One helps the other, so paragliding in particular helps with programming or even with life in general, because it trains me to make decisions. With OGOI, I theoretically have a lot of time, but if I always take it, it will never be finished and then the whole thing won't work. With paragliding, I simply don't have the time, and if I'm trained by that to decide faster, to move forward faster, to just do it faster and not always overthink whether I should or shouldn't, or whether I should do it this way or that way, but instead just do it, I will become much better and more efficient at pushing OGOI forward.
Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast. Stories from the cosmos of paragliding. Today with OGOI Georg Brodbeck and I am Lucian Haas.
A guide to crashing or a guide to slow flying. When paragliding videos carry titles like that, it should be clear that someone is celebrating something other than the higher, faster, further, more kilometers, more XC points, and oh, what a brilliant flight that was, which usually resonates so much in typical flight videos. Probably for that very reason, the YouTube channel Steppenwolf X by the Swiss pilot Georg Brodbeck has a steadily growing fanbase. Because the subtle, self-ironic way in which Georg processes his own flight errors in these films, among other things, strikes a chord in a positive way. There are surely many other pilots out there who can relate well to such experiences.
But mistakes are there for a reason—so that you can learn from them. And that's why, in this 134th episode of Podz-Glidz, I'm talking with Georg about how his YouTube videos help him deal with moments of flying frustration and gradually become a better pilot. Another major project of Georg's also plays a role here: OGOI. This is a website where you can visualize, analyze, and in a sense, replay your flights in 3D views. Georg has already put more than 1,000 hours of work into programming OGOI, creating a very valuable platform for the paraglider scene.
At this point, I'd like to thank everyone who is already financially supporting my work on Podz-Glidz and LOOGLIGHTS. Without your contributions, I would have had to give up the podcast and blog a long time ago. And if you also want these channels to continue, take a look at the Support page on the LOOGLIGHTS Gleitschirm-Blog. But for now, enjoy the show. With Georg Brodbeck.
Georg, are you a fan of Hermann Hesse? Yes, you could say so. So that's why you named your website SteppenwolfX?
Yeah, I'd say so, yeah. So, that's the book Steppenwolf that particularly fascinated me. Why the X? What does it stand for? Unknown. Like a symbol of mathematics. Or of science, that not everything is always known. I thought I had to add something else, because the band Steppenwolf already exists.
And I find the X to be a rather nice symbol somehow.
What do you like about Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf?
Well, it's like,
um,
it's just difficult to capture that right now.
So when I'm programming for OGOI, for example, I'm very much in my own world. It works quite differently than the rest of the world. I often have moments—even in the time I grew up—where I felt like I didn't quite understand how the world works. I have my own way of imagining everything. But at the same time, there's also that dialectical conflict. That you sometimes suddenly switch into an extroverted mode. Suddenly, you feel at one with your surroundings, with the...
just with, exactly with the people you're out with right now. And that suddenly works very well. It's somehow this dialectical back and forth between I don't understand people and I feel very comfortable among people, which can switch back and forth, what I find comes out in Steppenwolf, in the book Steppenwolf. Good.
to come across. So, do you feel like a kindred spirit to this Steppenwolf character by Hermann Hesse? In a sort of abstract sense, yes. It's certainly a bit exaggerated, but in a certain way, yeah. You also just mentioned the word extroverted in between. You became known in the scene through your YouTube channel, which is also called Steppenwolf X. Exactly, yeah.
Why did you start it? It actually began with me having, I'd describe it as a stupid idea back then, like making a guide on how to get wasted. I had a flight where I thought, hey, I've really done everything wrong that can be done wrong. And I felt some frustration, and I wanted to use that as an ironic way of processing my own frustrating experience, so I just cut a video of it. Then I thought, okay, let's put this online, what should I call the channel? Well, Steppenwolf suits me, let's stick an X on the end, throw it on YouTube. And then I forgot about it for half a year.
And then, after half a year, my sister comes to me and says, "Hey, I saw your video, I saw it already has 600 views." And I hadn't looked at it at all. And then I thought, okay, 600, that's less than nothing. That's more than nothing. That's more than nothing. Yeah. And I thought, okay, apparently it's not doing that badly. Come on, let's try to do something with it. Then I tried another video, which didn't work at all because I'd edited something together but didn't say anything about it. Then I thought, okay, I probably have to say something about it, that works better. And then I tried making two, three more videos. And that then sort of started to work.
And then it just kept going like that, sometimes more, sometimes less, it sort of got started. Besides
this spectacular tutorial on how to drown, did you also edit a competition video, a tutorial on how to fly slowly, where you were somehow flying behind everyone and stuff like that. Where does this ability for self-irony come from? I mean, I've always...
I mean, I've actually always wanted to be able to do that since I was a kid—not to take myself too seriously. For me, that's actually been a life goal forever. Sometimes I succeed at it, sometimes I don't do it so well. In the context of paragliding, dealing with frustration is a very important topic for me. And I was actually mostly very bad at it. I had many frustrating experiences that were very impactful and very difficult for me. I specifically remember... the paragliding holidays in Macedonia. My first flight there was by far my best ever.
At some point, which was pretty much at the beginning of my paragliding career, I somehow—I don't remember exactly if it was 50 or 70 kilometers—and before that, my longest flight was somehow 40, and then it was 70 and significantly longer in the air and all that. And then from the next day on, I couldn't manage anything at all. Every day was a frustration of, maybe, 10 kilometers at times or just crashing straight down. There was really nothing left in it. And in Macedonia, it's hot. There's nothing on the ground. It's boring. Yeah, crashing down there is really shitty. And that was really hard there. So for me, when I think of frustration with crashing, this image of Macedonia comes up.
Nothing is working. Then I had to find a way to deal with it for myself. And I think that was sort of the way to process it. The ability to handle it actually only comes at the moment I deal with it publicly. At first, it feels bad. But as soon as I have to explain to the outside world what happened to me, I get to self-irony very, very quickly.
That means, maybe it's this—performing your own mistakes in front of others, or whatever performing means, just showing them or talking about them—that's your strategy for dealing with your frustration. So you don't swallow it inside, you basically spit it out. And then, once it's been spat out in a certain way, you're rid of it.
It would be nice if it always worked that way. Classically, I just internalize it. But it's a very good method; if I manage to spit my mistakes out to the outside world, I feel better. And sometimes I succeed. And I find it works much better with videos than when I don't make them. That means,
you run a YouTube channel as a way to process frustration. You could maybe see it that way to some extent.
