The latest cool or important stuff I’ve read:
An honest and hilarious look at what it’s like to BUILD YOUR OWN ROCKET. (What could go wrong?!)
Some hilarious and insane stuff that was HAPPENING WITH SAM BANKMAN-FRIED IN THE CRYPTO EXPLOSION. (Let me see, where did I put that 6 billion dollars?)
Why some of us aren’t allowed to TEST DRIVE A TESLA. (I’ll give you a hint: It involves car dealers and lobbyists)
Remember that time the main-stream media thought it would be fun TO PRETEND THE INNOCENT PERSON WAS THE MURDERER. (Let’s pretend SHE did it!)
An exposure of THE BIAS OF THE FAR RIGHT AND LEFT. (though he opens with how CONSERVATIVES bypass justice via manipulation of the voting process…something the LIBERALS are doing now by removing Trump from ballots!)
Best strategy: Be forgiving, BUT NOT TOO FORGIVING, or you’re just a putz.
I RACE MY LITTLE PROP-PLANE AGAINST A BUSINESS JET. (But it’s not a very efficient BUSINESS JET)
Some REALLY FUNNY LITTLE STORIES by that guy that wrote The Martian, and PROJECT HAIL-MARY, which is just as good!
My favorite YOUTUBE CHANNELS: Veritasium | Joe Scott | Tom Scott | Half as Interesting | Yes Theory
Apps I made:
Xavion
I wrote Xavion to back up the instruments in the cockpit of any airplane, and provide engine-failed emergency gliding paths if the engine in my plane ever quits!
It has already saved my bacon in a partial engine failure and complete pitot-static failure!
Click HERE to check it out!
Control Pad
Control Pad is a free App I made for iPhone and iPad to set the weather, failures, location, etc in X-Plane!
Just grab Control Pad and put it on your iPhone or iPad on the same WIFI as X-Plane, and you can control the failures and weather in X-Plane for professional training… or to get the same level of power at home!
X-Plane: STARSHIP
I’ve made a sim of the SpaceX STARSHIP!
See the video where I introduce the sim (and discuss some pending legislation surrounding patent trolling!) here!
Stradale
I have a bit of Ferrari track-driving experience, and want to communicate what it is like to drive this type of car at speed. Stradale has physics as accurate as X-Plane, and I have never seen a driving sim that feels more like a real Ferrari or Corvette.
For iPhones and iPads, try it out HERE!
Bloodhound
In England right now, a team of people are building a car that will go….
ONE THOUSAND MILES PER HOUR.
This car uses a 542 horsepower V8 engine… to run one of the fuel pumps.
It uses a fighter-jet engine… for the LOW-SPEED portion of the run.
I made a simulation for it that is quite realistic, including driving dynamics and operation. Try it HERE!
A Movie I made and my Investments:
The Patent Scam
I was sued by a Patent Troll for USING THE GOOGLE PLAY STORE. The Troll claimed to own the idea of computers sharing information to purchase software.
Patent Trolls file patents on blatantly obvious ideas that are often decades or centuries old, typically adding the idea “…but now, on a computer!” to the patent to pretend they are the first person to think of the idea. Then, armed with the stupid patent, they start suing people.
Click HERE for the documentary!
Click HERE for the YouTube videos!
A recent comment on the YouTube video: “Just FYI, Nike goes to apparel expos, scouts out other peoples ideas and then patents them and sues the original inventors. I know I was in the industry. Don’t buy Nike.”
Investments
I invest to make the world cleaner, and my investments include Pro-Terra, a company making electric buses for cities. Imagine cities with clean, silent electric buses!! I invest in EPS, creators of an aviation engine that uses less fuel than other aviation engines. I invest in Beta, a company making a zero-emissions electric eVTOL airplane, and RDD, makers of a more efficient light airplane, the LX7. I also invest in a company called Aeon Blue, which is developing a technology that makes carbon-negative fuel (including SAF) from the wind and sea! These investments are all early-stage, pre-IPO, and helping make the world a cleaner place.
The Ava Lane Meyer Foundation
The Ava Lane Meyer foundation was created by Austin Meyer to advance clean energy and transportation by both investing and giving in those areas. Contributions and gifts made so far involve investments in ProTerra, Beta Technologies, Aztlan Chemical, and the gift of KidsRideClean, a gift of electric school buses that don’t make pollution, noise, or damage kids’ health.
