because it's the trust and the confidence in my ability to assess things that were lost.
And a vertebral fracture is obviously no small matter. I thought about what led to it, and it was simply that I was just following my program and paid far too little attention to the weather indicators—the weather forecast and so on—and I changed that later. Although, in that context, I want to say one thing: something that is actually shared and discussed far too little in terms of information in the flying community is how vertebral fractures are treated, because in my circle of acquaintances, I think half of them have had a vertebral injury at some point over 20 or 30 years of flying, and there are different treatment methods and the... I have a few flight hours...
I've already prompted the surgeons to write about it, but they somehow want to completely ignore it. This happened to me, by the way; I had the vertebral fracture, I could still walk, and at first, I didn't take it seriously. I set up my tent, dealt with a bit of pain, and then went to the hospital the next day and told them that a triangle maybe 1 to 1.5 cm in size had broken off, but not near the nerve canal on the other side. They wanted to operate on me and screw it in right away, but then I said, no, don't do that. I was at home in Linz and signed a waiver, drove to Linz, checked into the hospital there, and they wanted to operate and screw it in again. Then at some point I found out there's a gluing method, so the night before the surgery, I researched it on the internet in the hospital and then called another doctor—I practically dragged him out of bed—and described what I had. He said, yes, you can glue it, and then the next day I was like...
literally came from the doctor. Then I jumped on the operating table and told myself, let me get operated on, checked out, and went to the hospital on the other side of the street where the doctor said he'd operate on me and that he has a gluing method where, with his 3D X-ray and two needles, an adhesive—it's like a superglue—is injected into the fracture sites, and you have to be under anesthesia for an hour... And then you can get up immediately and be discharged the next day; weeks later you can already go hiking without a backpack, and three weeks later you can actually do everything again, including flying. That doesn't work for all fractures, but for certain fractures it does, and it's a much less invasive procedure than the big incision and screwing it in with iron or steel, because first of all, if you screw it in, a few vertebrae become rigid and the adjacent vertebrae are stressed much more, then you have the iron in there.
and it takes much longer because you have to take a break for up to twelve weeks, meaning the entire muscular system weakens. But with this method using the superglue that gets injected, you can move completely normally again after one week; the muscular system doesn't atrophy and, at least for my injury, it was a significantly better procedure. I think paragliding pilots should have this knowledge—that they should know if something like this happens, to also ask about alternative methods, because that's not how it works in normal accident clinics. In normal accident clinics, it's the standard procedure; any surgeon can cut and screw, and they do that for everything, even when other methods that require special training would be much better. This happened in 2017, and it's been over three years now, and I can say I have no complaints; I carry a heavy backpack when trekking and have no problems when flying. I've gone kayaking, too—so the surgery really worked wonders for me.
Interesting information. Interesting information, maybe we can also have a link for that, which I'll then put in the show notes at the end. One more question, going back to your accident, or rather in comparison with all the others where you talk about risk management or something, could it also contribute if you fly in Germany or Austria, where you say I have such good infrastructure, also such good safety infrastructure, there's rescue or something, that you're also much more willing in your head to basically take a bigger risk? That is absolutely
So, if I already see some thunderclouds behind the next mountain, I wouldn't have launched in Kirchstein, but when you're standing at the launch site somewhere in Bavaria and you have the village below and the sky above you is still blue, then you just take more risk; you feel like you're in a much more familiar environment, you're generally not as mindful of what if and how I get out again and the next flight takes... I was five hours away from there and so on, and I just didn't think about it enough, I tuned it out, and in hindsight, for me, it was somehow just ticking off the Excel list. I wanted to fly somewhere different every day and, by the way, I'd already planned the route and today it's Gammelsport in Kirchen, and that's getting flown without me really looking at what the weather conditions are like, that was a
a clear mistake on my part. That means the program was basically the risk, not necessarily the sport itself. The program was the risk, yes. Well, especially when you talk about risk sports—even if in this case the program was the risk—you're basically a very athletic person and you do many different sports that are often classified as risk sports or riskier sports; mountaineering belongs there, you've done skydiving, you drive, you also mentioned whitewater kayaking, you go horse riding, diving, paragliding... do you need this thrill?
