Joel Brinton:

Radio Shack, Excel, and OpenCourseWare — Joel Brinton on his unconventional path to aerospace engineer.

Hosted by Jeff Ward · Former VP of Avionics & Software, SpaceX

Transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Jeff Ward   [0:06]

Hi, and welcome to episode four of It's Not Rocket Science, the podcast in which I explore the trajectories of people who at some point in their careers have found themselves on planet SpaceX. Today I'm talking rocket risk and artificial intelligence with one of the smartest, kindest people I know.

Joel Brinton   [0:22]

My name's Joel Brinton. cool thing about myself. is that I almost got blown up by a rocket engine. Well, yeah. So it was quite a journey. Briefly start at the beginning, which is, as a kid, I was very interested in electronics and a RadioShack down the street and I would try to go there once a week and pick out a few resistors or transistors. And I had a lot of their electronics kits and I would build little circuits, but I never really did well at school. So I, you know, I was advised by a family friend to study business. And I thought, well, that's fine. And So I actually ended up starting that business degree and finishing it because it was a nice complement my natural interests in engineering and electronics. I started building robots quadruped dog like robots, which were fun. I could show them off. And then I got involved with the Mars Society and take these robots to schools and do demonstrations for young kids. And then through that community, I got connected with a number of commercial aerospace companies. The first one was XCOR Aerospace in the Mojave Desert,

Jeff Ward   [1:40]

What was XCOR doing? I'm trying to remember.

Joel Brinton   [1:43]

yeah, so they were working on a suborbital rocket powered aircraft. kind of like suborbital space tourism similar to, you know, Spaceship One. It was a small team, about 30 people. But yeah, so I got an interview for an engineering position through my contacts at the Mars Society

Jeff Ward   [2:01]

Even though you weren't an engineer,

Joel Brinton   [2:02]

That's right. Yeah. I don't know if there was a miscommunication I got there. Lovely group of people. Jeff Grayson, the founder, CEO, gave me quite a bit of his time, almost 2 hours in a technical interview, and I just couldn't answer any questions. It was really embarrassing. he was like, okay, if there's a boat on the ocean and I put a boat in the boat and this boat's half full, what happens to the level of this boat? And I'm like, Oh God, I don't even know where to start. but later on that afternoon we go, got to the hangar and they're doing some kind of flight operation. So they had just purchased an aircraft and were doing some aerodynamic testing with it on the tarmac. And I just kind of ran out and helped them out. I pulled the aircraft in and they said they needed to disconnect the battery. So I pulled the battery out, put it on the charger and chucked some sand bags under the wheels. that was it. the next day they call me Jeff called me and they said, You know, Joel, we can't hire you as an engineer. You're clearly not qualified. But we just really, really loved your energy and really appreciated your help yesterday and were wondering if you'd work for us as a lab technician. And I was like, Yeah, sure, that's great. Like, whatever, let's do it. And so I, moved up there a couple weeks later and found a little apartment and, you know, a dark, dingy place in lovely Mojave, California, for $300 a month. And I just spent most of my time at work. And that was really the beginning of my professional career. I'd say,

Jeff Ward   [3:28]

So for sure you wouldn't say that your career took some perfect trajectory like we'd recommend to a high school student.

Joel Brinton   [3:34]

