Oral-History:Chris Brantley

ABout Chris Brantley

Born in 1960, in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Chris J. Brantley, Esq. is a retired attorney, law professor and association management professional, with specific knowledge and expertise in public policy, government relations, technology and international law. In 1978, he earned a B.A. in Political Science from Mercer University in Atlanta, Georgia, graduating Magna Cum Laude with Department Honors in Political Science and was elected Student Body President. He continued his education at American University in Washington, D.C., earning a J.D. in 1985 and an M.A. in Law and International Affairs in 1986.

In the late 1980s, Brantley worked almost two years at the American Association of Engineering Societies, leaving as Director, Government Relations to join the staff of IEEE-USA in Washington, D.C. His publications include two co-authored papers with Duncan L. Clarke, including, "Executive-Legislative Consultation,” in Clarke, American Defense and Foreign Policy Institutions, (Harper & Row, 1989); and "Executive-Legislative Consultation: Impediments and Proposals for Change," in Hoxie and Pfiffner, eds., The Presidency in Transition, (Center for the Study of the Presidency, 1988).

Brantley began a nearly thirty-five-year career at IEEE-USA (1989-2023) as Administrator, Technology Policy in June 1989, and was later promoted to Senior Administrator, Manager of Government Activities, and Director of Government Relations and Operations, before being named Managing Director in April 2004. He served as the Managing Director of IEEE-USA for eighteen years (2004 to 2022) and one year as Assisting IEEE Executive Director on strategic projects and supporting IEEE-USA managing director transition. He was very active in promoting the mission of IEEE-USA and very enthusiastic about many of its programs, the especially the IEEE Congressional Visits Day, the Washington Internships for Students of Engineering (WISE), and the IEEE Congressional Fellowships. Some of his last projects before retirement included working with a great group of people to enhance IEEE's public affairs outreach on climate and technology issues as well as writing a history of IEEE-USA.

Brantley has a keen eye and a tremendous interest in history, so this oral history contains many fascinating stories about the history of IEEE and IEEE-USA as well as U.S. and global history. In particular, he commented on historical events during his lifetime, including the events that transpired on 11 September 2021. Brantly recalled: “I guess the other thing that left an indelible impression on me was 9/11 (September 11, 2001). I was coming out of the subway, walking to the office and everybody was streaming out of the buildings downtown. We were at 1828 L Street. A lot of colleagues from the Mechanical Engineers were all crammed in a car coming out of the parking garage. I didn’t know what was going on because I had been on the Metro, and I didn’t have a cellphone back in those days. They told me what was going on. I went up in the office. We’re watching it on the TV, we’re watching the news unfold. We could see the smoke coming up from the Pentagon in the distance so we could look out our window and see. We couldn’t see the damage, but we could see the smoke. I don’t know if you’ve been in downtown D.C., particularly in the central business district, but you’re sort of on the flight path to Reagan International.”

About the Interview

CHRIS BRANTLEY: An Interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, August 9, 2023, and November 21, 2023

Interview #898 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Copyright Statement

This manuscript is being made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the IEEE History Center. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center.

Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Chris Brantley, an oral history conducted in 2024 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Interview

INTERVIEWEE: Chris Brantley

INTERVIEWER: Mary Ann Hellrigel

DATE: 9 August 2023, 21 November 2023

PLACE: Virtual via WebEx

Early life and education

Hellrigel:

Today is August 9, 2023. I’m Mary Ann Hellrigel, Institutional Historian and Archivist as well as Oral History Program Manager at the IEEE History Center. I’m with Chris Brantley who’s recently retired after about thirty-five years with IEEE. He was Managing Director of IEEE-USA, from 2004 to 2022. He’s been a Senior Advisor for the past year. He’s also a Senior Member of IEEE. Welcome, sir.

Brantley:

I’m pleased to be here and look forward to our conversation.

Hellrigel:

Sir, I’d like to start by asking a little bit about your family life and yourself if you could tell me your full name and the year you were born.

Brantley:

Certainly. I was born in 1960. My full name is Chris Julian Brantley. Chris, because my father preferred short names. I was actually born in Fort Jackson, South Carolina on the military base there, but my father left the military shortly thereafter. He completed his obligation as an officer and went to work for the federal government for what was then called the Civil Service Commission which is now known as the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). He was responsible for supporting federal employment policies across all the federal employers in the Southeast. That led us to move frequently. So, I’ve lived in Jacksonville. I grew up in Decatur, in Jacksonville, in Tampa, in Macon, Georgia where I spent most of my high school years and then later to Atlanta, Georgia where I went to college. Then he retired and I went to graduate school in Washington. My family, the Brantley side of the family, I’ll just say very quickly that they are rural, from rural South Georgia near Waycross, Georgia. Ware County. If you look at the map, you’ll notice that the next county over is called Brantley County. That’s named after my great-great-great uncle, Benjamin Brantley. So, there’s a long history of Brantleys in South Georgia.

Hellrigel:

Your family goes back to South Georgia. I think Georgia became an official colony around 1732. I could be off. But your family goes back centuries.

Brantley:

[We were told] the first Brantley came over as an indentured servant, Edward Brantley, to Isle of Wight, Virginia to the Jamestown Colony where he worked on tobacco and ended up marrying the daughter of the farmer who brought him over.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

That family migrated down the east coast to Southern Georgia and that’s where most of them are. Although you’ll now find Brantleys spread all across the United States, the original ancestor that we all trace our roots back to Virginia.

Hellrigel:

That’s a lot deeper than my roots in the United States. [Laughing].

Brantley:

[Laughing]. On my mother’s side I’m from the McIlvains who were [Scots-] Irish. The context of them are they are a Scottish clan and migrated to Ireland then to the United States and worked their way across the Northern United States. My great-great-grandfather was actually a famous barber in the south side of Chicago named Louis E. McIlvain. He decided at some point to retire to Florida because it was nice and warm there and he’d get away. He started his business there in the era of the Chicago gangsters.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Brantley:

A barber shop is an interesting place to be during that period and I could tell you lots of stories. But anyway, he and his son moved south and set up in Madeira Beach, Florida and that’s where my mother was [raised]. Then my father and my mother went to school together at the University of Florida. That’s where they met. The rest is history as they say.

Hellrigel:

Okay. So, your mother’s name?

Brantley:

My mother’s name was Sharon Diane Brantley. Oh, pardon me, I got that wrong. I’m thinking about my own wife. Sharon Lee Brantley or Sharon McIlvain Brantley.

Hellrigel:

Her maiden name?

Brantley:

McIlvain.

Hellrigel:

She went to college at the University of Florida.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

What did she study?

Brantley:

You know I’m not entirely sure. She didn’t graduate. My father was a couple of years ahead and when they got married, she left school and followed his career and raised a family. I’m the eldest. I’ve got two sisters and a brother. I think she took on that traditional homemaker role pretty much for most of our life.

Hellrigel:

That’s very traditional that you marry a gentleman two years or so senior to you and leave college before graduating with what they used to refer to as the M.R.S. degree. This meant you married and became a missus, so Mrs.

Brantley:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

During this era, women were expected to marry. The husband would be the breadwinner and they would start the family. Of course, this is the stereotypical idealized family structure. Your parents were married then in the late 1950s.

Brantley:

Yes. When they were married, he had an ROTC commitment to do four years of military service. He was posted to Fort Jackson, South Carolina which is where I was born. It was an interesting time because it was at the very end of the Korean War and before the Vietnam War really heated up.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes.

Brantley:

It was not a great place to be because a lot of the officers there were experienced officers from the Korean War and World War II. A lot of them were alcoholic or had traumatic stress. My father, even though he was a second lieutenant, ended up running the training company. That was their job was to train soldiers, get them ready to go to Korea if the war continued.

Hellrigel:

Your father’s name?

Brantley:

Carroll Julian Brantley.

Hellrigel:

He went on an ROTC scholarship.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

For the U.S. Army.

Brantley:

Yes, exactly. After four years, he resigned his active commission and went into the Reserves, then he completed the rest of his obligations there. But then he went to work for the federal government so.

Hellrigel:

What was his major in school? College?

Brantley:

Agriculture. [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

He was a farm boy from South Georgia. He studied agriculture.

Hellrigel:

Agriculture. He went on an ROTC scholarship. Was that because he needed the funding or did he want to not get drafted? I don’t know if I’m asking the right way.

Brantley:

Well actually, yes, he was at some risk because of the Vietnam War. As a second lieutenant, he was later made a first lieutenant, but an awful lot of first lieutenants and second lieutenants ended up in Vietnam. I don’t want to suggest that he saw the writing on the wall, but I think after he fulfilled his commitment, he decided that he had a family now and he wanted to make a career with the federal government. He actually interviewed with the Department of Agriculture and almost ended up in Beltsville, Maryland but ended up taking a job with the Civil Service Commission and spent his whole career with the Civil Service Commission. [Later] it became OPM.

Hellrigel:

Even though he fulfilled his commitment, they had the footnote (in your commitment agreement) that you’re still liable to get called up for X number of years.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

At some point they may have determined that, one) they didn’t need him because the draft was going on and two) what he was doing was equally as important.

Brantley:

It could be.

Hellrigel:

Hard to say.

Brantley:

Honestly, I never talked to him about all those details. Back in those days, being in the National Guard meant that you had to do a couple of weekends a year and sometime in the summer. A lot of his duties were actually closer to home and a lot of it was going to be, instead of going out in the field and doing exercises, they would send him to training courses and other things. I think if he had been mobilized or called up, I think he would probably have ended up in logistics somewhere.

Hellrigel:

Okay. You mentioned that you have two sisters?

Brantley:

All of the siblings are about three years apart. I’m the oldest. My next is my sister Lisa. Then after that comes my brother Mark. Then my youngest sister is Amanda who we call Amy. Again, my father liked short names.

Hellrigel:

Okay. You’re growing up. You’re the eldest. You’re three years apart so then there’s a twelve-year gap between you at the top? Okay.

Brantley:

Yes. I was off to college when my youngest sister was still in elementary school. You know I always regret I didn’t get to know her as well although we have a close relationship now, but we didn’t. We didn’t spend a lot of time together then.

Hellrigel:

You mentioned when you were young that your father had moved around a lot for different, I guess, promotions in his government job or he was sourced to different offices with OPM? Or what’s now OPM?

Brantley:

He had a region for many years. He was responsible for the southern half of Georgia and parts of Florida and Alabama. Then about the time the computers were adopted widely, they centralized all the OPM offices, and he moved to the Atlanta office where instead of traveling all the time he just sat in front of a computer. Then at some point they actually promoted him to be director of the southeast region. So, he was responsible for all the Southeastern United States.

Hellrigel:

Yes, all the personnel management,

Brantley:

Yes. It was an interesting childhood growing up. He was a very attentive and loving father, but he also was on business trips frequently because of the nature of his work. He’d go up to Oak Ridge Laboratory.

Hellrigel:

Oh, Tennessee.

Brantley:

He’d go down to Savannah River Plant, and he’d go here or there. It wasn’t uncommon for him to be gone for a week or two at a time.

Hellrigel:

Now, you’re growing up, you’re moving around a lot but and then you have this big family, the Brantley family in Georgia. Well let me backtrack one step. Your mom became a homemaker?

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Did she work outside the home? For money at any point?

Brantley:

No, not really. Her outlet was crafting. That’s also something that after all these fledglings left the nest, she and dad would get into traveling. She would make stained glass.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

She would do macramé. She would sew quilts. She would get involved in groups that would do those types of activities. She tried to sort of enrich her life and get some perspective away from us kids by having a sort of a crafting outlet.

Hellrigel:

Right. Yes, some people do that. Some people go to church. My mom did a little bit of the PTA and would be the class mother in school, so it was sort of an outlet but still kid-centered. You’re growing up. How would you describe your childhood -- yes, sir?

Brantley:

I forgot probably the most important thing. From her perspective, the thing that she did consistently throughout the whole period and right up to the end of her life was genealogy.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Brantley:

She focused a lot of time and attention to tracking down both the Brantley and the McIlvain family and all the roots and offshoots. I’m looking at a book on my shelf called The Brantley Family: Preachers, Planners, and Pioneers of the South that she was a contributor to.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

So basically, a genealogy of the family tree.

Hellrigel:

Did she go to genealogy meetings at the local library or is she self-taught?

Brantley:

Mostly self-taught. As kids growing up, a lot of our vacations were built around the genealogy. So, we would travel to rural Indiana or farm country Delaware to visit with distant, distant, distant cousins to see if they had genealogy or to visit graveyards and record dates and information.

Hellrigel:

And courthouses and churches looking for birth records.

