The Jet Engine That Will Make Drones, Planes And Even Leaf Blowers Quiet

If you ever have the chance, I recommend going into Kid Rock's Nashville Steakhouse with Kid Rock.

How y'all doing?

What's up, brother?

How are you, man?

Nice to see you.

You may not care for his politics, but the man is hospitable.

Holy shit. Now we're rocking.

To be inside Kid Rock's private dining room is to be visually gangbanged by America. Trump and Kid Rock himself. It's glorious if you're into that sort of thing. This bathroom is amazing. The only bit more impressive is the women's restroom, which is a tribute to Kid Rock's ex-girlfriends and also lobsters apparently. The point of this is that I've come to Tennessee to talk to Kid Rock about songwriting and what AI means for the future of music.

Everyone's kind of freaking out right now.

More broadly, I've come to Tennessee to see all that the state offers on the technological front. But Tennessee is full of surprises if you know where to look.

Okay. Oh shit, yes!

Cue the nerdery montage.

Ah, it's glorious.

Y'all would probably expect us to start in Memphis or Nashville. But we're going to begin in Crossville, population 13,021. It's like a lot of small American towns these days. There's a solid Main Street, some nods to history and faith, some ups and some downs. The two star attractions in Crossville at the moment are the Buc-ee's, because Buc-ee's is a damn American icon, And then there's the startup Whisper Aero, which is an aspiring American icon.

So what you see here is the future of small aircraft. It takes our unique electric ducted fans directly into the leading edge of the wing.

Whisper was started in 2020 by these two gentlemen, and their goal was to make the skies quiet.

Whisper is a next-generation propulsion company. We're delivering cleaner, quieter, more efficient thrust for air management. So that's things that move air on the ground as well as air mobility. So everything that flies through the sky.

I just have one question for you. Are you still believers? I'm Mark Moore, 32 years at NASA and then 4 years as an engineering director at Uber Elevate.

Much of Mark's time at NASA was spent working on electric aircraft and vehicles that could take off and land vertically before such things were considered cool.

20 years ago, that was insane Star Trek geek talk.

Ian, meanwhile, studied aerospace engineering at Stanford, then worked at Northrop, and then went into startup land. They both ended up at Uber Elevate to try and make flying taxis a thing.

I'd been thinking about how to do these quiet propulsors for like 10 years before I went to Uber. Uber. When I went to Uber, we saw what everybody was doing, from Aurora Boeing to Hyundai, and we said, "Yeah, that's good, but I think I know how to do it better." The company's big invention is a new propulsion system.

It builds a fan out of lots and lots of small, thin blades, which it attaches to a fixed rim and then connects to an electric motor.

See, we have a lot of blades.

Yeah.

And they're all attached like a bicycle wheel rim, Well, if you look at this, the bottom one is a Schubler, and you can see there's a gap, and that creates these tornadoes at the tip of every single blade. We don't have those tornadoes at the tips.

Like, if they actually wanted, why couldn't they support on both sides?

Because from the beginning, we are obsessed with making this low noise. So we started from a design place. What do we have to do to make it really quiet? One of those answers is It's got to be at really low rotational tip speeds. If we were spinning at normal tip speeds, it would just rip apart. The centrifugal force, you couldn't do it. So that's why they don't put the rim around it. But one of the cool things about that is when you go to this really high number of blades, then you can push the tonal content above human hearing.

Mark is a legit legend in the aeronautics field. He played a key role in the rise of air taxis and advised companies like Joby and Archer Aviation. But what Whisper is proposing is borderline outrageous. The company is saying it has hit on a major aerospace engineering advance that others have missed despite decades of research. For me, hearing would be believing.

Now we're going to see the engines in action and we'll see competing existing things on the market in different classes.

Yeah, what you see over there, that's at about 5 pounds of thrust. And then that guy is the one that's going to go on and propel 1,000 to 10,000-pound aircraft.

All right, I'm in. I'm ready to feel the thrust.

So this is the low-thrust rig. We've got our 5-pound fan as well as a Schubler that's producing about the same amount of thrust.

This is the competing one.

This is a really high-quality Schubler electric ducted fan made in Germany.

And you can see the swirl.

Yeah, lots of swirl in it. These are carbon fiber blades, far fewer blades and stators than what we do. Theirs is far more expensive than ours.

Okay.

So now you can barely, barely hear it.

Yeah, and there's less of that swirl. It's more of like a straight line.

For people who are not swirl experts, how important is that?