oh, my gosh, yeah. I mean, that's not even a half of it. I've had the least perfect trajectory you can imagine. a lot of challenges. yet, after all of that, 40 years later, I am where I am, top of my field and what I do, having never actually gotten an engineering degree. And so it can be done. A lot of the times I, I feel a little bit of imposter syndrome because I'm like, well, I didn't go to Stanford for, you know, I don't have a master's degree. And yet here I am hiring people with PhDs and trying to design chips and build radios. And sometimes I'm just like, you know, please tell me how this should work. But, you know, when I got to XCOR, it was an eye opener for me. I actually almost got fired the first week because I didn't know what to do. I literally just had a desk and I brought in some of my own little projects and stuff and nobody told me what to do. And so I was just like I sat there and I worked on some of my own stuff and I talked to people somebody took me out to lunch a week later and they're like, We're going to fire you if you don't start doing stuff. And I'm like, Oh my God, are you serious? Like, what do I need to do? Give me something to do. Give me something to do. Right? And Doug Jones is a brilliant rocket engineer. It was like, okay, I just need you to clean up this worksheet. And I'm like, You got it. I'm totally on honest and I just I swear to God, I made the world's best Excel spreadsheet like macros and functions and beautiful graphs and everything with X functions. And, you know, the next day I'm like, Oh, check it out. Check out what I made. And he's like, Holy crap, this is amazing. So that was the beginning of it. But also I was just really under skilled. And so I realized that I had to level up and a couple of months prior, MIT started something called OpenCourseWare and they published a whole bunch of their class videos and syllabi and notes on this website specifically for electrical engineering and applied mathematics. I spent like 2000 bucks. I bought all the books and every single night I went home and I just religiously executed on that OpenCourseWare. did all the courses, I did every single exercise problem. I sometimes emailed to professors and acted like I was the student and got some of my questions answered. within a year and a half I had done most of the courses for undergraduate electrical engineering, mathematics. Obviously I got no credit for it, but I really paid off because later that year XCOR had a downsizing and they had to fire their only electrical engineer And Jeff came to me and he said, You're now our electrical engineer. And he gave me a small promotion. And so literally I was like, Well, I did the work. I don't have a degree. And now this guy just told me I'm the company's electrical engineer. And so, you know, super unconventional. But that was that was my route.

Jeff Ward   [6:23]

Why do you think they decided to hire you even though you couldn't answer the interview questions?

Joel Brinton   [6:27]

I mean, I'm just a really socially awkward guy and I don't like just standing around. and I also like helping people and I try to be kind when I can. And I was just like, Oh, these people need help. It's kind of like if you're in the supermarket and like somebody, dropped something, like, you know, you just got to help them. I kind of felt like that. Like I was just like, Oh, these guys need help. Like, let me just run out there and help them out. And then there's more things to do. And I just got to helping out. There's no cooler place than hanging out on an airport and, you know, moving airplanes around. So I did what I could do because it was fun and cool and they're nice people. And but I think that kind of applies whatever you're doing. Like if you if you wanted to get into a company and you don't have that opportunity to just like jump out on the tarmac and, put a battery on the charger, you know, you can do other things offer open source solutions if people like, Hey, you know, I need this like open source project, which may help your company out and you can just like post and get or something.

Jeff Ward   [7:24]

And you figure that Jeff had just spotted that commitment and took the risk.

Joel Brinton   [7:29]

yeah, I mean, also they pay me like literally minimum wage, you know, for the amount of hours I worked, it was, you know, questionably legal and I didn't care. So I think he in his calculus is like, this is basically free to me. And this guy seems very nice and very motivated. I was actually in the bathroom at XCOR one time and there was like a window to the outside and I heard people talking about me and they said, What do you think about that Joel kid? And somebody said, Man, that guy's got ADD, but he sure knows how to use it.

Jeff Ward   [8:00]

You know, that could be the motto of a lot of engineers I know, including my own kid. ADD is no blockage to being a great engineer. How did you end up moving on from XCOR to SpaceX?

Joel Brinton   [8:10]

I went to L.A. for like a space talk. Steve Davis was giving a talk at a public library And he took a group of us to see the Falcon one. And it was just the coolest thing ever. I mean, it was like, this is like everything that XCOR is doing. But, you know, 100 X, they have real rockets that are really trying to go to space. Quick, quick side note, I was able to click the Falcon one rocket on my way out.

Jeff Ward   [8:39]

so we know that you sent your DNA into space,

Joel Brinton   [8:42]

I did it. Made it. Yeah. And so Steve was great and he's like, Yeah, let me put you in contact with the avionics department. And I had a couple of rapid fire interviews, went back on site for a couple of days, I think probably had like 15 interviews or something like that. And they said, Listen, we can't hire you as an electrical engineer. I know you're an electrical engineer at XCOR, but you don't have a degree. But we'll hire you as a PC designer. paid 50,000 a year. And I was like, well, you know, that's fine. my first day was the same day as the first successful Falcon one flight, and I didn't know it at the time, but if that had failed, that would have also been my last day because I guess the company was was hinging on it.