I don't need the thrill. I do need the thrill, though. I realized relatively early in life that I like a bit of a kick and a bit of adrenaline, but always below the line where I somehow become self-endangering. But I'm fascinated by doing things that are "potentially dangerous" in quotation marks, because climbing, diving, flying—all of that can end fatally if you don't have the corresponding skill. That means if you master diving, if you master kayaking, if you know how to skydive and how to paraglide correctly, then it still becomes relatively safe. And that experience, and at the same time it's also a self-confirmation, to do something dangerous,
pushing some boundaries a bit, but mastering the equipment, mastering the aerodynamics, understanding the weather, planning a route so that it doesn't become dangerous and yet you still have a beautiful flight. That's what fascinated me, maybe from my twenties or mid-twenties. I have to say, I started quite traditionally as a young guy with football, tennis, skiing, the traditional sports. And then with these others I mentioned, like kayaking, skydiving, paragliding, diving, I saw that the emotional experience is simply much more intense. And also the skill you need for it, or rather the feedback you get when you come out of it safe again because of your skill.
And it's not just like, you go jogging because it's healthy for your circulation, but on top of that, you've also achieved something in quotation marks by mastering a dangerous thing. And you survived, although I'm not exactly putting my life in danger, but it's also somehow great. Especially with paragliding, and this is something I've actually never quite read about, but it's an important thing for me: for the first 16 years of my life, I was a scientist. And paper is patient; you can write whatever you want on paper, then find a publisher who releases it, and then your essay is out in his book. But you hope that a lightning strike is written, so no. The paper doesn't warp because of that. With paragliding, you get immediate feedback. If you want to do a small cross-country flight of a few hours, then it's not that easy.
You take off, then you have the problem of crossing a valley, or you have to turn somewhere, and when do you fly away, where do you fly to, and so on. And you get the feedback immediately, whether your decision was right or wrong. If you approach the valley crossing incorrectly and end up somewhere with no dynamics, you'll stall and end up sitting at the bottom of the valley. Or if you're somehow fighting against the wind because you misjudged the angle, or you flew away too early and didn't have enough patience to keep turning, then the flight is over. Or you don't get as far as the others. That means you always get immediate, objective, physical feedback. In our professional lives, it's often the case that your feedback depends on whether your boss likes you or not, whether you have colleagues who are on your side or not, or you get no feedback at all because whatever you do, it only turns out to be right or wrong in two, three, or four years.
But with paragliding, you really get the answer within minutes as to whether your decision was right or wrong. And paragliding is actually constant feedback. You have to make decisions all the time. In the sense of where do I turn, do I turn higher, when do I cross, in which direction do I cross, where do I look for the next thermals. That means you have to make decisions constantly. And you constantly get immediate feedback from physics as to whether your decision was right or wrong. And that is something many of us don't actually have in our professional lives. Because if you, I don't know, you can sit in a bank, you can be an accountant, you can do whatever. The feedback is never as direct as you have it with paragliding. And that is also for me
a beautiful experience while flying. The feedback you get in your career is often subjective, always tied to the other person. But with paragliding, you can say it's objective feedback. Right. The one who is highest, if it's just about getting up in the thermals, you have to say, he somehow did it best.
Exactly, yeah. Or with us, you first fly in the house board, take off, and then it spreads out. So I mainly fly in the Upper Austria area and then it spreads out. Everyone looks for their own routes because you can fly into the routes fresh. And then you're basically only flying with yourself. But with yourself, you set a goal. I want to fly this small stretch and I want to cross the valley there. And you get the feedback immediately, whether your decision was right or wrong. And next time. You also learn the decision then. So next time you try to do it differently. And for me, in all sports, except maybe playing football and playing tennis, I don't really have any sports that are particularly about fighting against others.