Brantley:

Courthouses and churches and libraries and reading rooms. Of course, we would camp while they were doing that. We had a big popup camper or as a kid it was a big popup camper. We’d be off running around in the outdoors, rowing boats on a lake, or doing fun things while they were off doing genealogy.

Hellrigel:

That’s pretty cool. So, your family vacations were camping and genealogy.

Brantley:

Yes. I remember we were trying to get to a place in Indiana and the road was out. It had been washed out by water; the river had overflown its banks. There was a farmer there. My father rolled down the window and asked the farmer how can I get around this. I need to get to so and so. The farmer said take a right and two lefts. He said there’s no place in Indiana you can’t get by taking a right and two lefts. [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

[Laughing] Well yes, out that way sometimes farmland is more of the grid. I lived in Iowa for a while, and it is very grid-like.

Brantley:

Exactly.

Hellrigel:

A little bit.

Brantley:

Childhood memories that I’ve kept with me.

Hellrigel:

Then when you were growing up did you play sports in school? Things of that nature?

Brantley:

I tried to play a little bit of baseball, wasn’t very good. I was a little better at tennis. I actually played in the Atlanta Lawn Tennis Association. We had team competitions. You’d show up and you’d play against other clubs. I did those kinds of things. I never had any illusion that I was good at it, but I had fun doing it.

Hellrigel:

Did you have other hobbies?

Brantley:

I mentioned the history and I trace that back to my great-aunt Sadie Brantley who was a schoolteacher in South Georgia. By the way, you probably noted I don’t have a very strong southern accent despite being from the very far, deepest part of Georgia. It’s because my great-aunt Sadie, the schoolteacher, one room schoolhouse, thought that the Southern accent was undignified. She would switch kids. She switched my grandfather, and she switched my father if they used Southern colloquialisms. [Transcriber note: Speaking next sentence in Southern accent] So I can affect a southern accent. I can tell you I can really talk in a southern accent if you want to hear one. But that’s not the way I was brought up. I was brought up…

Hellrigel:

This is a little off point, but do you remember any phrases that got the switch moving faster?

Brantley:

Well even simple words that you hear all the time like you all or y’all. Where y’all going? You know? Or reckon. You know what, I reckon I’m going to the store. You know? Stuff like that. Nowadays you still hear it frequently.

Hellrigel:

But at the time your father might not have appreciated it, but she thought she was like, well, improving them because of the bias that regional dialects had.

Brantley:

Yes. Another contextual note is that my father was the first Brantley to get a college degree.

Hellrigel:

Okay. So, she was a schoolteacher, but she probably went to a normal school which maybe was a one-year program for women. Sometimes two. Your dad goes to college. That was a big thing.

Brantley:

Yes, it was. When I say Brantleys, I don’t want to speak for every Brantley in the United States.

Hellrigel:

But your immediate.

Brantley:

But our immediate family line. My father was the first to get a four-year degree. I was the first to get a graduate degree.

Hellrigel:

Your father graduate college in the mid-1950s or late-1950s?

Brantley:

The mid-1950s, yes.

Hellrigel:

He would have been born in the 1930s?

Brantley:

I’ll give you a better answer. I’ve got my calculator here. So, this is 2023. He’s eighty-seven years, old so he was born in 1936.

Hellrigel:

My late parents would have been his cohort, but in my family, my dad graduated high school and that was the marking stone. Your dad went to college. Did he have the expectation that his kids were going to college? What was expected of you when you were a young lad?

Brantley:

I think there are two answers to that question. The first is that his answer was to do the best you can do whatever it is you do. He always expected you to do your best, but he pretty much left it to us to chart our own path. He didn’t try to steer us. By the same token I think all parents at that point wanted their children to have a better life than they had and everybody who could wanted their children to go to college. So, he wasn’t what they would today call a hovering parent. He didn’t force me to apply to certain schools or anything like that. He just wanted to make sure that I was making a plan and executing it and he wanted to make sure once I was at school that I was doing my best. You know? Bring home those A’s.

Hellrigel:

Opportunities and that. When you’re growing up did you have any part-time jobs as a kid or?

Brantley:

My first jobs were typical jobs: mowing grass around the neighborhood and things like that. The first job where I punched a clock was actually working in a pizza restaurant in the days before pizza delivery. So, it was actually a chain that still exists out in California called Straw Hat Pizza. They tried to expand.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I know that one.

Brantley:

Yes, they tried to expand east of the Mississippi. Didn’t make much progress. The owner bought out the brand, he relaunched it as Brickhouse Pizza, so I was a shift manager at eighteen, nineteen, and twenty at Brickhouse Pizza.

Hellrigel:

What town was that in?

Brantley:

That was Atlanta but it was in the suburbs east of Atlanta, an area called Redan. It is a typical suburban neighborhood. It was a typical shopping center with a grocery store and other odds and ends.

Hellrigel:

How’d you wind up at the pizza shop? It doesn’t sound like you have Italian ancestry.

Brantley:

It was close by, I liked pizza, and I didn’t really know what else to do. It was fun because back then people went to pizza places and hung out. The whole community, all your high school friends, a lot of people you know would actually show up. Wednesday nights the swim teams would show up and everybody would show up and it was a fun place to be. There were games and things to do, and I love pizza. If I had an ambition to go back to work, to be an entrepreneur, it would be to open up a pizza place.

Hellrigel:

Nothing wrong with that.

Brantley:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Yes, well I lived in California a bit, so I know Straw Hat and friends lived outside of Atlanta, so I know Brickhouse.

Brantley:

Oh, okay. Okay.

Hellrigel:

Your brother and your sisters, were they also expected to attend college?

Brantley:

Pretty much the same. One sister, actually two sisters. Lisa went to the University of Georgia and got her degree in finance. My little sister Amada started here in Washington, D.C. at George Washington [University] then she transferred to the University of Georgia and got a degree in accounting. My brother was into computers and IT. He got a couple of years at Kennesaw State which is just northwest of Atlanta. He didn’t finish his degree there because, like a lot of folks with a little bit of tech skills, he got a good job [Laughing]. He wanted to make money; he didn’t want to go to school.

Hellrigel:

No, that’s quite common. Also, IT jobs, for our generation, those were popping up. You used to go to like what was the equivalent of DeVry Tech or other schools for like a one-year program and they would --

Brantley:

No, I’m sorry to interrupt. I was just going to say that it wasn’t his career path though. I think after a year or two he decided he didn’t love it as much. He actually managed a gaming store for a number of years. Then he joined the Coast Guard and he actually put in enough years to say he had a career in the Coast Guard.

Hellrigel:

That’s cool.

Brantley:

Now he is living in Central Tennessee, and he rides his motorcycle in the mountains. That’s what he does for fun.

Hellrigel:

Oh. Keep that helmet on. [Laughing].

Brantley:

Yes, that’s right.

Hellrigel:

Have your sisters stayed in Georgia?

Brantley:

No. My eldest sister, Lisa, worked in Atlanta, got fed up with her career, sold everything, put all of her remaining belongings in a car, and spent a year traveling around the United States to find herself. She found herself in Oregon, Married an engineer from Hewlett Packard. Settled down at age forty, started a family and now she lives in Santa Barbara, California. My other sister, Amanda, married her high school sweetheart. His career took them to Oswego, Illinois. He works for one of the big delivery companies in management. She’s had three wonderful kids. My niece, a couple of nieces and nephews that are now college age and getting married.

Hellrigel:

Your family’s spread out.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

But I guess if your dad moved the family, like I’ve talked to many people and even my family after working around the U.S. I’ve come back. At one job they called me “Welcome Back Kotter.” [Laughter] I went to university, lived, and taught around the USA and then I came back to New Jersey. Then everyone in my immediate family is pretty much within twenty-five miles of each other, but your family’s spread out which is more what happened with our generation.

Brantley:

My father likes to tell the story. He bought a big RV, and mom and he would travel around the country, up to Alaska and all over the place.

Hellrigel:

Cool.

Brantley:

But he always tells people that he told us to move out, go far away so that he could have a place to stay when he was driving around.

Hellrigel:

Excellent idea.

Brantley:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

It made sense. Yes, well when you were growing up what would you consider, since you’re a historian, are there any influential historical events that frame you? People would ask like a generation or so before us would ask where were you when Pearl Harbor was attacked? Or like where were you when this big event happened? I’m just curious what are some historical events that stick in your mind?

Brantley:

There’s family history. So, there was a natural inclination. I was always fascinated by military history. When we would visit my Aunt Sadie, the schoolteacher, she had converted her porch into a reading room. She had the American Heritage History of the American Civil War. As a sixth grader or seventh grader, when we would visit, I would sit out on her porch and just look at that book which had all these wonderful pictures and maps and things. Probably as much as anything that made me really keen on history. Then you asked the question also what sort of big historical events where were you. I guess one that I always remember is when I was in elementary school. I think I was seventh grade at Springdale Elementary School in Macon, Georgia. I had a wonderful teacher, Mr. L. T. Hanna. It was an interesting school. They were trying to be innovative so for some reason I had the same teacher for three years, fifth, sixth and seventh grade.

Hellrigel:

Yes, to keep you as a cohort.

Brantley:

Yes. For a semester, rather than take history class, we sat and watched the Watergate Hearings on TV. I watched Sam Irvin and his eyebrow, and I watched Sam Nunn, the Georgia Senator, asked insightful questions and I listened to all the witnesses. You had that sense of watching history unfold. You didn’t necessarily know how important it was, but it was important enough that he made us sit and watch it. I always remember that. I guess the other thing that left an indelible impression on me was 9/11 (September 11, 2001). I was coming out of the subway, walking to the office and everybody was streaming out of the buildings downtown. We were at 1828 L Street. A lot of colleagues from the Mechanical Engineers were all crammed in a car coming out of the parking garage. I didn’t know what was going on because I had been on the Metro, and I didn’t have a cellphone back in those days. They told me what was going on. I went up in the office. We’re watching it on the TV, we’re watching the news unfold. We could see the smoke coming up from the Pentagon in the distance so we could look out our window and see. We couldn’t see the damage, but we could see the smoke. I don’t know if you’ve been in downtown D.C., particularly in the central business district, but you’re sort of on the flight path to Reagan International Airport.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

We were on the twelfth floor and so when the planes came down the Potomac River, before they would turn to the airport, they were coming straight at us, [laughing], at our building. We were watching TV and then all of a sudden there was an urgent report that there was another plane in the air. We were seeing planes come at our building and we all sort of panicked and we ran for the elevators, and we just left. It turned out it was just a normal plane. They’re trying to get them out of the air. The plane that they said was in the air was the one that went down in Pennsylvania. But at the time no one knew. We were all just scared to death and just evacuated the building as quickly as we could.

Hellrigel:

Did you get back home by taking the Metro or did you have to walk? What happened?

Brantley:

I had just gotten off the Metro a half hour, hour before. I knew it was running but when I got to the office everyone said the Metro was closed. So, I didn’t know what to do. I took a risk, and I went back to the Metro, and it was still running, and it got me home. I had a good friend who worked for the federal government who was also told the Metro wasn’t running and she walked eight miles to get home.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

Because you couldn’t get a cab. There was no Uber or Lyft.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

The streets were packed with people in their cars trying to desperately get out of town. So, she ended up walking all the way home.

Hellrigel:

While this is going through your brain, what did you think was going to happen?

Brantley:

I don’t know.

Hellrigel:

You knew the tower was hit by two planes at this point when you’re heading home?

Brantley:

Yes. Well, you wondered what was next. Then we immediately felt the consequences of that. I don’t want to say there was a shutdown but suddenly everything -- for example when I would go to work for the next several months, I had to walk three blocks from the Metro to the office, and I had to walk through two military checkpoints.

Hellrigel:

Exactly, yes.

Brantley:

With people with machine guns and, and Hummers, those big Jeep looking things. When I flew on an IEEE business trip, we went to Lafayette, Louisiana. This was later once they were allowing domestic flights. There were National Guardsmen with automatic weapons standing at all the security gates. When I flew to Mexico for the IEEE Board Series, I had to go through 12 different security screenings between the time I got out of my car at the airport to when they actually let me on the plane at the gate.

Hellrigel:

You’re flying through Dulles or?

Brantley:

No, this was flying back home from Mexico City.

Hellrigel:

Oh, from Mexico City.

Brantley:

In Mexico City at the gate. I’d been cleared twelve times. While we’re sitting in the lounge waiting to be boarded, a squad of Mexican soldiers with guns at the ready came into our lounge and basically had us line up and did a screening of all of us. I had a pocket watch, one of the old-fashioned pocket watches in my pocket. I had to pull it out and show it to him and he was very interested in my pocket watch and all of a sudden, I started thinking I’m not getting on my plane home.