What's really nice about watching it is that you're very self-critical about your flights and flight incidents and so on, and you actually show off your mistakes quite enjoyably. You can really wallow in it when you do something like this and say, "Okay, now I'm processing my frustration," but then I can really dive back into those mistakes and say, "Oh, that was truly awful. Did I screw that up?"
I can, yeah, I can deal with it better if I turn it into a story and think about how I could present it; then I can process it better and reflect on it with myself again.
That means making these videos is basically a way for you to, a, maybe let out some of your frustration, but b, also to reflect on all these flight situations and ultimately, maybe, to learn from them. In any case, yeah. Do you actually learn from it? Or do you end up making the same mistakes again next time?
I've had the impression in between that I've been flying better since I started the YouTube channel.
But not all the time either. From that perspective, I hope
I can't say for sure if it helps me. I wouldn't be able to tell other pilots, "Hey guys, just start a YouTube channel. You'll become better pilots."
So the analysis you do automatically, by thinking about how to tell the story of what I did, that definitely helps.
And whether you actually publish it at the end or not doesn't even matter. Now, there are different people who like to publish something like that. But I think a video analysis is certainly something valuable. Whether that makes sense for everyone is another question.
A video like that is also a huge time commitment. I mean, you have to film it first. So you have to go flying and film the whole thing. Then you have to transfer everything. Then you have to watch the footage. Then decide how to put it all together. Then you have to add narration and stuff like that. Your videos are often about half an hour long or something. How long does it actually take you in the end to really finish that half hour?
A long time. Longer than most people think. Anyway, that's changed a bit lately. Originally, I once said that for one minute of video material, I need about an hour of work. In addition to the flying. An hour? Yes, an hour of work
per minute. That means half an hour of YouTube footage would be 30 hours of work? Yes. Wow.
That was sometimes even more.
Lately, though, it's sometimes been significantly less. For example, the Wallis 189 kilometers video, which has the most views since then—it just hit the 10,000 view mark. That's a solid half hour. I was definitely on that for a full week. And not a work week, but a week non-stop without doing anything else. Mhm. But the experience definitely helped me become more efficient with the editing, that I have some tricks, that I have systems, that I'm getting better, that I do things differently. And now with my newer videos, I'm moving more towards a vlog style,
where I also cut in more comments during the day and do less voice-over. And that means I have to think less about what I'm saying and just do more of the assembling of what I already have. That's significantly less effort. I can get through a half-hour video in, I'd say, 10 to 12 hours.
But it's still 10, 12 hours. What's your motivation for putting so much time into it? I mean, getting rid of frustration is a nice thing. But if you say, okay, I'm going on a 5-hour flight and then I have to do 30 hours of follow-up work just to get rid of my frustration again, that's quite a lot. I can't give you an exact answer.
It's a very strong reward for me when I release a video and thousands of people watch it afterwards.
Is the number the reward? Or do you get a lot of comments too, and is it actually about being in exchange with the people? Or is it sometimes really just seeing, oh, that's 500 now, yeah, now it's 1,000, now it's 3,000 or something like that? And with every thousand, does the motivation increase again or double?
I wouldn't put it that way. I mean, the number alone—if you look at the statistics and see how it's going up—is nice on one hand, but also stressful on the other, because the YouTube algorithm can be a bit harsh sometimes; you can hear it stop pushing a video from one moment to the next, and it was going up the whole time and then suddenly it's not anymore. That takes a lot out of you emotionally, but those are just the raw numbers. That's one thing. The comments are of course very valuable. I'm lucky that my comments are almost exclusively very positive, and that's really nice. And if something negative comes in, it's usually very constructive criticism. I can't... I can't remember a single comment that was just purely negative.
So, I have a very nice community, from what it looks like. What's also really nice is that it started pretty quickly for people to approach me at the starting positions. Because they see what I look like in the videos, I get recognized, and I think it's really nice that people call out to me and, uh, also have opinions on various things and congratulate me on the videos or whatever. That gives me a lot too.
Your first videos were all in Swiss German. Yes. And lately you've switched to High German and also made a video explaining why you're doing that now. But explain again, why High German? Why didn't you stick with Swiss German? You could have basically had German subtitles there, or maybe you subtitled them all specifically so people could read along, so that they could understand in High German what you were saying in Swiss German.
Right, I subtitled those specifically. That was a huge amount of extra work every time. For a thirty-minute video, I was definitely spending another three hours on that.
Exactly, now, subtitles are all well and good. I've talked to German viewers about my videos and it clicked for me very quickly. Before, from the viewers' perspective, I see that they were focused on the statistics. Maybe about 30% of the viewers are from Germany and Austria. But I've already seen that, strangely enough, they watch my videos on average two to three minutes less than the Swiss. Now, I don't think the attention span of Germans is fundamentally shorter than that of the Swiss. So, what's behind that? It's just the thing, my videos are structured like this: you have the image of me flying, then you see the 3D visualization, then you see the speed,
altitude, height, and so on. Those are already three things you want to look at at the same time. If you want to read subtitles at the same time as well, you won't really take anything in anymore. From that perspective, I can imagine that for people who don't understand the language and still have to read the subtitles, they don't get much at all; they don't have the same experience and it gets boring faster, so you just don't want to watch it for that long. It's
Is it like, since you switched to German—I mean High German—that you see the Swiss watching less?
I can't say whether the Swiss are watching less; I see that the total view counts are going up and I see that the percentage of Germans is increasing.
I have a slight increase in canceled subscriptions, but overall, there are significantly more new subscribers, so it doesn't really carry much weight in that sense. I occasionally get feedback from Swiss people saying they find it a shame that the authenticity is lost and they'd actually prefer it in Swiss German again, but they also understand because the target audience is significantly larger. I also hear from Germans every now and then; I get comments like, "Hey, I'd actually understand Swiss German, that would be okay, but I only just discovered the channel now because YouTube suggested it to me."
Yeah, it's a difficult question. I'll probably make a Swiss German video again soon, just to see what happens,
but if I can really only reach half as many people with it, or even fewer, then it's just difficult to argue that.
What do you lose when the local sound—your actual mother tongue—isn't there? Do you think differently in Swiss German than in High German?