Rather, you can also do competitions in climbing. Climbing is really beautiful because you have the wall in front of you and you climb up, and above all, it's about climbing over the wall. And in kayaking, it's a difficult river and a waterfall where you're afraid and so on. There, you look for a line. And at some point, you make it and swim or don't swim. And with flying, it's the same. So in my sporting life, it's not so much about measuring myself against others because I'm faster, higher, or further than the others. Instead, I manage to fly 30, 40, or 50 kilometers for myself today, or to fly for three hours or get somewhere and get back to the landing field. And with that, I'm satisfied. I'm also proud of that because it was a beautiful flight. And I'm happy when I land down there and say, that was a successful day. Especially
When you do so many different sports. You just mentioned climbing, whitewater, kayaking, and paragliding again. Which of these sports actually fascinates you the most personally, or which gives you the most, and why? I have to say, I do many...
Sports. I'm not outstanding at any of them. I've done kayaking, but it stopped quickly at the level five. With climbing, it was somewhere around 6b. My longest paragliding flight was eventually around 100 kilometers. I'm actually sort of like above-average mediocrity. But I like it and I'm not aiming to become particularly good at any of it. Which sports have excited me the most? In my 30s or 40s, it was kayaking. And there was just a great kick to it. It was that shared experience with them. And then, when you go down a river where it's roaring and the water wants to get you. When you're in a rapid, and it's crashing over you, and you either manage to stay in the boat or you don't, and so on.
That's such a great experience, and it's also very physical because it takes a lot of strength. Later on, it shifts a bit towards paragliding, because paragliding isn't really a high-action sport. You don't have to react lightning-fast or fight your way through a rapid with maximum force. There's more time for that. You also get to enjoy nature. So, when you're flowing high above the mountains and look down at this beautiful landscape, and how the earth really reveals itself in a new perspective from above. You see the folds. It's like a bit of a group lesson in geology and how the mountains unfold in the Alps. And up there, it looks like a book. You can see the layers that have been broken open.
You can imagine what used to be joined together. What was eroded somewhere. What was somehow shifted. And then there's also the play of colors when you're up that high. And the peace up there, too. When you're not, like, scraping along the ridge and constantly afraid of hitting something, when you're way up there, it's just very relaxing. You're hovering a few hundred meters above the peaks and being carried along beautifully by the thermals. And that's actually a really great feeling of happiness. Like that
Natural High. That means those are really the moments of enjoyment you might find in whitewater kayaking. What you don't get in that form of whitewater paddling. With whitewater paddling,
especially when you're doing the heavier stuff, there's not much enjoyment in it. It's just a matter of looking back and saying, "I pushed myself. I did it." But during the time you're in there, unless you're on a calm river where you can just glide along nicely. But when you're really in a rapid, you're so focused on steering the boat through and not capsizing. The relaxation actually comes more from flying, when you're way up there and can glide over the landscape. You get that with kayaking too, but you really have to do the easier rivers. That's also beautiful, through the gorgeous scenery.
Probably also due to physical reasons. You get less strong and a bit weaker. And a bit more cautious, and so on. That's why it shifted from kayaking to paragliding.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. Can you say that paragliding is more of a senior sport? I can also see it from
That's an extreme way of putting it. Can you say that paragliding is more of a senior sport? I can also see it from... My friends. When it comes to kayaking—everyone who started with me 30, 35 years ago. We're nowhere near riding what we used to ride back then. We're way below the Zagreb level. There are rivers we used to run that were relatively easy for us. Places where you just don't think about getting back in there ever again. With paragliding, it's different. It's actually a sport you can do at a pretty similar level well into old age. I'm 65 now. And I fly with our club in a so-called "Oldies" group. That's a group of older gentlemen, all between their early 60s and the oldest being 77. And we don't actually fly much worse than we did 15, 20 years ago.