Jeff Ward   [9:31]

Here, it most likely was I was in denial because I'd moved my entire life from England just to work at SpaceX, and I didn't want to think it was about to go out of business. I guess you brought good luck.

Joel Brinton   [9:40]

maybe just some day,

Jeff Ward   [9:42]

Well, there's that. Did you do PCB design your whole time at SpaceX?

Joel Brinton   [9:47]

okay, so that's how I got hired. And then I think two days later you actually sent me to wake up because there was a engine controller on the stand that needed some debug and now you want to go. And I'm like, Yeah, sign me up. So I went and jumped on a plane I think 2 hours later or something like that, or something ridiculous. Like I literally went home. put a few things in a bag and just went to LAX you know, the next day I was literally hanging upside down in a harness underneath a rocket engine, plugging in a cable to an engine controller and trying to debug it. and I stopped for a minute And I was like, Is this real? like, how did I get here? I was literally delivering pizza like three years ago, it was just the coolest thing ever. And I came back and I remember you and Brandon pulled me aside and they said, We need a responsible engineer and ready for the stage control. Or how would you like to do that? And I was like, Man, that's great. It sounds great. And so that's, you know, typically an engineering role. And so I just kind of considered myself as a space X avionics engineer. Ever since then,

Jeff Ward   [10:51]

It would be tempting to say that Joel was smart and lucky, but I think there's more to it. He's also kind helpful and as you'll hear, 100% dedicated to advancing his skills and knowledge.

Jeff Ward   [11:02]

it seems like if you started out hanging upside down under a rocket engine, that's a pretty good space X story to begin with. Did you have a like quintessential space X moment?

Joel Brinton   [11:11]

you know, I actually did. in the first couple of weeks that I was there, there was a conversation I was having between, I think me, Katrina Chambers, Brandon Pierce and your walking down the aisles of cubicles talking about a new design for the Thermocouple board. And I remember thinking that this is the first time in my life that I've literally engaged 100% of my brain. they're the smartest and kindness people you could possibly imagine. I was just I was so impressed by their focus and their, ab initial understanding of everything. it was something. I was like the West Wing, you know, where every it's like walking really fast and talking really fast kind of ever since I've just been for those, those moments, walking around, talking fast with extremely bright people.

Jeff Ward   [11:56]

I love the West Wing comparison?

Joel Brinton   [11:57]

Yeah,

Jeff Ward   [11:59]

Did you interact with Elon at all or were PCB designers like off in some corner that Elon couldn't find them?

Joel Brinton   [12:05]

maybe a year into my journey there, I was sitting and eating lunch in the cafeteria with some friends and Elon just came over and he said, Hey, can I have lunch with you guys? And I'm like, Yeah, sure, come on, sit down. And I remember like looking at everybody else, and everybody else was like super embarrassed and they just didn't say anything. But I'm just like, I'm nervous, so I'm just like chatting. And so I was just like, I fully engaged him and we had this like 20 minute lunch together. I remember that the subject of discussion, which is very ironic now, which was free speech of course 15 years later I'm like, Holy shit, So he struck me, as, obviously one of the smartest people on the planet. You know, he always knew about what you were working on, which I was like, how the hell do you know what I'm working on? And, you know, so much more like he knew so many different disciplines. And, you know, it struck me as very interesting. But, interpersonal wise, it was just, normal person, like just little socially awkward and kind of acted like everybody else. It didn't stand out as somebody specifically charismatic or anything else. enjoyed my time with him. certainly my entire time there, I considered him a good leader and, very smart and didn't have any issues.

Jeff Ward   [13:17]

Did you say that you got blown up by a rocket engine?

Joel Brinton   [13:19]

Yeah it wasn't a space X.