I have to briefly object first, my mother tongue is actually High German. So my mother comes from Berlin, I did grow up in Switzerland, but as a child, at some point, like a very small child, I decided, I'm going to speak like my mama now, like High German, because I grew up in Switzerland with my not-quite-pure High German, as you hear it,
but I only started speaking Swiss German eventually, that was when I was 20 or so. Because I'd heard it my whole life, I managed to pick it up relatively quickly and internalized it that way. And now, for my videos, I think Swiss German is actually the better language in terms of style. I think a bit differently, especially regarding that
sarcasm and self-irony work better in Swiss German, I can't say exactly why. I think that Swiss German, mainly because I usually speak it when I'm talking to people.
Standard German is more of a language that comes from the media, from more abstract contexts—so sure, there are people in Switzerland who speak Standard German and I speak Standard German with them too. For me, it's more of a family language. Swiss German is more of a friends' colloquial language for me. And the videos, I'm directing them less toward my family and more toward my usual circle of friends and other people. That's maybe a bit of a thing. And I think that Swiss German allows for more of an emotional language. Especially my Bernese dialect, which is known for being
is very well suited for that. There are many Swiss singer-songwriters who write songs in Bernese German, and they are known for covering very emotional topics that High German isn't as good at. And that's very nice for the videos. And that gets lost to some extent.
I've got the impression, I've watched a few of them. I also watched your video channel back when you only did it in Swiss German, and I always enjoyed it then. I have a Swiss mother-in-law and understand Swiss German relatively well, but I still always liked being able to read the subtitles to learn a bit of Swiss German on the side, at least to pick up a few new expressions. But then with the switch, sure, it's certainly easier to understand in parts, but I felt like some of the subtle humor was lost and that the videos sort of gained a certain German seriousness with it. Or lost it, depending on how you look at it. So they gained seriousness with it and lost that light, subtle humor, and I'm personally torn about which I actually prefer.
So for me, I think Swiss, and I'd probably still find Swiss German better, but for the large number of people who would watch it, German is probably better. But there are also quite a few other Swiss pilots who are active on social media, Instagram and so on, who are now doing a lot in English. Because they want to reach the larger community and stuff like that. Even though, unfortunately, a lot of the local flavor is lost there. Have you also already considered saying, okay, I'll do Steppenwolf X in English? Yes,
I've also thought about that. I also considered whether I wanted to go straight to English, skipping the intermediate step of High German entirely. The reasoning was that, as far as I'm informed, a large portion of the paragliding community is based in the German-speaking world.
Of course, there are significantly more people internationally, but with English, you also lose people who don't understand it very well. That's why I thought I'd at least do the intermediate step of High German and see how much authenticity I can transfer to it. Maybe not right away, maybe I'll only manage that later. I think my videos have shifted a bit in a different direction now. Especially those informative videos, like the one about peeing—I don't think I would have gained much from using Swiss German there, because it's really about information primarily. Maybe I'll manage to get a certain vibe with High German over time, maybe I still need to develop that, and maybe I can then develop that into a third step in English as well.
I don't know where it's leading yet.
If you say, okay, actually High German is your mother tongue, you only started speaking Swiss German regularly at 20, and so on. If you're out on your own and flying yourself and something stupid happens and you start screaming at your glider or swearing or something, do you do that in Swiss German or in High German for yourself? For me personally, in Swiss German. So by then, it has already become your own language.
Unless I'm currently—I mean, if I'm recording a video and have the front camera running, it can happen that even when the front camera isn't running, I keep talking to myself in High German. So when I'm in that mode, that can happen sometimes. But it's in 95% of cases...
it's Swiss German. Speaking of mode, when you're flying and have your cameras running—with Insta on the stick in the back and the front camera up front so you can talk into it—do you fly differently?
I don't think so, but
I'm not
100% for sure.
I mean, you probably lose a bit of mental capacity because you have to worry about the cameras and all that, or have to think about what to say right now. Because, as you said yourself, you might want to tell what you're experiencing or what's going on while flying, like in a vlog style—why you're currently drowning or how beautiful it is as you're going up, and so on.
That also takes your attention away. You're looking at the camera and then you might miss the bird that's popping up somewhere on the top right. And then things like instructions for crashing or instructions for slow flying might also have...
to the camera.
Basically, not really so far, because for the "how to crash" or "slow flying" videos, I just let the camera run in the wind and forgot about it while flying. I didn't have a front camera to speak into back then. With the front camera, I've mostly let it run and quickly said something during quiet moments, and otherwise, I just watched what I was watching and let out a few words in between, just like I usually would, maybe a bit louder so the camera picks it up a bit better.
So, talking along constantly while flying thermals—my goal would actually be to quickly turn the camera on for a minute every half hour, drop a short statement, and then turn it off again. Because otherwise, the effort to cut anything out at all is huge, and in some cases, like on the Colombia video, I had the front camera running, and it ran the whole way through. And then I'd let out these individual snippets of my thoughts that refer to something I said half an hour earlier. The whole context is way too complex or way too irrelevant for a video to include it, or where I originally said it, people didn't understand it at all, whatever.
That doesn't really work that way. From that perspective, the concept is that I'll just drop individual statements, and I actually only do that when I'm in calm air where it works well. And I don't think that should negatively affect my flying style.
Do you script your videos? I mean, you can't script while flying, you have to stick to it. So the action isn't scripted, but is the stuff you tell about it afterwards all written down beforehand? Or do you just let the video run and say whatever comes to mind, roughly?
I script
actually
Originally, for my first videos, I scripted everything completely. It came across as very weird because I was reading it off, and I don't have a teleprompter, so it looks like shit.
Then I stopped doing that and would just think of one sentence, record it, then think of the next sentence and record that, and so on. And there's a lot of cutting in between. What I'm starting to do lately, especially with these informative videos, like the one about peeing, is that I make notes. So, for the peeing video, I had notes of about
what was it, like 6 or 4 pages for a 40-minute video and written in very large letters, so rough notes, keywords, and then I form a sentence out of them, say it, think of the next sentence based on the notes, say it, so that I have a concept where I can make something out of it in the end that works. If I'm making a normal vlog, then maybe if I'm telling a longer part, I'll make some notes, but otherwise, it's usually off the cuff.
This
The peeing video, so peeing while paragliding, is also one of the most successful ones by now. So the last time I checked, I mean not the video, but your channel as well, it was already at almost 8,000 views, it's probably already over that by now. Yeah, it is, yeah. Do you want to do such topics in the future
do more of those? Yeah, well, that video is definitely by far my most successful one. Considering the time,
how it's out there and how fast it shot up, roughly, right? Yeah, yeah, that
is very clear, and this is going to—this will also in the foreseeable future—overtake it in terms of views. That's pretty much set. But that's, that's also because I've had this video planned for a very long time and have been thinking for a long time about everything I want to cover in it. From that perspective, there's also a certain background to how that came about. I already have another video in the planning stages. That will probably come out soon. I'm still a bit scared to release it. I still have to edit it and probably record one thing or another. Part of it is already recorded. It's about cloud flying. I can already do a little teaser here.