So it really is a sport that you can do at roughly the same level into old age. And 77, and my friend, his name is Stazi,
He only announced that he wants to fly until he's 80. And at 80, he's throwing a big retirement party, and then we can go on some ski touring. Although we're talking about him continuing to fly. But you can really do that from 70 to 80. Paragliding is still possible. You just have to walk those few meters and somehow practice your landing technique to know how to land safely at that age. And then it really is a sport that you can actually practice at a similar level for a very, very long time. Not at all as a senior sport in a derogatory sense, but a sport that is actually very suitable for seniors. You shouldn't necessarily start flying at 70, but if you started at 20, 30, or 40, then you can certainly at 70
still fly comfortably. I recently had a podcast guest who only started flying at 73. He was a Swiss guy who actually did the course. That's great. He's also very, very athletic, but he managed it well overall. So it's possible, but his flight instructor probably told him it's much more sensible to start significantly earlier, because the muscle learning and muscle memory you have to build, and the reactions you have to develop, are just much easier if you do it early. Absolutely, yes. Let's jump back into the topic a bit, into your life now, into the quasi "present day" or rather the last few years. You stopped the jobs you were doing for the UN, OSCE, EU, and so on abroad in 2016 and then started traveling the world yourself.
If you've already traveled so much abroad, why do you have to keep traveling? Why don't you say at a certain age, "Oh, come on, I can just settle down now"? Good question.
Through my professional work, I don't know, I've seen maybe 50, 60 countries with neighboring countries and so on, and I've also traveled to about 30 of them for vacation. And the more countries I saw, the more curious I became about the rest. It wasn't like I said, "You've already been so far away, now I want to settle down," but it was the curiosity to see everything else too. And not in the sense of achieving some kind of feat, but simply, I've been to Latin America a few times, but I haven't really seen it, haven't really known it, and there are so many fascinating countries, continents, and regions that I thought, I want to see the others too. It actually started back during my middle school years.
I had a very, very good geography professor who was able to really inspire us, and he spoke so enthusiastically about the Pan-American Highway. Even at the ages of 15, 16, or 17, I had the desire to travel the Pan-American Highway once, either on foot, by car, or however. After school, after my studies, I started working right away, and then somehow it just didn't happen, but I always carried this wish in the back of my mind to travel around the world by car once. And then it was just a matter of making it possible; just like others save up for their weekend house and then build it and are happy with it, I simply put the money aside and said, I'm not building a weekend house, I'm saving up money for a trip around the world by car.
The prerequisite was first saving the money, but also the time, and the money gave me the time to stop working earlier. I stopped working at 60 without getting a pension yet, and then I said, for the rest of the time until I get a pension, I'll just live off my savings, but I want to be fit and young enough so that the trip is really worth it. Then in December 2016—well, in the summer of 2016—I resigned from the UN, and then I had a second hip operation, which I squeezed in in between, and by the time I was discharged from rehab, I had a 4x4 that had been converted into a motorhome; I sent that to Argentina, flew out to meet it, and then from December 2016 to February 2020—so until the end of winter this year—I drove from Argentina up to Alaska and then back down, and then I shipped the car to Europe, where during a stopover in Austria, I fell in love again and met an old childhood friend, and I was able to get her excited about coming along, and that was in 2017; she resigned in Austria in 2017, then got on board in Peru, and then we drove together.
The car was packed full of sports equipment and, of course, the park ranger was also along for the ride, and wherever it was possible, I also flew a lot during the trip.
Did you basically drive through all the countries in the Americas, or did you really just follow the Pan-American Highway and thus the Andean countries accordingly? I went once...
I was briefly in the south of Brazil, but essentially then up through the Andean countries, but we went in a zigzag and then further into the Mediterranean, then Mexico and up the west coast of the USA to Alaska. The whole thing took about three years. For someone who wants to do a trip like that, I can say if we see everything, if we also only see Brazil and Uruguay, Paraguay and so on, then you should at least plan for four years. They are such huge distances, I drove about 100,000 kilometers, which in itself isn't that much in terms of driving, but if you also want to do some stuff there, I went mountain climbing, flying, rafting, did some two-week trips properly and so on. If you want to do all that, that's when you really experience the country,
then you need three years as an absolute minimum, and four or five years is better. And that's why we just had to set priorities. I said Brazil is too big because you need about a year for that, because you always have to do some east-west between the Andes and Brazil or do a loop and so on. And I mainly focused on the Andean countries. Sure, I missed out on some of Brazil because of that, but the trip through the Andean countries was also fantastic.