Hellrigel:

Or they’re going to take it.

Brantley:

And God knows what’s going to happen here. These guys had big guns. Eventually he waved me through, but it was just an odd time. There was so much fear about what wasn’t known. At the same time, I had a friend who was working for the association that was responsible for all the oil pipelines in the United States. They were in a real quandary because those pipelines were exposed. Anyone could shoot at or throw a bomb at a pipeline. It wasn’t hard to get at them. The way that they provided security is they would fly airplanes at low altitude along the pipelines and look to see that everything was okay.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

But the FAA and Homeland, they didn’t have Homeland Security then, but whoever was responsible, they had prohibited all flights that were low altitude and that were not…

Hellrigel:

Commercial.

Brantley:

Yes, commercial on the register. On the FAA flight register. So, they couldn’t provide security for their pipelines. They were under legal mandate to provide security, but they couldn’t because their planes were getting chased out of the sky by military jets.

Hellrigel:

Grounded.

Brantley:

You know? It was just a crazy, crazy time. I recall going on a trip to Reagan National Airport. At the security gate they went through my bag and threw away my nail file and my nail clippers and anything that had metal. They just threw it in the trashcan. I took two steps and there was a gift shop there and I could buy anything that they threw away at the gift shop. I said this is crazy. Why are you doing this? They said, well, we have no authority over them. We can’t stop them from selling it to you. But you can’t come through this gate with it. [Chuckling].

Hellrigel:

Well, that’s interesting that they didn’t pull it from being sold because I know that, well in prison they’d call them shanks, but that on the flights that went down in Pennsylvania, the terrorists are supposed to just basically have had sharpened metal objects.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

You’re working at IEEE-USA at that point. How did 9/11 impact operations there? What was your response?

Brantley:

I guess the funniest thing -- and this also relates to a year or so before that, we had the anthrax scare.

Hellrigel:

Oh, right.

Brantley:

We mentioned that earlier. I had actually had volunteers who were visiting on Capitol Hill in the Hart Senate Office Building on floors where there was anthrax in the offices that came in the mail the day they were there.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

They came back to the office. I’m sitting there going, oh my god, have I got to close the office?

Hellrigel:

They may have been exposed?

Brantley:

What do I do? What do I do? Well, both of them were professionals. They worked for the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention). I figured if anyone knew what they were doing, they did. They thought it was safe to be in the office, so we didn’t do anything and fortunately we didn’t have any problems. Now, at some point we also were asked to implement a shelter in place policy with the idea that if we were in the office and something happened, we would be able to remain in the office for an extended period of time, thirty or sixty days. Yes, we worked through the process. I worked with IEEE Facilities. We bought plastic tarping so that we could isolate rooms and protect ourselves if we had to. We bought batteries. We bought tinned food. We bought all kinds of stuff. We stored it carefully away, and then eight years later we pulled it all out and threw it away.

Hellrigel:

Eight years later you threw it away. You didn’t have a lunch party?

Brantley:

No, no one wanted to touch [Laughing] that. This was tuna fish, eight-year-old tuna fish in the can and stuff like that.

Hellrigel:

Ready to eat meals.

Brantley:

Ready to eat, yes. Exactly.

Hellrigel:

Right, like the military.

Brantley:

Back then you didn’t have the choices that you would have now; the nice, prepackaged foods and just pop it in the microwave kind of stuff.

Hellrigel:

Did they do this at other IEEE offices? This would have been done at the IEEE offices in New York or Piscataway? I’d have to ask people.

Brantley:

Yes, I’m trying to remember.

Hellrigel:

I mean D.C.’s unique because you’re so close to all of those sites.

Brantley:

Our offices were in buildings that were shared by other entities, foreign embassies’ consulate offices and groups that were controversial. Groups that attracted attacks.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

At 1828, we had security shutdowns in the building on several occasions because of bomb threats and other things. We had a few at the current office. There are a couple of very political entities in the building like the Club for Growth and others that would get a lot of hate mail and a lot of threats. We had an incident. You may recall something that made the national news where there was a sniper in downtown D.C. who was dressing himself -- he would go up; he would shoot and then he would dress up as a woman and leave the buildings so no one would suspect him. Well, one of his bullets went through the glass of our conference room window.

Hellrigel:

Yes. That was the gentleman, they caught him and his son? Or is that a different sniper?

Brantley:

No, no, no, that was different. Where he was living and operating, in the YMCA that he went to, was the neighborhood that I lived in Silver Springs, [Maryland].

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

The bus driver on one of the routes that I rode was shot by him. The crazy thing was is that they were telling everyone to look out for a white panel van. Of course, he wasn’t in a white panel van.

Hellrigel:

No, that guy with his son, they were in a sedan that they had the trunk rigged.

Brantley:

Exactly. But the crazy thing is once they tell you to look out for a white panel van is when you realize how many white panel vans there are.

Hellrigel:

Yes, contractors, that was very common.

Brantley:

Exactly. Including a lot of people who lived in our neighborhood. [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Wow. Those are two historical events that you remembered.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I’m going to take a little bit of a different shift. Did you want to add anything about your childhood or growing up?

Brantley:

I’m not sure what to add. We lived and had a good life, and we were happy. They’ve always created opportunities for us. They’ve always looked after us. We’re at a point now where my father is eight-six years old, and my mother has passed away. We’re having to deal with those kind of issues, dementia and other things. So, it’s a very reflective time. It’s hard, too, because I was just down visiting, and the household is full of memories. I know in a couple of months that I’m going to have to figure out what to do with all those memories. You know? All those pictures and all that furniture and all the things that you accumulate. We’re in the process of trying to move him to assisted living.

Hellrigel:

Ah.

Brantley:

We’re having to plan what to do with all that history if you would [phonetic].

Hellrigel:

Right. Right. It’s always a stressful time but it’s also a bit overwhelming. Yes.

Brantley:

Fortunately, I’ve got my sisters and my brother helping. Even though we’re spread out we sort of back each other up.

Hellrigel:

You’re a team.

Brantley:

Yes.

Mercer University, legal profession, entry into engineering associations

Hellrigel:

A question. You’re going to go to college. You wind up at Mercer University in Atlanta. How did you choose that school?

Brantley:

[Laughing]. So, when you grow up in Macon, at the time that’s what I would call my formative years from 1st grade through junior high school but it’s still a fairly small town. It’s about 100,000 people. It did have a mall. But it had a limited horizon. It’s not like I had been anywhere. It’s not like I’d thought about going to an Ivy League school. I mean those things just weren’t on my horizon. So, I grew up in Macon. The main university in Macon is Mercer University.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

It’s actually a very good, highly rated, small liberal arts college. I just never thought about where else I might go. One of the things was that while I was still in junior high, our family moved to Atlanta. Mercer had a satellite campus in Atlanta called Mercer University in Atlanta. The advantage there was that I could live at home. I could save money while going to school and basically still get a liberal arts education. That’s what I did. It was a very small school. I think we had less than 1,000 students across all disciplines. But I thought it was a very good school. I thought I received an excellent education there. I studied political science. Early on I had been a Legal Explorer Scout, so I had always contemplated a career in law. I had neighbors who were lawyers. It seemed like a good profession. It was interesting to me. I always did debate in high school, so I liked the give and take of what lawyers do in terms of making a case for something. So, I went to school at Mercer and did my thing there. I decided I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in Georgia or sort of broaden my horizons. By that time, I wasn’t thinking so much about being a lawyer as I was fascinated with international things. I wanted to study international law and the place to do that was really in Washington. I had been accepted to the law schools in Georgia: University of Georgia and Mercer and others. I didn’t even apply. They sent me letters of acceptance. So, I could have stayed, and I could have made a great career in Georgia. I wouldn’t have been practicing international law, but I just didn’t --

Hellrigel:

One question.

Brantley:

Sure.

Hellrigel:

They sent you letters of acceptance based on your LSAT scores?

Brantley:

LSAT scores.

Hellrigel:

GPA.

Brantley:

And high school scores. Yes, GPA.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

I graduated from Mercer with honors in political science and I was a good student. Always worked hard for the grades. There was just… it was more interesting to think about the international stuff. I applied to Georgetown University. I applied to American University. I applied to Duke University just to have a third option. I actually liked Duke University and would have gone there except that the professor I wanted to study with whose textbook I had used in my undergraduate courses was going to be on sabbatical for three years. So, I would never take a class from him.

Hellrigel:

Who is this?

Brantley:

Ole Holsti was his name.

Hellrigel:

I’ll look him up. I was just curious.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

He made such an impact based on the book you used in [college] that you wanted to study with him, but he is so well known he’s going on sabbatical for three years.

Brantley:

Yes. Duke was a great school, beautiful campus. It had a good reputation as a law school. It was attractive but what was more attractive about Washington is both Georgetown and American had joint degrees. Both schools had strong foreign service-oriented programs: School of International Service [at American]. School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. They had law schools that had degrees that overlapped with the foreign, international programs. I could go study international law and have an entrée into foreign affairs, into foreign service, into working with the U.S. government, doing all kinds of interesting stuff. I actually contemplated at one point joining the JAG Corps. The Judge Advocate General of the Marine Corps, thinking I’d get to travel the world and be an international lawyer for the Marine Corps. Fortunately, I met my wife, and she talked me out of it. Georgetown did put me on a wait list. American University accepted me, so I went to American University. I got two degrees there. Got the law degree from the Washington College of Law and I got a master’s in law and international affairs from the American University School of International Service.

Hellrigel:

At this point you say, okay, JAG isn’t going to happen. You met your wife, and her name is?

Brantley:

Sandra Brantley, Sandy is how she goes by. She was from Baylor University in Texas. She came to Washington to go to law school. We met actually in graduate school in the master’s program.

Hellrigel:

So, was she a joint person, studying law and international affairs?

Brantley:

Yes, she was in the – Exactly. Exactly.

Hellrigel:

I guess at this point were the Secret Service and other agencies appealing? What are you going to do? What did you expect to do with your degrees? What were your aspirations?

Brantley:

Well, that leads to the story of how I ended up working for IEEE.

Hellrigel:

But wait. One thing, as an outsider, it was like, okay, that’s what an unexpected jump.

Brantley:

Exactly. So, here’s the story in a nutshell. The first thing I did was I interviewed; this was before I met my wife. I interviewed for international legal jobs in Atlanta thinking that I could go back to Atlanta to be close to family and I had several interviews. I had an offer from a firm that turned out they had it on their firm resume, but they actually didn’t do any international law.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing].

Brantley:

Yes, they did a case ten years ago, but they didn’t really have a practice.

Hellrigel:

Okay. So, they duped you.

Brantley:

Yes. I interviewed with another firm, actually one of the big firms, Alston and Bird. They had a partner take me out to lunch. At some point it became pretty obvious that it was a courtesy and that they weren’t really going to hire me. I figured well I’ll try to learn something from this then. I started asking him, well, why’d you interview me? He said, well, our senior partner, you both went to the same school, and he asked us as a courtesy to take you out to lunch. I laughed. I thought, well, at least they’ve heard of American University down here in Atlanta. Then he said, no, that was Mercer University [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

[Laughing]. So, the Atlanta hook (was what) got you the lunch.

Brantley:

Yes. Then I asked him, well, you know what I am looking for and what my aspiration is, so do you have any advice? He said, yes, go to work for the federal government, commit your malpractice there and then come back and apply here.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing].

Brantley:

That was his advice. At that point I gave up on Atlanta and I started looking around at opportunities in Washington. I interviewed as an analyst with the CIA. I interviewed with every federal agency that had any kind of international legal practice. You know the people who are responsible for admiralty law, just all kinds of interesting stuff. Interviewed for firms that did a combination of law and lobbying which was interesting. What I found was that being a graduate of American University and not having Law Review and top 10 percent GPA, that basically I was not making the cut.

Hellrigel:

Uh-oh.

Brantley:

Law firms in D.C. that do that serious kind of work have sort of a threshold that you have to have certain qualifications -- -- before they’ll even talk to you. Bottom line is really lots of no opportunity in Washington. I was still finishing up my master’s degree and one day I bounced a rent check. Didn’t realize my account was that low and I bounced a rent check and I said, well, I’ve got to make some money. So, I went to work for Choice for Temporaries, a basic temporary firm. They would take people with law degrees to do legal work, very basic legal work. It was very boring, and it wasn’t well paid but if you could type sixty words a minute, they could get you $12 an hour.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

I could type sixty words a minute. So, I went to work as a true temporary working for law firms and associations. I worked for the National Home Builders Association. I worked for the American Society of Heating and Refrigeration Engineers (ASHRAE).