A guide to cloud flying. Actually, I don't want to make a guide to cloud flying. The problem I see in this case is that people, or flight schools, or basically, it's always said: don't fly into clouds, and that's why people often hate it. If someone does end up in a cloud, they don't know what they have to do. I think that very often leads to very dangerous situations, like people trying to spiral out of a cloud—spiraling out of a cloud just isn't such a good idea.
Many considerations go in that direction. But I don't want to get too far ahead of myself right now. Do you have a lot of experience with cloud flying? I'm not sure what I'm allowed to say about that.
I've had some pretty extreme experiences regarding cloud flight.
experiences.
Yeah, you could put it like that. And then you had to see how you'd get out of it again. Yeah. So you want to have things on your channel that aren't off-topic, but are topics that aren't talked about much. Yeah. I think,
That's a bit like... even before I had a YouTube channel, I was always someone who liked to bring up things that might be taboo, things people don't want to talk about. And I think that's something I want to do more of on my YouTube channel. I think the stuff about drinking also goes a bit in that direction, addressing frustration and saying out loud what others might not like to say out loud. That's maybe a bit my thing.
Now you're putting an enormous amount of time into this video stuff, but then you also started a huge project last year. OGOI. What's it about?
It's a web platform for the 3D visualization of paraglider tracks. So something like what Ivory used to be. Actually, I tried to replace it with this and make it better. I used Ivory very intensively in my videos on my YouTube channel. It was actually an important part of how my videos work at all. Then, out of nowhere in October 2022, the bombshell dropped: it's being discontinued. And then I started looking into it, like, hey, what alternatives are there? I found your blog post, looked through it, and then I actually saw the alternatives. I tried out Sports Tracks Live and
but I didn't get how you're even supposed to go about viewing your flight. I'm very bad at using other software that I didn't program myself. I didn't get how you can upload and watch a paraglider flight on Sports Tracks live. And then the other alternatives in that list aren't really a direct replacement for what Ivory was before. I thought, okay, there's actually nothing there,
and then I looked at it and thought, hey, could I program something myself, how complicated would that be? I mean, I'm a software developer by profession, so it's not that far-fetched.
I looked into it and just tried out a bit of stuff, kind of gathered things from the internet, and after about 100 hours I had a somewhat
working prototype. Before we talk more about the prototype, first explain one thing: where does the name Ogoi come from? Yes,
I can actually just tack that on seamlessly. When I had this prototype, I thought I had to wrap it somehow, give it a name, a logo, in the context of this design—so, where I built it, I needed some kind of thing that marked where you are, where the pilot is. At first, I thought of a paraglider, but somehow I felt it didn't show where you were very well, not very precisely. Then I had this idea of this pen, I designed a bit of it, and at that moment I thought, oh, that's the logo.
Exactly that shape with the triangle, hollowed out inside, that's going to be my logo. Then I started designing my logo, put this shape at the top and thought, okay, now I'll choose four letters at the bottom with these two shades of yellow. Originally it was two shades of red on white, then I thought, okay, now it has to be on black, then I came up with the yellow. But then I thought, I need four letters, I chose the font, the position and the colors, and then I just looked for four letters that fit in there and look good. Ogoi were the four letters that fit best for me and didn't mean anything that didn't fit at all. So
Ogoi is actually an island in the Russian Lake Baikal.
I figured that out, yeah. So I tried out different letters, thought, okay, Ogoi looks good, sounds kind of nice, looked up what it is, okay, this island looks pretty, it's fine for me, I don't care, I'll just go with that for now.
But do you have any plans to fly to Ogoi sometime and make a video, like "drowning on Ogoi" or something? Yeah,
with the way that island looks, it's extremely rocky, I could imagine that flying there would be very difficult.
I have no idea, at the moment I also think I don't necessarily want to go to Russia for various reasons. Yeah, it might not be so nice right now, but... But who knows, at the moment I did that, I hadn't thought about Ogoi ever reaching the size it has currently. I could never have imagined it at the time, it just needs some kind of name.
But yeah, maybe a flight to Ogoi will happen sometime. To the island of Ogoi, who knows.
Now you have to do an enormous amount of programming for that, and you said you learned that too. As far as I know, though, you started a computer science degree and dropped out twice. Why twice?
Yeah, once wasn't clear enough for me, so I had to go and do a second one on top of it. No, I...
I did an apprenticeship, which is actually common in Switzerland—you do an apprenticeship, not quite like in Germany where most people rather go to university; in Switzerland, an apprenticeship is much more widespread.
My apprenticeship was as a Mediamatiker; that's a generalist job where you do a bit of business administration, a bit of programming, and a bit of graphic web design. And I saw a bit of everything you can do on a computer. Programming interests me the most; I want to deepen that a bit. Professionally, I was actually already programming at that point; I have a...
I started a part-time degree, and at first, it was actually quite interesting, but over time I realized there are many other things besides programming that interest me too, like for example, I also started paragliding during that time, although I hadn't actually gone paragliding yet by the time I dropped out of the degree. At that point, cycling was more of a thing. I chose various things, but for me, always sitting inside programming in different ways was too much. Besides programming for work, I also had the degree, so I thought, okay, I'll put it on ice for a bit, I'll do it for half a year
no studies, just work a bit and leave it at that and
I let it rest for half a year and then, well, half a year doesn't work because the degree is on an annual cycle. After a year, I thought, hey, I'm going to give it another try, and that was the fourth semester of the part-time degree—the part-time one takes nine semesters until the bachelor's, and the fourth semester is known for being the hardest and most demotivating. Because it has certain modules in it that are very exhausting, and that just finished me off, and I thought, no, I'm not getting this.
So you gave up on it again, said you're still going to work on your software stuff anyway, and exactly, that was also the...
For the work I've done, I didn't actually need the degree. Financially, it didn't really give me an advantage either, and in software development, it's also the case that you can acquire a lot of knowledge very well through self-study. That stuff is very well documented on the internet, and if you don't want to dedicate your entire life exclusively to software and programming—which I didn't want to do—it was somehow clear to me that I didn't need the degree, I didn't need the qualification, and the effort just wasn't worth it.