And did you fly in every country in the Andean region, so to speak? I flew in every country.
I actually started down in Patagonia, south of Bariloche; those are some beautiful flying areas. And it sounds kind of funny, because I somehow found out that you can fly down there. There are a few fir tree pilots, I contacted them. They showed me the launch sites and I was welcomed into the community there. And that's a bit different from us. As a community, they are so much... they have a much stronger sense of community. For them, flying doesn't end when you land, drink your landing beer, and then go home. Instead, they cook together, they spend the evening together. And I experienced that with the Argentinians too, it was climbing. It's different than in Austria, when you go climbing, even in a group, everyone sits at their own little stove.
Instead, they build a big fire, put a huge pot over it, and cook for 20 people. Then you have a great time and the evening slowly winds down. That's how I got into his group of pilots south of Bariloche. When I told them about my plan to head towards Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and so on, they immediately gave me the contact details for the next clubs because they're all networked with each other. So, de facto, I was passed from club to club. And at every club, it was pretty much the same experience. They were incredibly nice about welcoming me. They'd gather the whole club together. So, like, there's one—again, in quotes—famous club from Austria. Although "famous" is, of course, meant ironically. But they were totally thrilled that an Austrian was coming to check out their flight sites and fly there.
I almost always flew along with the local clubs. And they gave me the corresponding areas, so they did safety briefings. Because flying in Latin America is already quite a bit more demanding than in Austria and Germany. It's at least as demanding as in France. Simply because there's much less vigilance on the mountains. The launch sites are more demanding. You almost never get away without a back launch. There are such strong launch winds. And then, well, you have to know where you can fly to, because you're very quickly out of radio range. And then you have to know what to expect there. Or rather, how do I get back? Or how do I contact the rescue chain if I have difficulties?
Did those experiences you had in Argentina with the flying community—where you're being passed along like that—did they continue throughout the trip? I mean, does that happen in the other Latin American countries too? Or is that something specific to Argentina? No, no, that is
then continued. So in Northern Argentina, we recommended people in Bolivia. And that's how I really got passed along through all of Latin America, because they are very strongly networked with each other. What that has to do with it is, they fly much less. There are many places where you can fly, but there are significantly fewer officially designated flight areas. I think Argentina has 40 flight areas, although that's about 6,000 kilometers long, but areas where a windsock stands, where people fly. And they visit each other and also meet up at the ones—for example, I was at the Argentine National Championship, and I think everyone, pretty much every Argentine, had a glider that flew there, because so many pilots don't have one.
And because of that, they all know each other. They are really much better networked than, for example, in Upper Austria, where we already have difficulties—I think we have five or six clubs. So I know very few people from other clubs because they're practically in the next valley over, and we have little to do with them. It's completely different there; the groups, together with the community, are just much closer than with us. And interestingly, everyone there flies with a radio. For example, in Upper Austria, I don't know anyone who flies with a radio because it's a bit like, I'm not a beginner anymore. But there, everyone uses a radio, and they also communicate while flying.
with each other. They're all on the same frequency, and you know, you switch to this, that's our flight frequency, and then you know where each plane is. Exactly. But that's probably also a safety requirement fundamentally, so that the person who might crash or something can actually communicate, because there probably aren't any mobile networks in many places either. Absolutely, yeah. So she always had it in the...
borrowed a radio for the aircraft. They each had a spare, and we wouldn't have been allowed to take off without them. They tell us we want everyone to have a radio. One time it really helped me, it was, I don't know, somewhere in northern Argentina, desert area, that was a great flying area, and Route 40 goes below, so road number 40, and because it's so desert-like, there are strong wind systems, and I had already seen that it was difficult with landing means down there, and then someone radioed up from below that we have a landing wind of about 40 km/h down there, and the desert there was the road, and then there were the thorn bushes and so on, and you really had to drive the road like a maniac, that wasn't a problem because we all had to land on the road, because we were in danger if the first one somehow had to stay in, but the others were like, you've come down, there were two people standing down there, they immediately grabbed the rear lines
ripped off, otherwise we would have been dragged along the road, and of course a radio is much better if you can already communicate in the air and say what's waiting for you.