Jeff Ward   [13:21]

It wasn't

Joel Brinton   [13:22]

I

Jeff Ward   [13:22]

okay.

Joel Brinton   [13:22]

it was a company that was putting a rocket engine on an airplane we are doing some, some testing called a tie down test which is tie the aircraft down to the runway. You fill it up with fuel and then you run the engine for the full duration. Will you take data on the performance, the temperatures and the pressures and everything? You know, we had done this 50 times and everything was going fine. And I was standing in front of the wing of the aircraft with a laptop and all of a sudden I just heard this bang. And then just like crouch and gas went everywhere and like there are sirens and lights going off. there's a call in on the loudspeaker, evacuate the area. My friend was sitting in the pilot's seat and so I helped him out pulled him out as quickly as I could. And we got to safety. And later on, I had looked at my laptop and because the first thing I noticed was my my laptop screen turned off and a couple of hours later, I went back to the scene and there were shrapnel in the back of my laptop. So the laptop had protected the shrapnel from going in my body. It wasn't much I think it was maybe just some screws or something like that. Basically, the engine just let go. it was a 1500 thrust pound liquid oxygen, liquid methane engine that just decided to let go about ten feet from me.

Jeff Ward   [14:39]

How did that affect you?

Joel Brinton   [14:40]

You know, it was just a very surreal moment. didn't really feel one way or the other. we had lost friends in the commercial aerospace industry, Spaceship One have been lost and other people that we knew had been killed in. And this company had a very strong safety record. And we never thought something like this would happen to us. But it's just a reminder that you can never really be safe enough.

Jeff Ward   [15:06]

Yeah. All of the companies in aerospace say safety is job one, but it does take a real safety culture to implement that.

Joel Brinton   [15:16]

yeah, I have mixed feelings on this because safety culture is important, but safety can also kill a company like you can just, you know, be as safe as possible and never launch. I always say that, safest engineer is a competent engineer. I don't think you can build a spacefaring civilization without taking some risk.

Jeff Ward   [15:35]

And do you think that's a cavalier attitude?

Joel Brinton   [15:38]

it's a personal decision, right? Like everybody has a risk reward profile. And I think people who have, stronger reward profiles than I do should be allowed to carry on. I think the issue becomes when you hire somebody and, as an employer employee relationship, you have an obligation to protect them. But I think, if somebody is like a business owner or just an entrepreneur and they have a particular risk appetite, I wish that there was more of an opportunity for for people to build cheaper and better hardware,

Jeff Ward   [16:12]

I happen to agree with you, and I think it is important if we're going to build a spacefaring civilization just like it was when we built a seafaring civilization

Joel Brinton   [16:21]

there's going to be death. I mean, when people want to Mars, there's people are a lot of people are going to die and we need to be okay with that. We need to make sure that everything's fully disclosed, that the people who are getting into this have full knowledge of what they're getting involved with. But I think I'll be really upset if a couple of people die on Mars and that, squashes, any upcoming missions or something, that that would be disappointing.

Jeff Ward   [16:43]

How did you end up moving on from space X

Joel Brinton   [16:46]

Well, I'll tell you, it all started out with a performance review and actually I had been 100% committed to SpaceX for about two years. I worked literally 16 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. And it wasn't like I felt like I had to. It was just like why would I do anything else when I could be building rockets? Like this is the coolest thing I could possibly do. the company was, you know, becoming more formalized and we implemented performance reviews. And I remember going in for my performance review and I got a B plus and I was pissed because I was like, Are you for real? I sleep 6 hours a night and every waking moment, I'm here. Like, how, how is this a B plus? How is this not like, not a triple plus or something like that? And it's just a kind of realization that Oh yeah, this is a company and people are getting paid, in exchange for their time. And so after that performance review, I started treating it more as a job. And I actually started a business in the evening and I had rented out little office right before the cafe, the airport cafe,

Jeff Ward   [17:49]

Yeah,

Joel Brinton   [17:50]

Howard William and I rented that out to start our own companies. And I had started a software company. I was working on FBA software, so that was kind of the beginning of my exit. And I think a couple of months later I left.