Hellrigel:

Oh. Yes.

Brantley:

I worked for all kinds of different groups. I even worked for a legal headhunter which is where I found out all the requirements and rules and ways that law firms recruited and realized that unless I knew somebody, I wasn’t going to get hired at the type of firm that did the kind of work I wanted to do.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

Again, I had looked at federal government, but you know there’s like maybe five jobs in the federal government that actually do that, and they’re all filled with people from Harvard and Columbia. So, it was a reality check and I realized I needed to look and do something else. I actually interviewed with Henry Kissinger’s firm.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

They were a foreign affairs advisory firm. Entry level position, I was going to be responsible for running their Telex.

Hellrigel:

Oh, room, okay.

Brantley:

Room basically.

Hellrigel:

Info coming in and out.

Brantley:

All the information comes in and all of it goes back out. I had to make sure it got to the right people. They made me interview with about ten people that day and it was very stuffy, just very formal. I hated it. I hated the interview. They were very nice. It wasn’t that the interview went badly. It’s just I didn’t like it.

Hellrigel:

It’s not your path.

Brantley:

I walked out of the interview. Yes, I walked out of the interview, and I called the agency and said this just isn’t for me. But I’m really tired of having a new assignment with a different group every other day. Can you put me some place that I can stay for a while? They put me at the American Association of Engineering Societies.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

Where I became what they called a -- I forget my title. It was basically an administrative title. Working for their government relations professionals and supporting their volunteer operation. I was there for six months, and they really liked me, and they offered me a job. In another six months I was the Executive Assistant to the Executive Director and another six months I was the Acting Director of Government Relations.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I did a little deep dive. I checked your LinkedIn page.

Brantley:

The crazy thing though was, and I could tell you lots of AAES stories, but the executive director had sort of worn out his welcome with the board of directors which was all the executive directors of the member societies including Eric Herz [with IEEE] and Charles Belden, with the mechanical engineers. I used to joke that my job as executive assistant was to make them happy without bothering my executive director. So, every day I would get a call from Charles Belden and from Eric Herz with some issue they wanted me to work on or some message they wanted me to communicate. My job was to insulate the executive director from all those member executive directors. Which was fun. I was learning.

Hellrigel:

You were then like the screener of the interaction between Eric Herz at IEEE and your boss at AAES.

Brantley:

Yes. As I was doing government relations as well, I got to know the government relations staff of all the member societies. The mechanical engineers [ASME, American Society of Mechanical Engineers], the civil engineers [ASCE, American Society of Civil Engineers], and IEEE. I worked with them. We all worked together. We had a shared public policy agenda. We did testimonies and all kinds of neat stuff. My job was to sort of coordinate their collective efforts. They got to see me and Bill Herold who was the government relations manager for IEEE-USA had decided to leave. He was going to go work for a beltway bandit. The managing director, Leo Fanning…

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay, what does beltway bandit mean?

Brantley:

Companies that do work for federal agencies. Usually, the Department of Defense or the Department of Energy.

Hellrigel:

Oh, consultants or whatever?

Brantley:

Yes. So, if you think of companies like Mitre.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes, yes.

Brantley:

Also, SAIC. They are known colloquially as beltway bandits. Bandits because they’re getting paid from taxpayer dollars and they’re getting as much of it as they can. So, Bill was leaving, and Eric Herz asked him to help find someone to replace him. Bill knew me from AAES. I was about to lose my job at AAES anyway because they were getting a new executive director who’s bringing in his own director of government relations.

Hellrigel:

Oh, their group.

Brantley:

I was either going to get pushed back down or I was going to have to find a new job when Bill Herrold called me and said how’d you like to be the Manager of Technology Policy Activities for IEEE-USA? I said yes, sir, because I was about to get married, and I needed a job. [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Wow. So, this then is 1989.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

The networking didn’t have the connections to get in with the legal firms; however, your networks and diligence at the engineering societies got you in with IEEE.

Brantley:

Exactly. Even though it’s not international law or law per se, actually I’ve [been exposed to] a little bit of that over the years in my IEEE roles.

Hellrigel:

Definitely. Even though it’s got a domestic name, a lot of the policy that you’re dealing with is international.

Brantley:

It certainly has an international context.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

The other thing about me which I haven’t mentioned is my entire life I’ve been very interested in technology. Not to the point that I was going to go to become an engineer or a computer scientist, but I love science fiction, I love to think about how technology changes life. I love to think about what the future is going to look like. Working for IEEE sort of allowed me to slide right into that.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay, I’m going to…

Brantley:

I grew up reading Isaac Asimov. I grew up watching Star Trek and I was in love with speculative fiction. Every paperback I could pick up I read. Every magazine --

Hellrigel:

So, you’re a good point person then for when we get these questions like where you see such and such in ten years.

Brantley:

If I could do anything and get paid for it, for fun, apart from making pizza, it would be to be a futurist.

Hellrigel:

You’re reading Isaac Asimov and who else are you reading? If you’re a sci-fi…?

Brantley:

Larry Niven, and…I’ve got a bookshelf downstairs where I’ve curated my favorites. I’ve given away so many over the years. Also, I read a lot of fantasy, fantasy fiction, Lord of the Rings type fiction. Tolkien and authors like that.

Hellrigel:

Have you read, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward?

Brantley:

I haven’t read his books. I’ve read some of his short stories.

Hellrigel:

Oh, I’ll send you the link. It’s interesting. I’ve used it in my history of technology classes at university. He thought about going forward into a cashless economy and people would buy on cards. It’s a short read. It’s a short novel. It’s considered one of the early science fiction novels, and to me it was realistic because it also reflected what’s going on in the United States in the late 1880s. From my perspective as a historian, I am intrigued by how he is trying to talk about society in the midst of this whole industrial growth and what the future holds. Electrification is a big to-do in that book.

Brantley:

When you have looked at a field for thirty years and you can see the trends, you can see how the electronic calculator changed the engineering profession. You can see how computers changed everything, changed society. Personal computing. The internet. You can see how it’s changed culture. Now it’s fascinating to think about what AI, artificial intelligence, is going to do. One of the intersections -- I had that legal training, and I was getting my technology fix from IEEE, and I needed to have my legal fix, too. So, for eighteen years, I forget exactly how many years, I was an adjunct professor at the Washington College of Law, and I taught international law, international organizations, and I taught law in technology. So, I got to indulge. I got to dabble in all the things that were interesting to me.

Hellrigel:

We’ll take a sidestep. To be an adjunct? Did they approach you or you just saw an ad and applied?

Brantley:

There’s a first-year course taught to all law students called Legal Methods where they teach you sort of basic legal analytical research and other skills. They use practitioners to teach those courses. They’re small courses, ten or fifteen people in a class so they need a lot of them. It was relatively easy for both me and my wife to get positions as adjunct professors teaching Legal Methods. After I taught Legal Methods for four years, my former housemate and friend that I mentioned earlier, and I put together a curriculum for a course on international organizations. We were both graduates of Washington College of Law which at the time was rated number in the four, actually rated number three of the top four law schools in the United States for international law. It had a great curriculum, had great professors. But it had a hole in its curriculum which is no one actually looked at international courts and the practice in international courts.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay.

Brantley:

Even though that was not something that we did, we were able to put together a curriculum to teach that. We pitched it to the faculty committee that’s responsible for curriculum.

Hellrigel:

Right, the curriculum committee.

Brantley:

Curriculum Committee. They approved it. It became popular because [Laughing] it was a paper course. You had to write a paper that met the law schools’ requirement for an upper-level writing requirement. That was thirty pages with no notes, before notes, research paper. The regular professors hated grading papers. So, they loved that they had courses like mine where us adjuncts would have to actually grade papers.

Hellrigel:

The students liked it because it was a topic of their interest.

Brantley:

Exactly.

Hellrigel:

Like I don’t know, “an elective”.

Brantley:

Yes, exactly.

Hellrigel:

A topic.

Brantley:

Exactly.

Hellrigel:

But the requirement, the writing requirement. I’ve taught many of those courses. It was required so they got to explore a topic they were interested in and get rid of a requirement.

Brantley:

Exactly. Because it was positioned as an upper-level elective it satisfied the requirements for both the regular juris doctorate degree and also the master’s degrees.

Hellrigel:

Yes. So, you were in both schools.

Brantley:

We had a lot of master’s students in my classes. If you’ll allow me to go down the rabbit hole just a little bit further.

Hellrigel:

Yes, sir.

Brantley:

Some of the most rewarding. I loved my work at IEEE, but that was some of the most rewarding work I’ve done in my life. Many of my students were non-U.S. students. They were from the Ministry of Justice of Brazil. They were supreme court justices from Mongolia.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

They were admirals from the U.S. Navy. When we talked about issues in the classroom, they weren’t theoretical issues. They were real life issues that they were having to deal with. Probably my proudest moment was we had an Army colonel, a woman, and I forgot, I apologize, I’ve forgotten her name, who was responsible for organizing the prosecutions of the Taliban and others that were seized and taken to Guantanamo Bay.

Hellrigel:

Oh, oh, my gosh.

Brantley:

They wanted to put them on trial, but they had to put them on trial not under U.S. domestic law but under the minimum requirements of international law. So, the question was what are the minimum requirements of international, customary international law. It’s not written down. There’s no code book. They can’t. It’s based on the practice of states. She was a student in our class to try to figure it out.

Hellrigel:

How to do it.

Brantley:

For us to teach her the methodology. How do you find out what customary international law is? She took the knowledge that we gave her. She went back, engaged the Department of Defense, the Department of State, every embassy in the United States in the world. They hired local counsel, they collected all the local practice, they condensed it. They put it in a humongous spreadsheet. They defined all the rights. Not everyone did it the same way. They defined what the most common practices were. They created a roadmap for customary international law for international criminal prosecutions

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

It was the most amazing piece of research I’ve ever seen. Then they classified it so she couldn’t publish it.

Hellrigel:

But how long did that take for her?

Brantley:

It took her about two years.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

They used it and then she left and went to work for one of the international courts in Africa.

Hellrigel:

Right, because as a lay person, not someone who’s taught a little bit of legal history, but not a lawyer, you always think, oh, the international courts, The Hague or war criminals, the Nuremburg Trials, everything is set up, but people don’t understand as the world becomes more complex what was “the standard” doesn’t quite fit. A crime committed on one location, it’s so many different moving pieces.

Brantley:

What was really cool also is that I could take the issues I was working on at IEEE and I could bring them into the classroom. A quick example is an electric vehicle that is self-driving. If it is able to sense its environment and make decisions, you can also program it to make legally significant social choices like you’re going to run over a group of school kids or an elderly person. What do you do? [Laughing] Who do you run over? [Laughing]

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

Then you talk about how the technology could be used. If the sensor on the car senses that it’s going to collide and it can make a choice, what information does it use? What information can it obtain?

Hellrigel:

The information to make the choice. For example, if the autonomous car can drive into a ditch and injure the driver, should it do that versus whacking a school bus?

Brantley:

Exactly. Understanding that it may only be fractions of a second in which it has to make these decisions, but it’s still internet connected, what if it found out that you hadn’t paid your child support or that you had a criminal record or that you haven’t paid your taxes, would that move you up on the list of targets to be run over?

Hellrigel:

Oh, oh, yes. Or disposable and that gets into your science fiction realm.

Brantley:

Exactly. So, you could spin out all kinds of wonderful legal hypotheticals and use the technology to have fun teaching law. Which is, again, part of what kept me interested in doing it for so many years.

Hellrigel:

It prioritizes info in versus info out, like AI suddenly suggested why do I use a human to transcribe and it’s because there isn’t an AI package that is good as a human at this point for what I need to do.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Three to six-hour discussions that we’re because it’s info in and info out. So, people that I talk to at IEEE that do speech recognition, they understand the limitations of it. But others that know just enough they’ll start an argument. No, it’s good enough. I was like, not really. For example, Webex, I say I work at I Triple E. It has me in Tripoli, no matter how I enunciate.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Things. That’s just one thing but when you get to all these acronyms that we use and then titles of things and different brogues. But AI is fascinating. I think that not even a generation or a cohort of a generation, the what if… people thought that the riding on a railroad would rattle your bones and kill you.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Back in the day. What are the social implications? Have you had any relationship with the Society for the Social Implications of Technology at IEEE?

Brantley:

Over the years with IEEE-USA, we’ve cosponsored meetings and events. We worked with them on an ethics conference which now they sort of run. I found them to be a very interesting group of folks. I like people who think about the future or try to understand, again, the social implications of the technologies. I guess why I’m hedging is that they tend to be very academic and when you have to deal with technology and policy in the real world it’s often very concrete. It’s kind of hard to get them to focus on the concrete sometimes.