When you look at all these countries you're visiting on this world trip—at least the part of America you've pretty much already ticked off—if you compare them all, is there a country where you'd say, "If someone wants to go paragliding somewhere, I'd especially recommend this one," and for what reason?
So Kyrgyzstan is
It's beautiful for flying, first of all, because you really have thousands of launch sites. It's a country that only has four percent forest, it's very mountainous, and the mountains have a grass cover up to three and a half thousand meters; only then does it get rocky. You can do some beautiful hike and fly, the people are very nice, and you have relatively long periods of good weather. From that perspective, Kyrgyzstan is a beautiful country if you want to travel a bit further and have some of that exotic and unusual flying.
Austria is great for flying, but I also really enjoyed flying in France—the atmosphere of France between the Alps and the South of France is just very good—but I only want to tell you about one experience that was actually an extraordinary flying experience for me, and that was Yemen. You have to imagine, I'm sitting in Kabul in 2011, somehow in the winter of 2011, 2012, and I'm looking around a bit, clicking through the internet and so on, and suddenly I come across a film by the Nova team. They were in Yemen on the island of Socotra in 2011, around 2011, 2012, and they were the first ones to fly there and they had Thermik King and all kinds of people were involved and they...
because they heard that there's a, a, it must be the North-West Monsoon, that flows along the Socotra coastal range for over four months, which is about 700 meters of almost vertical wall underneath, and they went there and made a fantastic film called Forgotten Island, Socotra—that's S-O-C, Socotra—and I saw it and it electrified me, like I have to go there, and then I googled, for example, how to organize that, and a few days later a friend called me saying he'd read that you can go ski touring in Kashmir, that a guide offers it, and then I was faced with the problem: Socotra would be nice, Kashmir would be nice, what to do? Then I said, do both, so sand and snow.
Starting from Kabul, I had everything with me. I then booked a flight via Dubai to Yemen. I knew that Yemen—even before the war—was already quite dangerous; there were terrorist attacks, and Socotra is located right in the heart of piracy. Because I knew it was a bit critical, I thought it would be worth it. Then I thought, I'll fly to Socotra for a week, then fly back to Dubai, and in Dubai, I'll board a plane where my friend is arriving from Europe. We'll fly to Kashmir together, go backcountry skiing, and then... I can imagine,
So I hauled all the gear for glider in a hot country, like Africa, and then all the gear for ski touring in Kashmir. I flew from Kabul, Dubai, and then to Yemen, and after several transfers, landed in Socotra. Socotra is a tiny island with 5,000, 6,000 inhabitants, so completely isolated, and the first problem was already that my luggage didn't arrive. The ski boots and all the ski gear and the backpack with the normal clothing got stuck somewhere, and every three or four days more flights go there. Thank God the glider was with me, but anyway, that was the first story, and it was actually quite good; I didn't have any clothing because the Arabs had to dress me, I only had local clothing.
worried, and it was good for my safety because there are pirates, kidnappings, and so on, and then I...
a few months before in Sokota and the film talked about how I did the scouting via the Nova team, and they already picked me up and I did exactly the same tour that the Nova team described and filmed in their movie, but I was traveling alone. The island itself is really almost extraterrestrial because it's a piece that broke off from Africa, drifted away in a dry part, off the mouth of the Red Sea, a few hundred kilometers from the coast, and it's completely dry, so all the plants had to adapt. There are plants that only exist there and animals that only exist there, so it's really an extraterrestrial, very karstic island, and that's where I went flying, and there's this...