Jeff Ward   [18:04]

When you left, What was your planned trajectory versus the trajectory that you ended up on?

Joel Brinton   [18:10]

Yeah. So the FBA company was one idea actually even raised about $50,000 for it, but it didn't go anywhere. ended up giving the money back to the investors. But I probably had a dozen startup ideas that really went nowhere. But my biggest success after I left SpaceX was a PCB design consulting company. I started called Brinton Engineering, and I opened myself up for PCB Design Consulting on some of the most advanced PCB designs that were being done in robotics and aerospace and that was probably to date, my most successful business ever. We were doing a couple million dollars a year in revenue. I had a lab with some of the most advanced debugging equipment you can imagine And I ran that for about five years and I had about 50 clients, so I kind of worked equally as hard, you know, 6 hours a day, seven days a week sometimes, and after about five years of that, I really felt like, this can't be it, I need to get out of the rat race. And I wanted to, move from being somebody who does actual work to somebody who owns a business. And so I had a very interesting technical idea for something called a distributed BEAMFORMING radio network the gist of it is that I could offer a last mile wireless service, at much lower prices than you could with like, say, a cellular network or even a wireline network And so it was really $1,000,000,000,000 idea. And I pitched it to investors and I was able to raise $10 million. So that company was called Signal Laboratories, I had a couple of co-founders and I ran that for about three years. And we were trying to design this modem, But, we were achieving technical milestones about ten times slower than we had originally forecasted. So I kind of raised about ten times less money than I needed. And, you know, eventually we ran out of money and I had to close that.

Jeff Ward   [20:04]

Did somebody pick up the technology and the idea

Joel Brinton   [20:08]

So, you know, for me it was a very challenging period. as the CEO and co-founder, I was receiving about 101 different opinions. You know, investors would tell me to do one thing, advisors would tell me to do another, the lawyers would tell me to do another, and the co-founders would tell me to do another. And it was just kind of like decision paralysis. we were running out of money. And I, I thought I had informed the investors about this. And I said, you know, if you don't give us more money, we're going to close down. And, you know, I didn't receive any more money. So closed down and then I told the investors that I closed down and they're like, What are you doing? Like, if I don't close down? And I'm like, Well, then we like literally, I've already let everybody go. Like, we need more money. Like today, if you don't really close down, we need more money today. And they're like, Well, let me work on it. anyways, I said, if it doesn't happen by today, I'm out. and so I was. But one of the investors and another co-founder picked up the idea and they ran with it for another year. But I don't believe they had any traction. So at this point the code was open sourced, investors agreed to open source it there's not much there without probably 1000000 hours more engineering, But it's a good start. And, you know, we didn't disprove the concept. And I still think that there is some validity in building a distributed, coherent beamforming network But, it's going to take a lot more time and money if if somebody can ever do it,

Jeff Ward   [21:26]

Did you come out of that thinking that you wanted to be CEO again and wanted to found something, or was it a lesson that you prefer to do engineering?

Joel Brinton   [21:37]

i think in the long term i, i do enjoy being the ceo founder but i would keep the organization very small. I don't think I would enjoy having a company more than 15 or 20 people because at that point everything gets so abstracted away and you're just dealing with people who deal with people which sounds like the opposite of fun. And I think for me, all of the interesting engineering projects that I could possibly do, I don't need billions of dollars, I need millions of dollars. And that's something that's achievable with a very small company.

Jeff Ward   [22:08]

and what do you think you'll chase after next?

Joel Brinton   [22:11]

I'm pretty rigorous and formal about my interests and hobbies. So I have actually documented 32 different personal projects of mine. I used to think that I would never accomplish all 32 of those things in my lifetime. But really in the last 12 months, everything has really changed with AI. And so I'm actually more encouraged than ever now that I might actually get all 32 projects done in my lifetime. But I think instead of focusing directly on those projects, I'm probably unfortunately going to have to focus for the next couple of years on this intersection of agents and engineering services. I did incorporate a few months ago with another co-founder, a brilliant buddy of mine who's a digital designer and we're looking into different ways where we can potentially augment portions of the engineering workflow using agents to both kind of make money, but then potentially also achieve some very interesting ends,

Jeff Ward   [23:12]

So you don't see A.I. as a passing fad.