Hellrigel:

Right. An example of that in the real world, what I taught at university, I was often put on business school curriculums because one of my fields is history of economics and business. I’m at this seminar and someone from Verizon is giving it and they’re just really frustrated that the public expects them to have these seamless telephone calls. Then I said, well, I’m going to raise my paw now. I’m not the engineer. I’m not the MBA. But I just watched your commercial and you’re selling them for X number of dollars, a plan that you claim interconnects them, and you show them the map, interconnects them all over the United States and can you hear me now. I said personally, I could tell you that your cellphone coverage in Wyoming stinks.

Brantley:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Because I’ve been there, and you can’t hear anyone from there. I said do you understand that you’re trying to hook them with this ad that you’re selling Product Y for X dollars and they feel gypped if they don’t get that. They’re looking at me. It brings me back to my early electric light research. Do you know what are you selling electric light as? What are you selling? You talked about the self-driving automobile. What are you selling, and what could it do? The public is sold one bill of goods as a product but, yes, you want to get them as a customer so it’s the chasing the tail example.

Brantley:

Yes, exactly. I’ll give you an example of a story I tell often about the difficulty of getting down to brass tacks and doing the things you need to do to be effective and to have a voice in Washington. There’s a small office in the Department of Energy that funds research related to electric transmission and it was funding research on electromagnetics and all kinds of interesting areas, looking to build what they call the grid of the future, back in the day. What we now think of as the smart grid.

Brantley:

Anyway. We wanted to give a testimony to the appropriators in Congress basically saying you need to give them more money. Real simple message, right? They’re doing great work.

Hellrigel:

So, they need more funding.

Brantley:

We need it. You know? Let’s give them more money. In the testimony that was drafted, and I think I did a first draft and then the committee sort of worked with it a little bit, we listed some of the fields that they were doing research in. One of them was, and I may get this wrong, but I believe it’s magnetohydrodynamicis.

Hellrigel:

Magnetics and water.

Brantley:

Yes. The committee resolved that no one on Capitol Hill is going to know what that is. So, we need to put a footnote in and explain what it is. Now you have to understand I had a two-week deadline to get this testimony done, approved and submitted. We spent six months arguing over the wording of the definition of hydro, magnetohydrodynamics in the footnote.

Hellrigel:

Six months.

Brantley:

Six months. We never submitted the testimony. We missed our window, but they wouldn’t drop it because they got their teeth in it and they wanted to figure out a way to explain magnetohydrodynamics to a lay audience.

Hellrigel:

Who may have read the document.

Brantley:

I was just standing there shaking my head, you know? It’s like what can I do?

Starting at IEEE

Hellrigel:

Well, that brings us to your jump and you’re going to join IEEE in 1989. You’re going to take this job. When do you become a member of IEEE? Membership member?

Brantley:

Yes, I didn’t become a member until I was promoted to managing director.

Hellrigel:

Around 2004, you become an IEEE member.

Brantley:

Yes. Exactly. About a month after I got promoted, I got a phone call from one of my favorite volunteers, a gentleman named Marc Apter who you may know.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes.

Brantley:

Marc Apter is very active. He sits on the Senior Member Committee and he’s very involved in that kind of stuff. Back at that time IEEE apparently had a policy that managing directors of all the organizational units had to be IEEE members. I wasn’t. In his volunteer role, somehow that came to Marc’s attention, and he called me one day and he said you’re not eligible for your job. [Laughing]. That’s quote. [Laughing]. I said “what?” Then he explained, well, you’re not a member. You’re not eligible for the job. It violated IEEE policy. And I said, oops, well I guess I have to become a member. Then he proceeded to help me become a member which was a bit of a challenge because I didn’t have an engineering degree. I didn’t have a technical background. I was a lawyer. IEEE’s membership criteria were a little bit tighter back in those days. So, I worked with Marc and wrote up an application that emphasized that my legal and government relations work related to technology and blah, blah, blah. They approved it. I’m not sure if anyone looked the other way when they approved it. I became a member and was a member long enough to become a senior member.

Hellrigel:

That’s an interesting point. About three months ago, someone in Educational Activity said to me, well, aren’t you a member. I said, well, as a historian I never even thought of it because back when I started to get involved with IEEE as a graduate student, they funded my dissertation, the Life Members. But I don’t think I was eligible.

Brantley:

Well, yes, that’s always the issue. Nowadays, eligibility is much broader. Really anyone could be a member now, but most members don’t understand that. They still think there’s a more rigid set of criteria. No, it was interesting. Not that being a member necessarily changed, I was still doing my staff job, but it does change your perspective on things because now you’re sitting at the table, and you have a membership interest and you can speak from a membership perspective as well as from a personal perspective.

Hellrigel:

Did you sometimes have to say, well, I’m speaking as an IEEE member, Chris, not an IEEE-USA employee?

Brantley:

Yes. I always found a way to say it without having to give a formal disclaimer. I’d remind them that I was a member and as a member I hate to have to pay that or I, or as a member I want to know what I’m getting for my money. You know, those kinds of conversations.

Hellrigel:

When you become a member of IEEE then you also have to become a member of IEEE-USA? Or is that an automatic link or do you pay $10 bucks and…?

Brantley:

Well, here’s the trivia is that IEEE-USA technically doesn’t have members.

Hellrigel:

That’s weird.

Brantley:

Yes, we serve IEEE’s members residing in the U.S. in Regions 1 through 6 which is in and of itself crazy because there are IEEE members residing in the U.S. who are not in Regions 1 to 6 and there are non-U.S. members residing in Regions 1 to 6. Like Canadians and Jamaicans and others. So, it isn’t very clean, but the membership and the membership structure that is under the purview of the Member and Geographic Activities Board, MGA. The Sections and the Chapters and the Student Branches, IEEE-USA provides support and services, but we don’t govern any of that. We’re not responsible for membership. We do receive a mandatory assessment of the U.S. members residing in Regions 1 to 6.

Hellrigel:

So, by mandatory assessment that means that you’re an IEEE member in Regions 1 through 6, so you automatically have to pay X number of dollars and it goes to IEEE-USA?

Brantley:

Yes, it’s not dissimilar to the money you would pay to your Region.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

So, I’m in Region 2, I pay to Region 2. Or I live in Canada, I pay -- by the way a lot of people don’t realize that IEEE Region 7 is also IEEE Canada.

Hellrigel:

Exactly.

Brantley:

Yes. They have a president, not just a Regional Director. They have a President who is a Regional Director. So, there’s a lot of politics built into IEEE’s organization. I’d be tickled to talk about that at some point if you want to, but it creates a very interesting political environment in which to operate.

Hellrigel:

Well, we can do that with part two or your oral history.

Brantley:

Okay.

Hellrigel:

If we can because, yes, just writing IEEE history, I know that the creation of IEEE-USA comes at a time when the engineering profession and certain members in the United States feel that they need a national voice.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I guess one question and then we’ll jump into your work with IEEE-USA. I guess the good thing about you getting this job with IEEE-USA is you don’t have to relocate. You know some of the players already. You get to continue doing what you were doing to some extent at American Association of Engineering Societies. What’s it like then to take this job? You’re starting this career now which is going to last almost thirty-five years with IEEE-USA

Brantley:

I’ll try to give you a couple of anecdotes or stories. So, the day I started work at IEEE, you have to understand, I had been working as a temporary and I’d been working at AAES and back in the day we had WordStar computers where they were all everyone had a WordStar computer. Everyone used Word Perfect software, or they used VisiCalc spreadsheets. One of the things my father did for the kids when we were in high school is he got us an Apple II computer. So, we grew up computer literate even though personal computing still wasn’t really a thing yet for most folks. So, I was very into computers. When I came to work for IEEE, I thought, wow, this is going to be great. I don’t even know what brand computer it was. KayPro, I think. It was the size of a suitcase. It had a floppy disk that was literally like a 12-inch floppy disk. It used some sort of software that I still don’t know the name of that treated every page as a separate document. If you were typing a five-page testimony and you added a couple of extra words on the first page, then you had to totally redo the second, third, fourth, and fifth pages. Cut and paste and move text. It was crazy. I couldn’t believe that IEEE was so far behind the curve. Then the next thing I was introduced to -- this was in the days when America Online was first starting up. The internet was first hot. People were starting to know what it was. We didn’t have the internet. What we had was something that had been developed in the Computer Society called COMP mail.

Hellrigel:

C-O-M-P?

Brantley:

C-O-M-P. COMP Mail, short for Computer Mail. It worked sort of like the internet. If you’ve ever worked with a browser, an internet software client called Pine, that was about the quality of the tool we had to communicate with. You really couldn’t communicate outside of IEEE because no one else had a COMP Mail address. It was only internal.

Hellrigel:

So, it was an intranet.

Brantley:

Basically. There were a few volunteers in the societies, particularly the [IEEE] Computer Society that had it. So, you could talk to some of your volunteers, but you couldn’t talk to all of them. You could talk to other staff. Our boss at the time, Leo Fanning, who’s just an old-school kind of guy, didn’t really understand or trust the internet, didn’t understand or trust email. He had it set up so that he had to review every email before you sent it. [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Oh my gosh.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Did that mean that his secretary had to do it, or he personally did it?

Brantley:

I think the way it happened was that when you drafted it, he could see it and then he would tell you it was okay to send.

Hellrigel:

Oh my gosh. I found this form, IEEE-USA staff executives. It was really good, and it has everybody’s mugshot. So, I have Leo Fanning’s [photograph]. He looks a little bit like a Richard Nixon.

Brantley:

Leo was a character.

Hellrigel:

It looks like Richard Nixon’s mugshot of that era.

Brantley:

Yes, Leo was a character.

Hellrigel:

From 1979 to 1994, wow.

Brantley:

Yes. I’ll say two things about Leo. First of all, like I said, he was an old-school kind of guy. He at one point in his life he had been a shotgun escort on an Alaskan mine payroll chest.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

So, when they would ride the payroll chest out to the mine, he would sit shotgun next to the driver on the wagon. He had spent most of his career before he joined IEEE working for, and I’m forgetting the name of the organization where people volunteer to do stuff overseas.

Hellrigel:

Peace Corps.

Brantley:

He spent a lot of his life working in the Peace Corps. Then he came to work for IEEE. He was also a Jehovah’s Witness. He was very strict in the office. We couldn’t put up Christmas cards on our desk. When we had Christmas parties, we couldn’t have a Christmas tree. But he was a straight shooter, and he was fair and honest, and I had a great respect for him, but he was just a bit of a character.

Hellrigel:

He was the director for fifteen years. Wow

Brantley:

Yes. Then Tom Suttle replaced him, and Tom was a wonderful person. He created opportunities for me. He allowed me to advance to become a manager of my own government affairs piece of IEEE-USA, then promoted me director, responsible for all of it, and then he gave me operational responsibilities, so I got to work with the board of directors and got to understand budgeting and governance. Then ultimately when he retired, I was able to step up and take that position.

Hellrigel:

When he retired, he just was leaving the workforce?

Brantley:

Yes, I believe he had some health issues and he had started his career in the Air Force and so he had a pension, and everything all squared away. He was one of those guys who was going to retire as early as he could and enjoy his life.

Hellrigel:

I’m going to go back to ask you: Ralph Clark, head of IEEE Washington office, 1973 to 1976, did you ever meet him?

Brantley:

I knew of him, but I never actually met him.

Hellrigel:

Then John Kinn?

Brantley:

Yes. He was, I think, the very first year or so. I never met him. [I believe he worked in IEEE Educational Activities.] There’s also a long tradition of IEEE of volunteers taking on staff roles. One of the best gentlemen I ever worked with was Bob Walleigh. I don’t know if you -- he supported the managing director but when he retired, I took over his operational roles. He had been very involved in IEEE while working at the National Bureau of Standards: what became the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

If you’re aware of that big -- two quick stories about Bob Walleigh. During World War II, he was the guy who was responsible for the logistics and organizing the planning and the construction of the Trans-Alaska Highway for national defense purposes. Later he went to work for the National Bureau of Standards. When they built that beautiful, big campus out in Gaithersburg, Maryland, he was responsible for overseeing the planning and construction. But he was also a very active IEEE volunteer and so active that they actually hired him to help with [IEEE-USA] governance. When he stepped down, Tom needed someone to take on that role and that’s when I added Operations to my job title.

Hellrigel:

I’ve heard of him before. It could have been from just reading about the Trans-Alaska Highway.

Brantley:

Yes, a wonderful man, wonderful man.