Now, I believe you also live off programming, but how do you balance it all—side by side or one on top of the other—when you say you're editing videos for 30 hours, you're programming your own wing presentation platform, OGOI, and of course, you also want to go paragliding when the weather is right? How do you manage to fit that in with work? Well, actually, you don't.
So, at the moment, I'm doing some kind of work at about 20 percent.
Financially, it's not really enough, but I'm not losing a massive amount either. So, I live very frugally. I don't have a car, I live with my girlfriend in an apartment in Bern and
I don't do a crazy amount of things that require a lot of money. It's hard to compare with figures for German standards. I need a good 2,000 francs per month. For Swiss standards, that's practically nothing. For German standards, I don't know exactly. It would probably be quite a bit, depending on where you live. Now, with the 20 percent income from software development, I get to about 1,500.
The rest, I'm currently covering that from my savings and seeing what happens.
What's the deal with OGOI? You have a subscription model, right? You can use it for free, so you get a bit of restricted access, or the access isn't restricted, but what you can do with it and which map data you can display is all somewhat limited. Then you have a Premium and an Ultimate subscription. We don't have to tell you all the details right now. But are you already making money from it by now, or is it something medium-term for you, where you say, I assume I might be able to make a bit of money with it at some point, or maybe even finance myself with it?
At the moment, I don't assume that I'll be able to finance myself with it. Right now, I'm making a bit of money with it, but the problem at the beginning is that the map data OGOI needs—which are satellite images that I have to display everywhere—I can't buy those because it would be way too expensive. I have to get them via an
API, I have to keep buying them. That means every time someone makes a query on OGOI, these satellite images come directly from another provider to the person making the query. And I have to pay for every, for every single little map snippet. So, that
is always like one tile, and for every tile you upload, you basically have to shell out a cent or something, right? So, that would be
it's a bit very expensive. I have to pay 10 cents per 1,000 tiles, something like that. That means, yeah, per, per, uh, 100 tiles
I have to shell out a cent. But just for the sake of understanding, if I upload a flight now, it's in there, and now I watch it 10 times—do you also pay 10 times for me watching it 10 times? Or is it that when you say, "I loaded this scene once for him," and it's then basically somewhere in the cache or something, and you don't have to pay for that again? In the past, for example...
was it really like that, do I have to pay for it every time? I've since found out that I'm not allowed to cache it on my end—that's forbidden by the terms and conditions of the providers—but what they do allow is for it to be cached on the client. That means I now have a system in place where if you watch the same flight twice, it gets cached for you. This means if you watch two different flights in the same region twice in a row, most of the images get cached; if you zoom in a bit closer at a new location, then you're loading new data again, that's clear. Or if you look at a new perspective, it loads again too. But if you watch the same
tiles, that will be cached for a certain amount of time
cached. That means you'd also have to tell your users, "Guys, it's best not to clear the Ogoi cache so often, otherwise I'll have to keep buying new map data."
Yeah, exactly. But yeah, ultimately these costs exist, they're relevant, but I have to say I overestimated them at the beginning. It holds up, I mean, I had one month where I didn't have the caching yet, right when I released the first video about Ogoi on my channel, I only had... in one month, just...
what was it, 150 Swiss francs paid for the card data. I'm not paying that much right now, but the season hasn't really started yet. Now that the first good days have arrived, I'm already noticing a significant increase. I'm very curious to see how much usage there will be. My thing is, I sell subscriptions, and most of the subscriptions I sell are annual ones. That means I've already received money for the whole year. But what I'm paying for is the usage. In that sense, I have no idea how many costs will still come my way compared to the money I've already collected.
That means if you have heavy users, you could end up with a significant loss
make? In the worst-case scenario, that could happen, yeah. But based on how the data looks so far, I'm not afraid of that anymore at the moment. Right now, my worst-case scenario would be a zero-sum game. Which, of course, isn't particularly great either, because I've put in more by now—I won't list the hours, but my estimate is in the range of several thousand hours I've invested in the development and maintenance of Ogoi. And if I get a bit of money for that in the end, that would be very nice.
But we'll see how that turns out. At the moment, I really have no idea. I'm getting some money in from the subscriptions, which isn't really relevant, and I'm no longer afraid of being able to cover the costs. And that's already very nice.
How complex is it to set up a page like that, where you have to analyze flights, calculate altitude data, and then load all the map data—and you don't just have one map source, but you have ten different ones you can choose from. And there are 3D maps and 2D maps that you can also overlay. Is programming all of that very demanding? I mean, I'm not a programmer, so for me, it wouldn't be doable at all. But for a normal—let's just say, a programmer like you—do you have to be particularly good at it, or do you just have to be particularly persistent, where you say, "I've already invested over 1,000 hours into this"?
So, for the 3D representation right now, I don't do that—I don't write all the code for it myself. I use a JavaScript framework called Cesium.js. That's actually how all browser-based 3D representations, or rather map-based 3D representations, are basically done. There's this framework, and there's also documentation for it. You can do a lot with it. I think, fundamentally, getting a representation like that working—where you can display a flight in 3D—I think many programmers could manage that. From my point of view, the big challenge with a project like Ogoi is two things.
One thing is getting the usability right so that people actually want to use it.
and understanding how it works, what you have to do, so that they understand the functions themselves without needing a manual, that kind of stuff. And the second thing is the focus, making sure you implement the right things, that you implement what is actually needed and not just some features that nobody cares about in the end.
I think that's much more important than just the technical skills.
I think, as a programmer—I didn't even finish my studies, I don't have the most insane technical skills you can imagine. I think I have reasonably good skills in building a GUI that's cool and setting the right priorities, even though I invest thousands of hours into a project that won't work out financially. One could question how good my decision-making skills are in that regard.
GUI stands for Graphical User Interface, just so people can still follow your software talk. Sometimes I also get lost in the technical details.
Now you're investing so much time into that and into your YouTube videos too. Do you still find, or do you even find time to fly anymore? How often do you still go flying? Luckily, it forces
...my YouTube channel from flying sometimes.
That's one thing, and then I also have competition flying, which I do. That means there are also fixed dates where I'm going anyway. Just last Saturday, for example, there was a competition in the Jura, the Swiss Cup Biel. That was really cool. Otherwise, the weather is so shitty at the moment that the question doesn't even come up that often.
That means the bad weather actually works in your favor now, because you find the time to keep programming properly.