coastline that's almost 600-700 meters high, and there's a dune going up there that's blown by the northwest trade winds, which is maybe 100-200 meters of sand—very fine white sand—where you can take off with a strong wind, and then I go up there, and you can soar beautifully along the edge at the top. I think you can soar along it for about 20 kilometers, but in such laminar wind that your hands can go limp and you only fly along like that using weight control. Towards the end, the island narrows and it starts to look like the tail of a crocodile, and there has to be a point where if the wind doesn't get stronger, it just blasts over the island, and on the other side, we have just a few hundred kilometers of water until you somehow hit Africa, and I guess that's the limit, but then again, despite the speed system, 4-5 km/h
I watched my forward speed to make sure I came down quickly, because the higher you go, the higher the wind speed is, so I always kept a close eye on the speedometer as I moved forward, and everything went well. It was truly the greatest experience, and the week went great. Then I went back to Dubai, set up my plane, my friend was already waiting in the machine, and we went to Kashmir and did a deep flight there for a week. From there, I went back to Kabul, Afghanistan, and started my flight again. After the two weeks, I was tired, but I said it was absolutely great and I think it was one of the...
best vacation I've ever had.
Would you say that, nowadays, this flight to Socotra was the flight of your life? It probably was
visually the most beautiful flight of all, meaning on one side
was a...
the blue sea below and when you're maybe 700 - 800 meters up, if you look down and see how the colors change, how deep the sea gets, then a really totally barren island, probably of volcanic origin, and then broken away, and this rock formation flying over it, and this wonderfully beautiful laminar wind, where there's none, it comes from about 3,000 kilometers across the sea and there's no disturbance, no turbulence, it was really so visual
and I think the most beautiful experience—and if you watch the NOVA film, I think it's a Forgotten Island, Socotra—then you can imagine what that means, and they made that film so elegiac that when I saw it in Kabul, I was already really electrified; I had to go there, and it was the right decision.
Well, you still have a few years ahead of you. I hope so. What dream flight is still...
...out? A flight I really still want to do is starting in Micheldorf, we're in the Prealps, starting in Micheldorf and then over the Tote Gebirge to the Dachstein and then back again. I think that would be around 100 kilometers; I've already flown parts of it, but I haven't done the whole flight there and back together yet, and I've made it a goal to do it whenever the weather conditions are right.
That means for someone who has basically traveled all over the world, in all sorts of high-risk countries and flown everywhere there, a dream flight can still be a great flight in your own home country. Absolutely, so the
The region we have here in Upper Austria, and probably Bavaria, Switzerland, and South Tyrol, where I've also flown, is certainly beautiful too, but that's my immediate home, and the unfolding of the mountains and the landscape there is really, really beautiful, and the connection is simply, I want to complete this flight in my immediate home once. And a second flight I might want to do again is from the Krente in South Tyrol, like a larger triangle. I've flown the 100-kilometer triangle from Sand in Taufers, and I want to fly that again too. Those are two flights I still want to do.
Alright, Oscar, then I wish you that these two dream flights definitely come true. I read that you're planning—or had planned, I don't know how things will go with Corona—to actually continue your world trip starting next year and travel further into Asia. If that works out and if it's possible, I wish you many great new experiences there too, and thanks anyway for the super interesting stories here. I think that's pretty inspiring for many people. Some might also say, "I wouldn't have dared to do that" or something like that. But it shows just how far you can get with a paraglider in many countries to get completely new impressions of such places. Thanks a lot for the opportunity to...
to have a conversation, and I'm really trying not to continue the trip for a year as far as Corona allows, but rather a year later and for three years through Asia. And the paraglider is of course part of it, and the paraglider really is a piece of sports equipment, especially if you take a small and light one that is ideal for such trips and where you can have such wonderful experiences in other countries.
That was Oskar Lehner in conversation with Lucian Haas. If you want to learn more about Oskar's experiences around the world, I recommend his website www.oskarlehnertravel.news. You can find many reports and photos of his professional assignments, his sporting adventures, as well as episodes of his ongoing world trip there. In the show notes for this podcast episode on Loglites, I have also put together some further links to topics that were discussed in the podcast. If you like Podz-Glidz, please recommend the podcast. You can find all previous podcast episodes on Loglites and Soundcloud as well as well-known audio catalogs like Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, etc. To make sure you don't miss a new episode, you can also subscribe to Podz-Glidz right now in your podcatcher.
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