Hellrigel:

A friend’s parents both worked in Alaska during World War II and his father worked on the highway. His mom was more clerical. Yes. When I see road construction, when you look at that project and how quickly it was done. It is just monumental. So, you join up and the computers are…

Brantley:

Yes, not up to snuff. We got them up to snuff.

Hellrigel:

What’s your first job? What are you doing when you first start?

Brantley:

The first week I sat at my computer just trying to figure out how to make it work and do what I needed it to do. At that point in time, government relations in Washington were different because it was pre-internet days. What I did is I worked with committees of volunteers who had had an issue or issues that were their jurisdiction whether it was energy or research and development, civilian research and development, defense research and development, aerospace, or intellectual property. What my job was is to help them understand what the legislation that was going on that affected those issues and those interests and what the needs were, what legislators were concerned about, what they needed to understand, what they wanted: problems that they wanted solutions to. Then I would bring that to these volunteers who had this technical expertise. I would try to capture their knowledge and put it into a form that we could communicate. Sometimes that meant going on a visit, taking them up to Capitol Hill. Sometimes it meant writing a testimony. Sometimes it meant drafting a comment on a federal regulation. Sometimes it meant organizing a briefing or a conference where they would get in the room and our people would get in the room and talk at each other: whatever was needed for the particular issue and under the time constraints that Congress and the Executive Branch work under.

Hellrigel:

Okay. They’re scheduling. So, you were the liaison between IEEE members that thought they needed to bring something to the attention of Congress and then you also had to bring things going on in Congress to attention to them.

Brantley:

It really cut both ways. So, a lot of the issues were things our members were concerned about, they wanted Congress to be concerned about. On the other hand, there were a lot of --

Hellrigel:

What are some of those issues?

Brantley:

Yes, a lot of the other ones were issues that Congress was concerned about like do cellphones cause cancer.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

Pardon me, I’ve got workmen in the house, and I hear someone knocking at the door

Hellrigel:

Let’s take a break.

Brantley:

Yes, pardon me for just five minutes.

Hellrigel:

No problem. Take your time, sir.

[No conversation.]

Brantley:

Apologies, it was a bit of a false alarm. They were banging in some new studs. I thought they were knocking at the door.

Hellrigel:

I wish you well on the repairs.

Brantley:

Yes, I had water in the basement, and they had to dig out the foundation inside the house, put in a second sump pump.

Hellrigel:

A French drain?

Brantley:

Yes. Now this is what they call “put back”, trying to get it back the way it was.

Hellrigel:

Oh, good luck, Sir. Yes, I lived in a place that’s become more of a flood plain and the first thing I did was install a sump pump because I was tired of the shop vac.

Brantley:

Yes. Well, I can tell you from personal experience, no one really thinks about sump pumps. They tend to break down at the worst possible time. Most houses are built with sump pumps that are only good for about eight or ten years.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I have to check mine and actually a friend recommended I have a spare sump pump like in the garage.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

In case it dies and knock wood, I haven’t had any, any issues lately but right behind my house is a creek that goes to the Passaic River.

Brantley:

[Laughter] Now you can get a sump pump, there are heavier duty sump pumps that will last you twenty, thirty years. But it’s one of those things. It was buried under the carpet. I never thought about it until there’s water in my basement. I have a nice, finished basement. My gaming room and everything so that’s a mess.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes. I don’t have a finished basement. In my neighborhood, we have these little Cape Cod style homes, and most people have finished basements. I said I don’t give a flea’s butt; we live in a flood zone.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

My basement is really a boxed-up library. I no longer have an office, I have 1,500 books or so, but no where to put them.

Brantley:

Oh.

Hellrigel:

The books are all in plastic boxes. A couple of pieces of family sentimental furniture that I still have are also in the basement, so I have some workspace. So, it’s been dry enough but people down the road that did get flooded out and they keep putting down carpet, tiling and paneling. In my brain, I keep saying stop the madness.

Brantley:

Well really going down the rabbit hole with you I’m afraid.

I spent a lot of time talking to the gentleman who I guess organized the work for me and spent a lot of time doing research as well. When they build the houses, they build a drainage field on the exterior of the house. Houses that have basements are also built with what they call a floating floor. Underneath, this is construction. So, the idea is that the area underneath the floor is a drainage field. It’s full of gravel and other things and then the floor sits on top. Then you’ve got a drainage field around the outside of the house, but the problem is the drainage field outside of the house silts up. It pretty much stops working after about eight or ten years. Then you’re relying on the sump pump to pull all the water that is accumulating underneath your floor.

Brantley:

If the sump pump breaks down and the water pressure builds up, then you get what they call hydrostatic pressure that literally forces the water through. First it goes through any crack or hole but then eventually it actually forces its way through the concrete itself because concrete is semi-porous.

Hellrigel:

Exactly. That’s what happened. My house was built in 1957. Before I put the sump pump in and did some work outside, I was telling people that it’s coming up through the concrete and they were like you’re the village idiot. I’m like no, it’s coming up through the concrete. Yes, I’m not the village idiot but the other deal is, too, that settlement happened.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Then it brings me back… water main breaks or in the old towns in Jersey but also underground electrical lines and such. It always goes back to IEEE but the underground infrastructure and with drainage and seepage and shifting of things, the engineers try to figure out what might happen, the what ifs, but you can’t always figure that going forward.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

So that’s a challenge. But I wish you well. It’s also one of the challenges of modernizing.

Hellrigel:

For example, you’re working at IEEE-USA. It’s rented office space but when you have to reconfigure the office and you’re there when they’re bringing in more computers and internet how do you run it? Do you stick it [the wires and cables] under the carpet?

Brantley:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Do you hang it through the ceiling?

Brantley:

Is the wire too close to the lighting and it gets an electromagnetic interference?

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

Yes, it’s crazy.

IEEE volunteers, IEEE-USA and Washington

Hellrigel:

Right. The other challenge, too, is dealing with rental space. Eventually you’re going to become the grand poohbah so all these problems will roll to your desk. You have rental space of how much change can you do to it and those challenges. But you’re starting and you seem to like policy, you’re feeling comfortable working at IEEE with these policy projects. Who are some of the IEEE volunteers you worked with most closely? If you could name a couple of people? That’s hard. That’s a long time ago.

Brantley:

There are literally hundreds. Literally hundreds. Maybe realistically thousands. Many of them [Laughing]… many of them who are on committees the day I started thirty-four years ago are still on those committees. Wonderful people but you know it’s been thirty years since they were active in the field. But, no, they’re… I mentioned Marc Apter.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

See, part of the trouble is as managing director I worked with so many boards of directors and presidents that I could reel off those names or I could talk to you about some of the volunteers I worked with on committees who were actually working on some of the policy issues. [Laughing] Or I can bridge the gap because a lot of those volunteers went into the governance, people like Gordon Day and Ned Sauthoff were outstanding folks that climbed that IEEE ladder and who had tremendous professional credentials. It ended up with Jim Jeffries being IEEE president.

Hellrigel:

Oh, right.

Brantley:

Gordon Day, IEEE President. Ned Sauthoff, he was at Princeton University. He became head of the [U.S. program office for] ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, this big, global attempt to create fusion. He was the U.S. representative for that program. He was also my vice president and my president. He was a great guy to work with. I worked with some outstanding women leaders over the years as well and volunteers as well. People like Candy Robinson who ran the Skunkworks that created the F-35 airplane for the Department of Defense. Evelyn Hirt who works at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory. One of my early presidents, LeEarl Bryant from Texas, was a sort of a controversial figure. She ran for U.S. Congress. She didn’t win, but she actually put in a pretty good [campaign].

Hellrigel:

What is her first name?

Brantley:

LeEarl was very controversial because she was very proactive on the H-1B issue at a time when IEEE really didn’t want us working on the H-1B issue. I actually took her up to Capitol Hill once and she stood at the Capitol South Metro Station and handed out fliers to Congressional staffers coming to work explaining why the H-1B was a problem.

Hellrigel:

So, she was against it.

Brantley:

Well, the organization was and personally she supported that position.

Hellrigel:

So, she wanted to limit the H-1B visas. That’s probably one of the issues that really is between and betwixt. It was one of the very important policy issues because in the 1970s from my understanding and personal family history is that defense contracting and jobs… so engineering jobs start to constrict, the economy in the U.S.is getting a bit problematic and so one of the issues is American jobs for Americans, if I have the correct terminology. It was one of the very important policy issues because in the 1970s from my understanding and personal family history is that defense contracting and jobs… so engineering jobs start to constrict, the economy in the U.S.is getting a bit problematic and so one of the issues is American jobs for Americans, if I have the correct terminology.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

So, H-1B visas and bringing in international people, maybe paying them less, working them more were seen by some engineers as taking jobs, eroding working standards, and eroding salaries.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Bryant wants to stop those visas?

Brantley:

Yes, [stop efforts to expand the visa quotas]. We could have a whole session just on the evolution of the H-1-B and advocacy and how that issue has evolved. I want to make a different point.

Hellrigel:

Yes, sir.

Brantley:

Which is that that issue is a perfect example of what I would call a controversial issue in IEEE. It pits the interests of working engineers versus the interests of management and corporations.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

It pits the interests of U.S. engineers versus the interests of Indian engineers or engineers coming from other countries that want to work under the H-1-B. It was very uncomfortable for the IEEE board because they were getting that feedback from all directions. We were sort of the underdog. We were championing the rights of U.S. engineers, but other people didn’t necessarily agree, or I guess another way of putting it was whether they agreed or not they just didn’t think IEEE should be doing that kind of controversial stuff. Because we’re a learned organization. We’re not a lobbying organization.

Hellrigel:

That brings you back to the whole creation of first the committee and such that IEEE members are bringing issues to IEEE corporate. I don’t know what phrases to use. They’re saying these are some of our concerns and corporate is saying but we’re a nonprofit, we can’t lobby. We’re global. Oh my. We’re trying to get more global. Oh my gosh.

Brantley:

By the way, nonprofits can lobby. That’s just a little fiction that they tell to try to stop us from lobbying.

Hellrigel:

But wasn’t that what people were saying though?

Brantley:

Oh, of course, of course. They believed it because they’d been told it over and over and over again but it’s not true. Nonprofits can lobby. There are just rules that they have to follow.

Hellrigel:

Okay. But IEEE corporate didn’t want to go down that slippery slope. At that point they are outsourcing their legal work, we don’t get a legal department or called compliance now so it’s all outsourced. I know there was concern about prices for consulting for legal and such a decade or so ago.

Brantley:

Yes. So, if I could, let me take a step back just because I think H-1B is a very important issue that illustrates one of the big challenges that IEEE has. But it’s not the only one. If you go back to the very foundation of IEEE-USAC., the predecessor to U.S.A., that arose out of the merger of the two societies that created IEEE. One was very technical; one was very professional in their orientation. They were geographically organized into Sections and Chapters. They built an organization that accommodated both groups. They created a balance between the technical and the professional. At first, none of the professional was built into the constitution and the bylaws. The two organizations that came together, that large constituency that wanted more emphasis on that, fought to change the constitution and bylaws to add professional to the purposes of IEEE in the constitution. Even if you look at the constitution there’s long paragraphs of the types of things they expected IEEE to do, to do salary surveys and things of that nature.

Brantley:

They are very important rules and restrictions. We are not a labor union. We can’t collectively bargain. We have to be careful how we do things. We can do a salary survey, but it has to be done in a certain way otherwise it can take on certain legal complications. If you’re using today’s information and sharing it, then it’s a bit of an industry collusion which is against the law.

Hellrigel:

Is this like insider information or something?

Brantley:

Insider, I forget the exact legal phrase. But there are ways you can do things. But the issue that created IEEE-USA was number one this desire to focus on the wellbeing of the profession and the needs of working engineers. That was in education, that was in policy, and that was in just all kinds of other types of engagement, mentoring and all that kind of stuff. So, they wanted those type of programs and the organization at the time was pretty much mostly technical. So, they created this new entity. The issue that mobilized the U.S. membership at the time was highly controversial. It was portable pensions. Companies hated portable pensions because that meant your workers could leave you.

Hellrigel:

Right. One step back. You have the merger in 1963 between the AIEE and the IRE, so the AIEE would you see as technical, and the IRE is the professional?

Brantley:

I believe that was how it broke down although I wasn’t there at the time and someone with more history on that could probably explain it better.

Hellrigel:

Right and the IRE was more global.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

AIEE was US-centric.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

That reminds me of that issue. I don’t know if it’s a rabbit hole or what but there was that guy by the name of Feerst?

Brantley:

Irwin Feerst.

Hellrigel:

Was he?

Brantley:

Yes, a well-known IEEE figure.