In any case, yes.
Ogoi or the YouTube channel. Lately, I've actually gone flying in bad weather and made a video about it. How do you fly in the rain? Will that come out as a video too? How do you fly in the rain? Not as
rain, but
in the rain. Yeah, no, I don't actually plan on going flying in the rain. I don't think
not such a good idea. Has your flying become more or less over time? Now that you've built up this YouTube channel and are investing more into it, and then Ogoi came along as well. Now since I
since I've been doing more of it with Ogoi, it's actually become less.
But I've also always had an ambivalent relationship with flying. I had a really tough time with flying just before the whole YouTube thing, and I think that was the 2022 season. I had a pretty big year of frustration. You might know this from learning processes—you keep moving forward and then you hit these plateaus where you feel like you're making no progress, and that's very frustrating. You know this from learning instruments, you know it from pretty much anything where you're developing skills in some area. And I had a very, very long, distinct plateau with paragliding.
And that frustrated me a lot, and it led to me going flying very little for one season.
And the following season, I made significant progress again. I think that was the final year. I was much more motivated then, and that actually happened at the same time as... No, that didn't happen at the same time as Ogoi.
From that perspective, I had this phase where I didn't go flying much, then the phase where things went better, and shortly after that, Ogoi came along.
And actually, it was another period where I made more videos again. I also had a break with videos where I didn't make many. I find it very difficult to categorize what that has to do with what. Sometimes I feel like, because of Ogoi—because I can analyze it now since I enjoy it more—through the videos, through the new perspectives I get, I have more fun flying again, I have more motivation again, I have more reasons to go flying. Sometimes it's the other way around, I get less of it. I think in the end it doesn't really matter. It actually cancels itself out because there are
arguments
in both directions. This plateau you had, where you also flew less. Did you fly less because you were frustrated because you had this plateau? Or did you have this plateau because you flew less for whatever reason and didn't develop further because of that? Because "more" means, like, you learn to fly by going flying and you progress by going flying even more, and of course, that also includes having your negative experiences or your less successful flights, but you learn an incredible amount from exactly those. Yes, sure. I
I flew less because I was frustrated, I'm pretty sure. Flying less didn't mean, in my case, that I suddenly only went flying once a month, like many casual pilots might do.
Then enlighten me,
so what counts as flying less, or how many flight hours do you get in a month under good, I mean normal weather conditions, and what then counts as little?
Yeah, well
that was, yeah, exactly, it's quite difficult to say. Basically, I fly maybe per year
something around the 200-hour mark.
My airtime. During the time when it was less, it was actually still during the period where I was learning, so where the curve was still going up steeply. That means, in that year—at the moment it's 200 hours per year because my level is actually a bit higher now and I can also handle these long flights regularly—I didn't often manage such long flights back then, but I still had more flights in terms of numbers, and during this plateau, I still had more flight hours than the previous year. I think it was 150 in that year.
But did you still feel like it was a plateau? Yes. Maybe it was just one—I mean, just a perceived one—but in terms of performance, if you were to analyze it, you wouldn't say it was a plateau at all; you still developed further. That's possible, yes.
When you go flying today, are there still flights where you do away with all the extras? Like, no camera, no tech—well, tech like a vario and stuff, but no ulterior motives of thinking, "maybe I'll make a video out of this flight," but I just want to go flying today. Does that still exist? Yes, absolutely.
I haven't made any videos for a while now, and the videos I've been producing lately all come from old footage.
When I started the channel, I filmed every single flight for a while. And back then, I didn't really think much about the video during the flight; I just always filmed. I also have, I don't know, 50 flights filmed that I'll probably never edit anything from. Then I didn't film at all for a while because I felt like I had so much material that I wasn't going to edit anything from it anyway. And then I started editing videos again and recently started filming again. Now, I've actually decided that before I go flying, I clearly decide: either I film the flight or I don't do anything.
Since then, the weather has been relatively bad, so I usually thought, okay, I'll make a video out of this, but sometimes... I think since I've been putting out quite a lot of videos lately, I've done, I don't know, seven or eight flights, and I've filmed four of them.
How the balance will be in the long run remains to be seen, but lately, I've also started doing a weather briefing at home the day before. That means it's already decided then whether I'm going to film anything at all. So, a...
Are you filming the weather briefing? Exactly, yeah. You explain to the camera what you're seeing, how you're assessing the day, and so on, and people can watch it right away and learn a lot from it. Exactly, yeah. Are there things you do while you have the camera with you during the flight where you notice, "Hey, I'm actually only doing this for the camera"? So, do you kind of act in a way sometimes? Or are you just yourself? I've never done that so far.
But as I said, until recently—well, with my older videos, I just let the camera run and at that moment I didn't even know if I'd ever actually edit a video out of it. From that perspective, I didn't care about it at all. And deciding beforehand that I'm going to make a video out of it is relatively new. And these flights haven't been incredibly long flights so far. I haven't had a situation where I did something just for the video yet. But I won't rule out that it might happen. Maybe I'd even find it quite funny if I did something like that at some point.
Well, you had your plateau in 2022, you got past it, maybe also by engaging more with your flights, with OGOI. Maybe you'd say you're not so sure if that had an influence on it either. But if you were to look at it now, you have the option to film your flights and watch those videos afterwards to do a kind of debriefing. And you have the option to upload your flights as an IGC file into OGOI and watch them there in 3D. However, you don't have the actual weather in view or anything like that; you just see your flight path or something. Is there still something where you'd say I can learn more from one than the other?
So, a pure video analysis without OGOI or just the analysis with OGOI? I mean, which would you prefer, if...
If you were to say, I have both options to watch the flight again to think about what I could have done better? Either one or the other. What do you think brings you more?
That's a very difficult question.
I need to specify the question. Do I have the climb values and the information with the OGOI, and do I have audio with the video?
So, classically, with a 360° video, which is a timelapse, I don't have any audio.
Aha. So you mean that the audio enhances the video, and as soon as you have the climb rates in OGOI, that's it. But aren't the climb rates always displayed directly in OGOI anyway? They're always displayed, yes. I
I think now, if I have a video recording with audio—meaning, if I can hear the Vario and watch it at 1:1 speed—that is the best video analysis for me to learn something from myself.
By the way, I can also recommend to everyone that if you make a video—I mean, if you film something—not to do it to cut something for others, but to learn something from it yourself. Have someone film you so that you can hear the Vario and just watch it again at normal speed. I find that incredibly educational.