If you think about the force, right, any swirl is a deviation from just straight thrust. Yeah, so the less swirl you have and the more just straight thrust you've got, the more efficient you're generating that force.

That makes sense. So it's just pure shot. All right, should we scoot? Down we go.

Yeah, big guys. So this one is going to put out way more thrust. We start at 40 and then we're going to ramp up all the way to 70, 80.

Yes, bottom one again is a Schubler, but much larger.

Why are you guys picking on Schubler so much?

We're complimenting them. They're the best company.

Before we kill them.

As Whisper's turbine kicked in and again mercilessly dominated Schubler's, I had a strange urge to put my body on the line in the name of aviation progress. Or maybe just for fun.

It was glorious.

These turbines are meant to one day go on air taxis and planes and drones. And the military very much wants Whisper's technology. So that it can fly things that see and hear near people without them noticing. In the short term though, Whisper has been working to fix that great scourge of suburbia.

Part of our business model is not just about aviation.

Yeah.

We're developing the world's quietest and most efficient leaf blower.

Oh man, we got leaves and everything.

We got leaves. Yeah, we bought every single electric leaf blower and some gas ones.

Everybody hates leaf blowers. I feel like if you guys actually solve this, people will be happy.

We solved it.

Yeah.

What we have is more thrust, which is what matters, but with efficiency that's about 40% better. So I know that sounds crazy, but that's how bad small electric ducted fans are typically.

Yeah, so these are all electric. This one is the Whisper one. Yep. These three are like, yeah, these are kind of the leading Yes. Should we do loudest first, maybe? Or biggest, I guess?

And just like that, once again it was time for a demonstration. And again, I was willing to put my body on the line for all of you.

Jesus, dude, this is gonna hurt. All right, here we go.

You gotta wait for the whisper one.

Hold on, his cheeks are being pushed back.

Yeah, that's good constant thrust.

Hey guys, what's up? I recently moved my finances to Bragg's. I wanted to know all about it. There's some of new songs. I've got "You Brax Me Up," "Receipts Are For Losers," "I Did My Expenses Like a Boss." There's so many other Intelligent Finances hits. You need to go download them right now. Don't wait any longer.

Call 1-800-222-BRAX. Sort it out while supplies last. Getting blown was nice, but there's more about Whisper that I'd like to show and tell you. For one, the company's headquarters is a little nuts. Hello, Mark.

Ashlee, great to see you again.

Just a few miles from the hangar is this former timeshare resort. Mark bought this place and turned it into Whisper's original campus.

I took my UberShares and Bought this foreclosed timeshare. We all moved in, and for 2 years we blitzed on the new technology and proved that it worked. And now we've got a headquarters downtown and in Nashville, and this is where the interns get to stay.

And this is your house?

This is where I'll always live. Come on, it's right on the lake. How can you not want to live here in Tennessee paradise?

Yeah.

The interesting thing is the younger single people for some reason wanted a dating life, and so they wanted Nashville. The families were really happy here.

Oh yeah, you do have a putt-putt.

Yeah, it needs a little bit of work, but we'll get to that too. This is what we call the tennis house, where we have fun discussions. Oh yeah, and drink a little bourbon.

You gotta keep the interns outta here.

Yeah, no interns allowed.

The timeshare is an example of things you can have and do in Tennessee that you can't in some Silicon Valley.

Welcome to Whisper.

So too is Whisper's R&D facility located in the Crossville city center. This building used to belong to a magazine publisher, and now it's being used to test and manufacture aerospace parts. The Crossville locals have welcomed Whisper with open arms and open wallets. In return, Whisper can do more engineering for less money and bring the city tech jobs. Whisper's leaf blowers will go on sale soon, which is nice. But for the company to really become a big deal, it needs to put its turbines on more things that fly through the air. Redesigning aircraft around a new engine is incredibly expensive, time-consuming, and risky. For Whisper to succeed, it would have to prove to skeptics that it's a massive leap forward and worth the trouble. That said, Whisper plans to perform a number of demonstrations in the air over the coming year. We wish them luck because major aerospace advances are rare and prized. And now it's time to bid Crossville goodbye and push on through more of Tennessee. We just left Whisper and we're on our way to Knoxville. It's about an hour away. And in fact, Knoxville Knoxville seems to be the beating heart of the Tennessee hardware startup scene. We are cruising through eastern Tennessee. It's very pretty, full of kind people. It's hot, it's humid.

Life is good.