The coolest airplanes I invest in, design, or build:
Beta eVTOL
What are the most annoying things about airplanes other than the airline food? The fact they they use so much FUEL and RUNWAY! THESE are the things that we are solving at Beta. Meet Ava. This airplane is electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing. No gas. See our web site HERE. A few stories are here and here.
Giving that I do:
Meyer/Finlay Pet Adoption Center
I like animals more than people.
So I helped fund some Pet Adoption Centers, such as the Meyer/Finlay Pet Adoption Center and Thiel/Meyer Pet Adoption Center
Meyer Scholar at Saint Paul’s School
If you live in South Carolina and want to go to the most amazing school that I can imagine, then check out Saint Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire!
I went there and it was just the most amazing place I have ever been, period.
To help, I helped fund the Meyer Scholar full-ride scholarship, so you can go without worrying about money for tuition.
Izzies’ Pond
What these people do is just amazing. Many of us THINK of how we want to help wildlife, but Greg and his wife actually DO it. They give every bit of time and effort and energy they have to helping injured or abandoned raccoons, deer, goats, squirrels, and any other animals that need help. Their farm, to me, is a little paradise. I help when I can, but they sure need more!
KidsRideClean
THIS VIDEO opened my eyes to the need for our buses to switch to electric… so I launched KidsRideClean through the Ava Lane Meyer Foundation. Zac And Jesse interview me here. And I deliver the first bus to a school here!
Institute for Child Success
The Institute for Child Success does a lot of driving, and since they are a non-profit, they don’t have extra money for zero-emissions cars. I gave them a Tesla Model 3 to provide zero-emissions transport.
The Ava Lane Meyer Science and Art Building
I just gave a new building to our school! The buildings we had were all so run-down and crowded, a wonderful new science and art building was called for! We just finished construction and it is GREAT! It’s clean and neat and new and useful and the kids love it. Mixture of renderings and actual photos above… the building turned out exactly as planned!
ApexProtection
THIS VIDEO opened my eyes to how amazing wolves are, and why they are worth working to help and save. ApexProtection is doing that, and caring hugely, so I give tho them.
The St Frances Animal Center
The St Frances Animal Center operates on a tight budget but still provides cats to a wonderful cat-petting cafe in Georgetown, SC, where we vacation sometimes. I’m giving for them to make a small new building for the cats!
Carolina Wildlife Center
I gave Carolina Wildlife Center a… parking lot.
OH MY GOD that is boring.
OH WELL! It’s what they need to start their next level of development, and sometimes we just do what is NEEDED, whether it seems fun or not!
WHOSE lives matter?!?!?
Pardon me if this is annoying, but I can’t keep this bottled up any longer.
My brother, Kirk Meyer, was killed on vacation in Jamaica. I saw what that did to my parents. The person that killed him was set free after a few days, since Jamaica made up a policy of not holding people that are ‘psychotic’, so he’s free now.
My friend, Greg Alia, was a police officer shot and killed in the line of duty… for nothing. He left behind a wife and six-month old son, who will now grow up without a father.
I was once mugged, and they were kicking me in the face to get my wallet (which I still managed to hang on to!)
I give to animal shelters, where we get a lot of dogs rescued from dog-fighting rings, where dogs are forced to maul each other to death for the amusement of the dog-fighting ring.
The national media never MENTIONS any of this, because the race of the people involved doesn’t match the narrative the media wants to present to us.
This is…. crazy. The main-stream media is effectively lying to us by telling lies of omission. This lets them EFFECTIVELY lie to us, while CLAIMING that everything they say is true. They just bury whichever story doesn’t fit their narrative. And now, peoples’ understanding is so distorted by this cherry-picking of facts that that they are literally marching though the streets with signs, LECTURING that only BLACK lives matter, based on the main-stream media cherry-picking facts to PRESENT only one race as the victim… even though my personal experience, and the experience of most others, is literally the exact opposite of what the media presents. This is hideously harmful, because by presenting the RARE cases where white people attack black people as if that is the NORM, it sets up race-based hatred that turns into crime… which propagates the whole wretched mess.
Here’s to hoping that in the future, the media and the government will report and act on crimes based on their severity, not the races of the people involved.
The scammers and the lawsuits:
I just got this from a customer named Adrian Clayton recently regarding FlyThisSim:
Dear Austin,
I hope you are well. Your name is ubiquitous with flying and simulation and I could think of no better person to ask about sim construction.