Hellrigel:

These are some of the issues that he talked about. Not to make it about him but some people see him either as a heroic I don’t know… not a shooting star – but like bringing this up and then others call him, and I quote, “a gadfly”. Like a pain in the butt. But these are some of the issues that the pensions were… yes.

Brantley:

Another big issue at the time and again this was one that pit workers against companies was at that time a very large proportion of our U.S. members were employed in the defense sector working for big companies. What the practice in the defense sector at the time was: when you lost your contract to do something with the federal government, your division that actually did the work got bought out and moved over to the company that got the federal contract. So, you could be an engineer for Lockheed and end up moving over to Northrup Grumman. The problem with that, again, that was a pension problem because they never stayed with the same employer long enough to actually vest in a pension. But it was also a problem because of the contracting practices of the companies because what the companies were doing in order to get those contracts is they were underbidding labor.

Our engineers were getting paid for forty hours of work, but they were expected to work sixty or eighty hours of work, work overtime and do all kinds of other stuff because of the underbidding practices. We lobbied effectively, one of our early successes, to get the Department of Defense to change its procurement processes and to change the requirements on bidding so that it wasn’t always just the lowest bidder. That there had to be more realistic estimates of labor costs. That hopefully helped some of our members. There were other issues as well. Intellectual property rights are always a big issue for our members. For those members who work for companies and create something and then the company take it, even though it had nothing to do with the company or the resources of the company. A lot of that early work was really around professional issues that had a lot of people complaining that we looked too much like a labor union. We weren’t supposed to be a labor union. Because of the issues that we were working on.

Hellrigel:

By them saying you look like a labor union, there was that San Francisco issue with transit or something.

Brantley:

Exactly. The Bart Case was another example. That’s an example of something where IEEE was integral but doesn’t get much of the credit. Because there were the volunteers who sort of spearheaded a lot of that and advocated to the IEEE board to actually intervene in the case who were wearing two hats. They were wearing an IEEE-USA hat and they were wearing an IEEE Ethics hat, so IEEE Ethics gets all the credit.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

But we did most of the work [Laughing]. I forget the details. I know the case eventually settled after we agreed to intervene. I’m not sure whether our threat of intervening changed the position of the parties or not, but they got to a reasonable outcome and that was a real difficult issue for IEEE that went back and forth. Should we even do this? Even today we argue over what role should IEEE play in protecting our members who are whistleblowers or who do things to conform to our ethics code.

Hellrigel:

Right, it also pits this controversy between like industry and academia. In academia now, 70 percent of the courses are being taught by adjuncts, neither here nor there, but the erosion of that labor market. And it also is the interest of maybe Ph.Ds. versus non-Ph.Ds. It’s some of the different…

Brantley:

So, here’s another issue. This is one that IEEE was tangled up in as well. You probably remember Erich Bloch. He was German-born. He’s a former president, active on the board of directors, and ended up at the National Science Foundation. He’s a deputy director and I believe he actually was Director of the National Science Foundation at one point. A very high-level important government posting. Controls a lot of money going out to universities.

Hellrigel:

I remember reading about him.

Brantley:

Erich commissioned a very suspect… and I’m trying to be very careful here… it was a report that was not peer reviewed is the accurate way to say it. It basically made a case that was used to convince Congress that we didn’t have enough Ph.Ds. in this country at a time when Ph.Ds. were underpaid, and a lot of graduates couldn’t get jobs.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

We tried to communicate to Congress what the real situation was. That was very difficult because Erich Bloch was a very influential IEEE leader. He made life difficult for us.

Hellrigel:

I remember reading about that going through the history. It brought up, yes, NSF funding and the whole funding stream to universities. It goes back to the Eisenhower era: monies flowing in for these Ph.D. programs and others, and you’ve created this infrastructure and need versus… for one person to need it, it’s another person’s pork barrel.

Brantley:

Yes, yes.

Hellrigel:

Why are you supporting that? But that brings up the ethics and peer review and how you use statistics and such.

Brantley:

Well.

Hellrigel:

You were going to add, sir?

Brantley:

Well, no, what I was going to add is that I moved into management roles but throughout my career I was very closely involved and most interested in the policy part of the job. One of the nice things about working for IEEE as an employer is, and given my interest in technology, et cetera, is that over the course of my career I’ve worked on hundreds of issues. I can honestly say that every night I could put my head on the pillow and with only one exception I always thought that IEEE-USA was on the right side of the issue.

Hellrigel:

Okay. What’s the exception?

Brantley:

Tort reform.

Hellrigel:

Tort reform.

Brantley:

Yes. Limit people’s ability to sue companies to recover for the injury or damages that they suffered as a result of some flaw or defect. The argument at the time, and it was a valid concern, was that there was a lot of forum shopping going on and you could go and bring a case in Alabama. You could get multimillion dollar judgements and all that kind of stuff. There was a need for reform but the solution that companies were pushing for and that I was asked to lobby for -- a lot of times IEEE-USA did align with corporate interests I mean we were asked to support tort reform. The proposals would have basically shut it off or made it so difficult to actually win a case that a lot of people would have been hurt would not have a remedy. Any kind of remedy. I thought that was just had gone too far so I mean I did my job, but I didn’t like working on that issue. I can say in all honesty, even with H-1B I think we were on the right side of that issue when you look at the facts. You look at what’s actually happened and what was being done, I think we took the right principled position. The trouble with taking the right principled position is that it often puts you in the middle between two extremes and everybody hates it.

Hellrigel:

What was IEEE-USA’s position? Limit H-1B?

Brantley:

It evolved over the years as we learned the politics of the issue. It started as just asking a simple question. Where’s the shortage? Why do you need to bring in H-1Bs? The data didn’t suggest that there was a shortage. We were attacked fiercely on that issue. There were people who called us racist. That we’re just trying to keep the Indians out and all kinds of other stuff. We realized that we had to change our position. This was in the first year even. We evolved our position and we needed to be able to communicate it effectively. We couldn’t be anti-immigration. We weren’t anti-immigration. So, our position became green cards, not guest workers. Our corollary to that position was a large portion of the H-1Bs were being educated in U.S. institutions and actually wanted to stay, live, and work and make their career in the United States and they couldn’t get H-1Bs.

Hellrigel:

So, they can stay… right.

Brantley:

Because there weren’t enough of them to go around, and they were all being used for models and all kinds of non-technical positions. Little companies couldn’t get them. The big [offshoring] companies were scooping them all up. We wanted them to be able to be entrepreneurs and to live and be Americans and help build the American Dream. Make us more competitive. After all we invested in the institutions that gave you your education. Why don’t we get some benefit out of that by letting you be citizens? So, we argued for green cards. That’s been consistently our position through the years. We’ve worked on some peripheral issues like how long a student should be able to get OPT, which is the ability to work at what do they call it, occupational practical education. You’re actually working for a company, getting a salary but it’s considered to be educational. When the big companies realized that they couldn’t get as many H-1Bs as they wanted out of Congress, what they did is they lobbied to increase the OPT eligibility to like five or ten years, I forget the actual number, I don’t want to give you incorrect information. But they greatly expanded the OPT so that they could bring these graduates in, put them to work and not give them green cards.

Hellrigel:

That’s some of the criticism that I’ve heard. Then underpay and push you to work because you’re in fear that you’re going to be given the boot.

Brantley:

We had a lot of members who were fired, and their severance was conditioned on training their H-1B replacement. We had a lot of members who applied for jobs that were only posted so that the company could say that there was no one qualified, and they had to bring in the H-1Bs.

Hellrigel:

Oh. Yes. Yes.

Brantley:

Yes. So, you’re not qualified. Even though they were totally qualified. But there was the job.

Hellrigel:

The fine tuning of.

Brantley:

Yes. Unfortunately, IEEE facilitated that because a lot of the job postings that were put in the IEEE Job Listing Service were very questionable job listings. They were designed to exclude, not to encourage. It became an issue for IEEE, too, because IEEE, hired H-1Bs in the IT Department and I think maybe some others. It was very uncomfortable for IEEE to have us out there lobbying against it, against the quota increases that were being proposed. They were having a hard time hiring. They needed H-1Bs to fill empty chairs. They couldn’t afford to pay higher salaries to get them, so they wanted H-1Bs. They were doing what every other company in the United States was doing.

The other thing that a lot of people didn’t understand about H-1Bs is that most of them came through -- they weren’t students hired out of colleges, graduates -- a lot of them were employees of Indian firms, I don’t want to name any names, but the company hired the Indian firm. They were outsourcing firms. They would provide the workers who worked under H-1B visas. The company held the H-1B visas.

When we talked to them, just they’re in the United States now. They’re our members now. We have to look after their interests, too. We looked at how they were treated, how they were charged, how they were living. How they were living in apartments, ten, fifteen people in an apartment. How they were being promised jobs, but they weren’t getting the jobs. There were a lot of ones that were well treated but there were a lot that were poorly treated. Then there were the ones who were well treated, who were paid fairly, they were recruited fairly, but they were H-1Bs. They couldn’t get credit. They couldn’t buy a house and settle down. They couldn’t open a business. They couldn’t do the things that a U.S. citizen could do that they wanted to do. So, we tried to look out for their interests as well.

We ended up working with some sectors of industry who read the tea leaves and understood that they needed to find a solution. We worked with them to try to find solutions. That’s part of what green cards were about. That’s part of what OPT reforms were about. But we also had to keep other groups at arm’s length. We couldn’t work with like FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform), the group that was anti-immigration because we’re not anti-immigration. We didn’t necessarily think America First. We thought America should be open and welcoming and that if you came here and studied and wanted to make your life here, we should figure out a way to make that easier for you. Don’t make you sit in a green card queue of ten or twelve years to get the green card. That’s just crazy.

Hellrigel:

That’s some of the issues. I have the email that you sent me where you talked about the emphasis on public policy advocacy accomplishments. You said you worked on hundreds of issues. If you had to give me your, I don’t know, top few issues, what do you think your legacy is going to be? What are some of the most important issues?

Brantley:

I don’t know that it’s my legacy as much as it is the organization’s legacy. It’s also important to understand that any issue you work on, you are part of a much broader community of interest groups that are also working on it. It’s hard sometimes. You’ll work on an issue. You’ll get a good outcome but it’s because a lot of people were working on that issue, sometimes even working with you on that issue in coalition. You always try to build coalitions. But I think we were involved and put our fingerprints on a number of things that have had real impact. I’ll give you some small examples and then I’ll give you some bigger examples. Sometimes it’s the small examples that are the most interesting. At one point there was a big concern about the U.S.’s ability to project its naval power abroad. We had conflict in the Middle East, and you may remember a lot of our people got killed in Lebanon. And the United States felt that it lacked the ability to project naval force abroad. We worked with Congress and some of our fellows on Capitol Hill worked with Congress to get them to understand that you could recommission some of the old battleships.

Hellrigel:

Oh okay.

Brantley:

They did. I believe it was The Iowa that they recommissioned, and they deployed it to Lebanon. It was involved in some of the activities there. That’s an example of where you can have an impact. Another example of where you can have an impact: one of our members had an Energy Star TV and he was wondering was it really saving him on electricity. So, he put a voltmeter on it and he measured it and he realized it wasn’t saving him any electricity.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing].

Brantley:

He wondered why. So, he figured out, we helped him figure out, that the reason it wasn’t is because the cable companies were behind the scenes, constantly refreshing the directory of cable channels and it was causing his TV to run and use energy when it would be sleeping otherwise. No one knew that. No one knew that it was screwing up the Energy Star Rating System. So, we took that knowledge, and we went to the regulators and we said did you know this. They said no we didn’t. Then they made new regulations that changed how the Energy Star system worked and what companies could do, and cable companies could do and it got back to saving electricity again. So just sharing that little bit of knowledge, helping regulators and legislators understand how things really work can have a real difference.

Hellrigel:

What would that --?

Brantley:

Helping them understand what an energy efficient building is and how can you make a building more energy efficient?

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

When you explain that, then they create laws and regulations that cause that to change and that now all federal buildings are energy efficient. Because all federal buildings are energy efficient, the private sector is going, well, we need to be energy efficient, too. You can start to see the evolution of the impact. Now when you asked me about bills that are important or those specific things that are important, I think what we did on H-1B was important. Portable pensions were important. What came out of that was IRAs and 401(k)s. I’m sure you’ve got a 401(k) probably tucked away somewhere --

Hellrigel:

I think I have twelve.

Brantley:

Yes [Laughing]. Exactly one for every employer. Right?

Hellrigel:

Yes, I have taught at many universities in different states, and each has its own plan.