With Vario sound. What can you learn from that? Because you don't have the physical sensation, and you don't see, okay, my right butt cheek is pressing more or whatever. Instead, you just hear a bit of the Vario sound, but you also only have this limited field of view from that camera. So, what—why do you think you can learn so much from that?
So in my very first videos, I used that plate that comes with the GoPro, the one it's already attached to. I glued some Velcro to the bottom of a plate like that, stuck it onto the cockpit, and then mounted the camera there so that it actually looks directly at the leg bag. And I filmed from that perspective. And that way, you still get a relatively lot of the movements the harness makes, plus the vario tone; when I look at it like that, it almost puts me back into the situation a little bit.
...where I was flying. And when I watch the video, I think to myself, "Okay, turn now, this is the right moment," and then I realize, "Okay, I'm too late," or "I'm too early," or then I suddenly notice, "Okay, here comes the first rise, okay, I'll ignore it, good, here comes a second rise, I'll keep ignoring it, then comes the third rise, that's much stronger, okay, I'm turning in, that was right." Or sometimes I turn in too early and then I notice, and I think to myself, "Oh, it would have been better to wait a bit longer, would that really have been better?" And I can go through those thoughts a second time after I've flown, having already thought them through during the flight, in a slightly less stressful setting. And I think these reflections—we have very few opportunities in the air to reflect like that and we're especially always stressed because we're afraid of it.
To drown in it and then do those reflections again in a stress-free situation, I think is very helpful.
What would you say—are there real aha moments or core insights that you've actually drawn from your video analyses or the OGOI analyses, where you'd say, hey, I wouldn't have gotten there without these two mediums, let's just say?
Hmm.
I can't really remember a specific moment right now.
So what OGOI is very often helpful is that I frequently have a very clear picture of my flight and also a picture of what I did wrong, why I sank, and then I look at the OGOI of it and realize, hey, that's not true at all. Somehow I thought to myself, that was extremely inefficient, taking so long to turn, and that I might have been better off going straight away or vice versa, and then I realize, hey, that reasoning is completely wrong, the climb there wasn't that weak at all, it was much stronger than I thought, or I didn't lose that much altitude on this crossing. If I compare that with another pilot, you can do that very well on OGOI, comparing a line with another pilot and then seeing how different it was, and you see the hard reality.
how it really is. That's very valuable. With the video, it's probably similar things. I think the video gives it a more personal touch, especially if you can watch it with sound or at a faster speed, because what's very helpful—where I might have had a few cool moments—is that in the timelapse you see what the clouds are doing. That's incredibly cool. Whether they're building up or breaking down and so on. Yeah, you sometimes don't see that in real life, but in the timelapse you do; you can watch it accelerated, then you see what the clouds are doing and suddenly things become clear.
Do you use that while flying in the sense that you sometimes think, "What would this look like in a timelapse?" Like, that you're basically developing a new perspective on the sky? I don't think so.
So clearly, I always set myself the goal of looking at the clouds, saving them, and then looking at them again to see how they've changed and
Sorry, the video helps me look back later to check, if I observed it in real life, if what I saw there is correct?
Especially with front-camera videos, I mean, those are the cameras I'm thinking about, and then I see what happens and sometimes I notice, oh, the thought was completely wrong or the thought was right, so I can verify myself a bit better.
That's probably quite useful, especially if I still want to record it with the front camera. Sometimes I think about it and my memory can be deceptive. But if I've recorded it, those are hard...
Facts. This debriefing you're doing, would you say it's something you'd recommend to every pilot—to debrief flights very intensively—or would it be enough to say, okay, for every flight, there are maybe two moments where you say, those might be the error moments. You don't have to watch the whole flight or anything like that, but maybe two things where you feel like you could have done that better, or something, so you say, let's deal with those again intensively.
So, too much is obviously too much. You can't remember or learn that much from every single flight. I think pulling out two things is definitely very valuable. The big difficulty is probably which two things they are? And an analysis could certainly help find that. Maybe there aren't two things from every flight. Maybe there's a lot you can learn from one flight, and not so much from others.
But analyzing a flight, especially the longer ones, I think is definitely
very valuable. Now you're a lone wolf, sitting in your little room, analyzing your flight and so on. Is there, or have you ever tried, meeting up with fellow pilots and saying, let's just do an analysis night. We'll just look at a few flights together. It doesn't have to be at 1-to-1 speed, and you don't have to sit together for five hours to watch a flight like that, but you could just do a debrief or something where you say you're really sitting down and talking about it to, so to speak, learn from the wisdom of the many. What can you do there? Have you ever done something like that?
Now with
not several self-organized ones. To two, of course, so when we went flying as a pair, now, I'm going with one buddy who also appears in my videos every now and then, Benz. I go flying with him often, and we've also frequently looked at the stuff in Ogoj together afterwards. What also happens a lot are these debriefings from the Swiss paraglider league. Those are partly at the competitions. The Swiss league has always used Ogoj for the competitions. I've also implemented certain features there, partly at the request of the Swiss paraglider league. We are in close contact. And there's actually always a debriefing over Zoom where you look at the...
competition in Ogoj. The same goes for the XC League; sometimes there's organized group flying, and they look at it that way too.
With our paraglider club, we also sometimes organize these group flights, although we've had some extreme bad luck with the weather lately. So, in addition to the weather being generally bad, we always hit the worst weekends for the ones we've planned. Because of that, we haven't really had the time to use it yet, but I'll definitely do that too.
Then you need to make even more videos about the weather so that you understand it better and can say which weekends you should maybe avoid.
Yeah, these weekends are already in the annual plan, and I probably won't be able to plan the weather that far out anyway.
You're also building your own website, called Steppenwolf X, fittingly enough. What's the plan for that?
I have a lot of ideas and nothing completely clear yet that I'm certain I'll do. I primarily made the website to make sure it was reserved, and then I just put my logo on it. I have various ideas for what else I could do under the name Steppenwolf X. One point is a merch store. Does that mean Steppenwolf X becomes a brand? Or will it? It could become a brand; I don't know exactly what that would look like yet. Probably Orgoy is a product of the Steppenwolf X brand. I would have this merch store alongside, perhaps, a Steppenwolf X or Orgoy T-shirt,
that would be more of a side thing, maybe someone wants it, I don't know, I had the idea of offering a few cool items. One thing would be, I personally made a Skyways wall hanging. It's on an aluminum plate, two meters long, where the Skyways are designed a bit nicely, it looks really cool. I can't sell it at the moment because I used map data that I'm not allowed to use commercially. But as a side project, I'm still working on building that up with map data that is freely available. But that's not easy at all, maybe I'll make a video about how complex that is. That would be one of the things that would go into this merch store, and then I have a buddy who made a really cool phone holder for the cockpit where you can clamp a phone in very well.