I am a PPL from South Africa that has been looking to improve my flying and for years researched flight simulators – I am too busy at my normal job and not technical enough to build my own, so I finally decided to purchase a Flythissim sim in November 2018. Unfortunately they have not delivered the product and neither have they refunded my purchase price, Flythissim seem to be defrauding other pilots too. I expect to never recover my $13500.
I drive a Tesla Model 3 Performance Edition and my wife a Tesla Model S.
My car goes 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds, which is faster than most Ferraris, has a 5-star safety rating, is safer than a Volvo, is quieter than a Rolls Royce, handles exactly like a BMW, has a far better map for navigation and traffic-avoidance than any other car, and uses no gas.
The only fluid it needs is windshield wiper fluid.
Gasoline-powered cars, of course, are much more likely to burst into flames after an accident than electric cars, and this causes about 2 people per day in the United States to die by immolation after an otherwise-survivable crash.
Tesla makes electric cars that solve these problems, and, in South Carolina, it is illegal for Tesla to sell them.
I hate extortion and censorship!
So me and a biz partner were running down to Louisville Kentucky and stayed at a rental place called the HollyHock Suites.
The neighborhood was so sketchy, just an abandoned concrete jungle, that I didn’t even feel safe there, and the sheets were filthy with the previous-renters’ hair still in them, never washed, just smoothed-over.
We left and stayed at a hotel instead, asking for a refund. This was the reply we got from Ben Brainard of Hollyhock rentals:
I added the screenshot above to my Google review and…. Google instantly shadow-banned the review, making the review perfectly visible to me… but not anyone else! (Simply logging out of your Google account and THEN looking at the reviews is the 10-second way to test this). WHY did Google hide the review? My strong suspicion is that some sort of confused AI could not understand the image above, so rejected the review as some sort of spam, and since Google didn’t want me to FIND OUT THAT THEY HAD JUST HIDDEN MY REVIEW, they left the review perfectly visible to me… but invisible to everyone else.
Sigh. So here’s a few lessons I have taken from this:
-IF you must get an AirBNB type of place, GET IT THROUGH AIR BNB, NOT THE RENTER DIRECTLY, to have a layer of protection if a refund is needed!
-We are going in a pretty bad direction with the internet, where any new information that does not conform to expectations set by a Google-controlled AI is silenced, and Google will try to keep you from even knowing WHEN you are being silenced by them. They want to censor you.. without you ever knowing you’ve been censored. This is complete control of the public discourse, by Google, in a manner that attempts to hide that their censorship is even happening.
I think these are some useful things to know.
Below are Wayne and Susan LaPierre of the NRA.
Decide for yourself if they are brave hunters, facing a deadly prey, using their guns in desperate self-defense. Start at 5:30 if you have no time.
AND BECAUSE SOMEONE JUST SENT THIS TO ME: This is Steve Jobs’ final essay:
I reached the pinnacle of success in the business world. In some others’ eyes, my life is the
epitome of success. However, aside from work, I have little joy. In the end, my wealth is only a
fact of life that I am accustomed to. At this moment, lying on my bed and recalling my life, I
realize that all the recognition and wealth that I took so much pride in have paled and become
meaningless in the face of my death.
You can employ someone to drive the car for you, make money for you but you cannot have
someone bear your sickness for you. Material things lost can be found or replaced. But there is
one thing that can never be found when it’s lost – Life. Whichever stage in life you are in right
now, with time, you will face the day when the curtain comes down.
Treasure love for your family, love for your spouse, love for your friends. Treat yourself well and
cherish others. As we grow older, and hopefully wiser, we realize that a $300 or a $30 watch
both tell the same time. You will realize that your true inner happiness does not come from the
material things of this world.
Whether you fly first class or economy, if the plane goes down – you go down with it.
Therefore, I hope you realize, when you have mates, buddies and old friends, brothers, and
sisters, who you chat with, laugh with, talk with, have sing songs with, talk about north-south-
east-west or heaven and earth, that is true happiness! Don’t educate your children to be rich.
Educate them to be happy. So, when they grow up they will know the value of things and not
the price. Eat your food as your medicine, otherwise you have to eat medicine as your food.
There is a big difference between a human being and being human. Only a few really
understand it. You are loved when you are born. You will be loved when you die. In between,
you have to manage! The six best doctors in the world are sunlight, rest, exercise, diet, self-
confidence, and friends. Maintain them in all stages and enjoy a healthy life.