Joel Brinton   [23:15]

I mean, this is like the 1980s all over again where, you know, there's the introduction of the personal computer and everybody goes from using pencil and paper to typing. Anybody who's not incorporating science into their workflow is just going to be doing things with pencil and paper and just won't be able to keep up. So I'm excited about, having this leverage, like being able to take my love of engineering and multiply it by some coefficient using generative A.I. tools. But I just I don't know what that looks like. And so I'm just spending all my time right now figuring, figuring out what the future looks like. Really. We're kind of in a transition right now.

Jeff Ward   [23:50]

So this for you, is the fundamental engineering tool of today.

Joel Brinton   [23:54]

Yeah, exactly. the majority of my life, like literally tens of thousands of hours have been spent in software tools, primarily this tool called Altium Designer. I just spend my whole life in it just clicking buttons opening menus and moving wires and setting parameters and this is how I achieve things. This is how we design circuit boards and build products. and I feel that like it's just limited by the rate at which I can like read menus and click that's all about to change I'm just going to able to think about the things that I want to build and how they should be built, and then just have the generative AI figure out how to implement that. And I'm not quite sure what that looks like yet. So it's going be all text based or if there's going to be some graphical component that gets controlled by an agent. We're still trying to figure all that out, but I think the days of people sitting at a computer opening menus is very limited.

Jeff Ward   [24:47]

So you told me in your bio that you want to live 200 years and you're raising a young son now. You're dedicating all your time to A.I.. What keeps you up at night?

Joel Brinton   [24:56]

what's after I that's what keeps me up at night. the future is very uncertain. large language models are never going to be worse than they are today. And I actually have a lot of fear and concern for people who know nothing about AI. you have humans that have zero marketable skills or skills that can be replaced with, $0.10 worth of tokens, like You've got some serious questions to ask as a society And, you know, that definitely keeps me up at night. But it could go very it could go very good as well. I'm what they call an acceleration test. I think this is going to be net positive. I mean, I spend every night I put, I put the chat app on on audio mode and I just chat for an hour with an agent And I'm learning at just incredible rate. It's like when I was first introduced to Wikipedia, I just sat there for three months and just read every link I could find, and it's like the same thing. I'm just having chats with these agents and there's just like any question I can have, they just answer it for me. it's just all at my fingertips and I'm just like, What the fuck does the future look like? Dude, it's going to be so weird. There's a lot of pitfalls that we need to watch out for. But I think that this is going to be good. We just have to really keep our eye on the ball right now.

Jeff Ward   [26:13]

As much as I don't want to cut this conversation short, I think that's a great time to do so. I'll go away and edit it and get it out there where people can hear it. I want to editorialize a little bit before I finish this up. One of my assumptions in making this podcast has been that early employees that space gains financially and then used their financial resources to follow their passions. Here's what Joel had to say about that.

Joel Brinton   [26:40]

when I started, I was getting paid 50 grand a year and I didn't have enough money to buy my options when I left.

Jeff Ward   [26:47]

So Joel left space without a financial windfall. And what he told me was that it was all about the experience for him. And I think that's important because it's easy to say I couldn't do what he did because I didn't get the degree or I didn't get the money. And what we really see from Joe's story is that he turned his passion and intelligence and hard work into a lot of really interesting endeavors. So in future interviews, I'm going to challenge my own assumptions and find out really what people took as the main benefit from their time at SpaceX. One additional bit of housekeeping is to say that artificial intelligence has actually helped the podcasting workflow. I can upload the podcasts, get a text transcript and edit text and have those edits ripple through to the audio, which is kind of cool. So I've been able to turn this episode around in about two weeks, and that means we should hear some more episodes of It's Not Rocket Science coming up in the near future. Thanks for listening.

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