Maybe there are other things that could be added. Just a few cool items that people in the paraglider community might need. That's an idea I could work on. Another idea I had was, somehow, to do something under the name SteppenwolfX
I could do group flights where we then edit a video together of us going flying at some location. I have various ideas, I don't want to say too much because then people will suddenly pin me down on it, but I don't know exactly where it's going yet, but I'm interested in doing more in that direction, actually.
SteppenwolfX also has a channel on Soundcloud where you have music posted. Do you still find the time to make music today?
I haven't done that in a long time now. It has a long history. Actually, I wanted to try to have a career in music at some point. Apparently, I wasn't talented enough for it or I didn't find the right niche. I produced a few albums with songs in Swiss German. You can find those under the name Georg Brodbeck, by the way. It's all online on Spotify, in case anyone feels like listening. It hasn't really reached the masses yet. And then I started doing some stuff without vocals, and that's the music I now use for my videos as a
Soundtrack. But you don't make a separate soundtrack for every video now, where you basically have to reprogram or re-record it. That
I did that at the beginning. For the first five or six videos, I made a separate soundtrack for each one.
That was relatively time-consuming and sometimes resulted in the soundtrack not being really great everywhere.
I actually got some constructive criticism for that as well. I did produce some soundtrack material that I now use in general. What I'm doing now is using the good parts of the soundtrack I have. So, I try to select them a bit and always cut them together like that. Nothing new is being added to it at the moment. I probably haven't made anything new in the last year. But I don't want to rule out that I'll make something new again in between. If I find it's slowly getting boring for me, you need something new again. If I feel like doing something again, I'll make a new soundtrack and then it'll be put in again. Your soundtracks aren't exactly mainstream, after all.
How did you get into this style?
It started with the stuff I produced, with the vocals, where I actually looked for a bit of music that I liked. And I had this idea in my head of what I could do, what I somehow thought sounded cool. And then I tried to get as close as possible to that using the production programs that exist. In the beginning, it was Ableton Live, now usually Logic. And I tried to get as close as possible with Logic to what I have in my head, to a sound I imagine that I'd somehow find cool.
And that's roughly what came out. I'm not really a perfectionist, whether it's with the sound or the video. I develop the stuff up to a certain standard where I feel like, okay, that's enough for me, and then I just put it out there. I think that's also what allows me to run a YouTube channel at all, where I occasionally publish my videos without having to keep editing them endlessly until they're practically perfect.
But with the soundtrack, that's what allows me to actually get it out there in the first place.
But I don't spend days working on a soundtrack like that.
Are you a perfectionist when it comes to flying? Or do you strive for perfection when flying? Not at all. But I think that would be
also very difficult. I think it's very exhausting.
Well, perfectionism is actually based on having time.
And you don't have that when flying?
With cross-country flying, the exact challenge is that you have to act and make decisions in the moment. And if you don't decide, it's going to turn bad anyway. I think that's the big lesson of cross-country flying.
And I also find it very nice that you have to act and can't spend forever overthinking what the best option is. We have on
At the beginning, you have the dialectic of the character Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. Harry Haller is the name of the
Could be. The protagonist in there. This dialectic, is it maybe a bit like flying and all this programming work for you, is that also a kind of dialectic? You have to be flying at the moment, and programming is something where you can invest an insane amount of time and run a thousand loops that you just can't do while flying, at least if you want to make progress while cross-country flying.
Could be.
For me, it is
but that also means one helps the other a bit. So specifically, paragliding helps with programming or even with life in general, because it trains me to make decisions, because with Ogoi I theoretically have a lot of time, but if I always take it, it will never be finished and then the whole thing won't work.
And with paragliding, I simply don't have the time, and if I'm being trained by that to decide faster, to move forward faster, to just do it faster and not always overthink whether I should or shouldn't or do it this way or that way, but instead just do it, I'll become much better and more efficient at pushing Ogoi forward.
I'll just leave that as a final thought. Paragliding also makes you better in life in general.
Georg, thank you so much for sharing. Thank you for everything you provide for the paragliding scene. On one hand, for behavior and further education with your channel, but also for visualizing flights. I think Ogoi is really a great platform for that. I wish you much success in continuing to build that up. I hope you find many, especially many subscribers, so that you can also finance these map data and perhaps, in the end, for your many thousands of hours that you will eventually have put into it, it's not just about the fun, but ultimately, you might also have something left over financially.
Thank you so much for letting me be here. It was good, cool, to actually experience what it's like from the inside, since I've heard from the outside every now and then how you do it. This is how I do it.
Exactly.
Did you see that? And well, at least, I don't think you filmed it, so you can't make a YouTube video about it now. Then, I'm curious to see what the next exciting topic is—specifically this cloud soaring video—I'm very curious about what and how you'll eventually approach that topic. I'll probably feature it again on some news ticker of Lu-Glidz or something. Yeah, but make something good out of it. Now I'm turning up the pressure a bit. Let's see, yeah. Good, Georg. I wish you the best and maybe we'll see each other sometime somewhere in the skies. I'll recognize you. Who knows, yeah. What kind of glider do you fly? What I have as a tester right now, roughly. At least in the summer months, that always changes a lot.
I can't really say whether I'm recognizable on the glider. Okay.
By the way, the music playing in the background here is also by Georg Brodbeck. You can find the link to his Soundcloud channel—as well as all the links to his YouTube videos, Ogoi, and more—in the show notes for this episode on the Gleitschirm-Blog Lu-Glidz. If you want to hear more of Podz-Glidz, you can subscribe to the podcast in your podcatcher of choice. Additionally, as a supporter, you can choose to financially support my work however you like. A frequently chosen contribution is 60 euros a year, or about 5 euros a month. But no matter what you give, every amount helps ensure that Podz-Glidz and Lu-Glidz can continue to operate and develop in the service of the paragliding scene in the future. For that, I say thank you.
All the information on how your contribution reaches me can be found on the website www.Lu-Glidz.blogspot.com. There, you'll find the "Support" menu item. Lu-Glidz signs off as Lu-Glidz. Until next time. It doesn't fall from the sky. Ciao.