Brantley:

Did it make labor portable? Yes. Did it make us all secure in our retirements? Maybe not because maybe people didn’t save enough. So, was it a great idea? I don’t know. But it was the solution to the problem of the fact that people were working and not having any pension at all.

Hellrigel:

More transparency in it.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I worked at a university, and this is the other problem. You’re given a one-year appointment. Well, you can’t get vested until you begin your fourth year, so they just take all their money back that they put in every year.

Brantley:

Exactly.

Hellrigel:

That’s what they did and so there’s still weasels in the system.

Brantley:

Yes. But as part of our work on retirement security, we also worked on the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation to make sure that they were adequately funded to actually cover all the failed pension plans which affected a lot of our members.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

A lot of big, old industrial companies went out of business and they tried to pay off their pension plans pennies on the dollar. That government agency was the backstop.

Hellrigel:

Yes, Braniff Air. I knew a friend whose father lost everything.

Brantley:

Yes. So those kind of issues, you could feel really good about because you could see how it benefited people. We also worked on issues that were technology related, both legislative and otherwise. I’ll give you an example of something we did that I think was important although I don’t know that we actually won on the issue. There was a race between the United States and Japan in the field of consumer electronics and the United States was getting its clock cleaned by companies: you know the classic Japanese companies who were putting out great product. But it was a question of the new technologies that were coming and could we grab a piece of them and create jobs and create wealth here in the United States. One of those new technologies was high-definition television.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

Where we’re going to produce and create high-definition televisions. The problem was the Japanese had organized themselves through their own quasi-governmental mechanisms and they had created a standard. They were already moving ahead with the technology whereas our companies were just sitting around. They could not agree on a standard. They couldn’t draw a pathway forward and they were losing ground to the Japanese companies. So what we did, and a tip of my hat to Deborah Rudolph who was our Manger of Technology Policy, is that we held a meeting and we invited representatives from all those companies to sit in the room and talk about what was needed in order to make the U.S. competitive and to move ahead on the development and manufacturing and the sale of high definition advanced television by U.S. companies. That meeting started a process which led to agreement on a standard. We still lost the battle [Laughing]. The Japanese and then the Koreans and then the Chinese sort of took away the market for manufacturing consumer technology goods. But we were able to mobilize U.S. industry to actually do something which, again, was part of what made that type of work exciting, and you felt like you were having an impact. We had a program. We have a program of fellowships where members come and work on Capitol Hill for a year. We also have them at the State Department and the White House. Well, if you know anything about Congress, you know that the House and the Senate don’t always get along. They don’t like to talk to each other, even when they have issues that they share concerns about, they have different views about appropriate solutions. They just can’t agree. Things don’t get done. Well, our fellows are sitting there in those offices. It was a period of time, this was in the early 1990s, when we knew that our electric grid was falling behind. We knew that the energy was going to be a big challenge for the future. But the House and the Senate couldn’t agree on what to do. They wouldn’t even talk to each other. But our Fellows in the House and the Senate could. They did. They talked and they talked. They talked to their bosses, and they did the footwork to lay mutual understandings that resulted in a bill called the Energy Policy Act of 1992, the EPACT. One of the first major pieces of energy legislation in probably a dozen years at that point. It laid the groundwork for what we know today. There were later energy bills, but it opened the door to smart grid and all the other things that we now sort of view as being an essential part of our national energy supply.

Hellrigel:

About how many fellows do you get a year?

Brantley:

In the best of years, maybe three, or four, or five. Most years only two. But the other thing is we’re only one of about twenty societies that have fellows so they all are part of a network of fellows that talk to each other and will collaborate. We do educational things for them on the side. Then as graduates of the fellowship program, we have to be very careful they cannot lobby for us. They’re not supposed to be active as volunteers. But after they finish their fellowship, they’re active IEEE members, they have knowledge of Capitol Hill. We recruit them to become volunteers. They don’t have a conflict of interest anymore. We recruit them. They sit on our committees, and they go on to become leaders. Gordon Day was a Congressional fellow

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

He worked for Senator Rockefeller.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Brantley:

Yes. We’ve had dozens of fellows that have gone on and if you look in the history that I sent you, there are dozens of fellows who’ve gone on to important government positions in the White House and Homeland Security and other agencies.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I’ve been reading that history. Where do you get the money to fund the fellows?

Brantley:

From the member special assessment.

Hellrigel:

Oh, from the member special assessment.

Brantley:

Yes. When we created the program back in the early 1970s, we actually had some donations, some gifts from several large corporations, from Westinghouse and I think IBM. That money: it’s interesting. That was before the IEEE Foundation so that money still sits in a reserve account that IEEE-USA can use. I mean we’re not talking seven figures. We’re talking about sort of mid, low six figures. So that money comes from there. It comes from the member assessment. The other thing is, although we provide a fellowship stipend, it’s not enough for a lot of these people so a lot of them are on sabbatical from their jobs. They’re still drawing their corporate salaries or their academic salary. They’re getting a living allowance from us to live and work in Washington. So, that’s where the funding comes from. Great pains are made to make sure that there’s no conflict of interest. We can’t lobby them. We can’t even talk to them when they’re there. But when they come back then they’re IEEE members and we put them to work. They get to work on the issues that they’re interested in, and we get their knowledge and expertise.

Hellrigel:

They get a stipend from you, but you can’t like round them up for a lunch or something like that?

Brantley:

No. No. When we send people to Capitol Hill to lobby, knock on the door and say here we think you should do X, Y or Z, we don’t knock on their door.

Hellrigel:

Wow. Most of them are college graduates already and they’re being brought in to learn policy and how government works, I guess.

Brantley:

Many of the fellows, society fellowship programs, are built around grad students. Ours is actually built around -- we do accept grad students, but we actually accept working engineers as well. Carnegie used to have a commission on science and technology that made recommendations to the government about policy. About how they should organize to support strong science and technology. They reviewed fellowship programs one year and they said we had the best because we didn’t limit ourselves just to students. We brought people with practical experience from the private sector.

Hellrigel:

Did you ever get a retiree?

Brantley:

Yes, we’ve had retirees. Again, it’s all kinds of circumstances. There was a period of time when the State Department was being heavily criticized because they had very poor capabilities in science and technology, and they had eliminated the attachés responsible for science and technology in the embassies. The new secretary of state [Madelaine Albright] decided to fix it. The National Academy basically did a report and said they were in bad shape. She decided to fix it. She fixed it by creating an Office of Science, establishing a position of science advisor, and then reaching out to groups like IEEE to establish fellowship programs at the State Department to bring engineers into the State Department. Some of our engineers in the State Department have, again, done amazing things there using their knowledge and experience. They’re represented the United States in international treaty discussions like the Wassenaar arrangement. They’ve acted as diplomats. They’ve advised the State Department on issues related to proliferation. They’ve helped the State Department adopt technology systems to learn how to use Internet and how to be aware of cybersecurity. I mean these organizations still kept paper records in shoeboxes in a basement. I knew this from my legal work. The U.S. Treaty Series, all those documents that we signed and everything, most of them were in boxes in a basement. They didn’t have money for digitalization. They didn’t know what a network was. There are too many security holes. We can’t work with stuff like that. But we had fellows that helped them understand the technology and supported the people who worked to make those changes.

Hellrigel:

Yes, because you start working and even selecting how you are going to scan it, what type of scanner or has the sale person sold you a bill of goods and it’s going to be obsolete. I recorded an oral history with Robert (Bob), Frosh. Did you know Bob?

Brantley:

I worked with Bob over the years. I wouldn’t say we were buddies or close friends, but I know the work that he’s done over the years, yes.

Hellrigel:

Yes, he was a nice gentleman.

Brantley:

Smart.

Hellrigel:

I wound up finding him because I was friends with his daughter.

I’m doing some research, and I was like, Frosh? Your dad’s Bob Frosh?

Brantley:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

I went up to his house in Massachusetts and recorded his oral history.

Brantley:

That’s great. No, like I said I worked with some outstanding volunteers, too many to really name, but one that I am particularly fond of -- well… God, there’s so many I’m particularly fond of. But one guy I always enjoyed working with in particular, Jim Fancher who was a power engineer from Chicago. He’s the kind of guy who could look at a train coal car, loaded coal car, pull out a slide rule and tell you how much electricity was in that coal car. James Fancher.

Hellrigel:

That’s the cool stuff. He bridged the slide rule to, well, to the calculator to the computer era.

IEEE's culture

Brantley:

To the computer, exactly. Yes. He was very computer literate, and he was one of those guys who was still active after he retired. He kept himself up to speed on all the issues. He had been there long enough, he understood the environment, he understood the technology, he understood the issues. He brought a lot of value because he gave us a lot of time, you know? We don’t put a dollar value on the time of our volunteers in IEEE. But it’s huge. It is probably hundreds of millions of dollars of value that we get from the time our volunteers give us.

Hellrigel:

Right, and some of them even after they’ve become regional directors, presidents of societies they then go to technical activities at you know trying to chart people’s career then they’ll go to a journal editor and different aspects of it. Ethical activities and MGA.

Brantley:

Yes. If I can make an editorial comment, I will say two things about IEEE and volunteers is that, as you mentioned earlier, you know the enjoinder to Sophie to remember that we’re a member organization.

Hellrigel:

Right, that it’s… Yes.

Brantley:

When I started, everyone in IEEE had a little green plastic thing that sat on your desk that said Remember the Member. I’ve always thought of IEEE as being a member organization and I cherish the work and the time both social and hard work, substantive work that I got to spend with the volunteers. That said, two editorial comments. I think the revolving door has gotten too out of hand. We are not creating enough opportunities for younger members. I also think that if you’ll pardon the aphorism: there’s too many Indian chiefs and not enough Indians. What I mean by that is that there are too many people who have great intentions and who think big thoughts but who aren’t able to roll up their sleeves and actually do the work to create what it is they want to create.

Hellrigel:

Right. Too many managers, not enough workers.

Brantley:

Yes, that’s another way to say it.

Hellrigel:

Right. Yes.

Brantley:

Then that creates a dynamic, too. This is another area which I think is a real challenge for IEEE right now which is this culture. You mentioned before that there seems to be this need for the volunteers to put staff in their place or to remind them that you work for me kind of attitude. I always thought IEEE was most effective when it was viewed as a partnership where we worked together. Where it wasn’t you telling me how do to my job, it was just working together, figuring out how to solve a problem. I’m afraid that’s changed some again I think it’s part of that revolving door issue that, again, too many Indian chiefs, not enough Indians.

Hellrigel:

Right. Well, from the staff side, the challenges of, yes, the staff is the continuity, but it’s frustrating sometimes when leadership is a one term and it’s like, okay, here’s the flavor of the year.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

We have to reshuffle the deck and sometimes people think they need to create a new flavor just because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

That continuity, that’s where that five-year plan I think was an attempt to instill some continuity. But sometimes depending on the force of a volunteer or two they could minimize long-term vision for short-term and staff finds itself jostling between…

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Then IEEE-USA might be in a unique place in that it’s not only jostled between like volunteer staff issues but also that you’re seen as being U.S.A.-centric, it’s in your name.

Brantley:

Yes. Yes, yes. I hear that a lot, yes.

Hellrigel:

Right, but that’s what you are and as we’d spoken about earlier, other countries have their national engineering group like in the U.K., it’s the IET. Others have it. IEEE-USA, you’re a separate legal entity?

Brantley:

No, technically it’s not.

Hellrigel:

No?

Brantley:

We are a committee of the IEEE Board. If the board wanted to amend the bylaws it could get rid of us at any time. There’s an important point in there I want to share with you. I hope it can be sort of recorded.

Hellrigel:

Yes, sir.

Brantley:

I’m going to struggle trying to make it clear I’m afraid. The reality of IEEE is that when it was built and as it grew and as it globalized, there are certain tensions built into the organization. Certain conflicts. They’ve always been there. They just increase in intensity over time, sometimes they go away. You talked about continuity. The problem that I’ve always seen with continuity is that we have great ideas, too many of them, and we try to implement them all and then once we try to implement them and they don’t get anywhere because we haven’t put enough critical mass behind them then they never go away. They just suck at the energy of the organization. The second thing in terms of these tensions is that there’s this professional versus technology tension. You know we’re only here about the technology. You know lobbying for R&D creates the technology. So, I see the linkages but a lot of people just don’t see the linkages. National versus global. You’re U.S.-centric, you’re not global or we want to be global, but we don’t want to have to replicate U.S.A. everywhere. So, we’re going to stop you so that we don’t have to watch it spread. But you know what? The members want it to spread. They want an effective voice. You’ve heard the expression: all politics is local. You say global, well global policy, what does that mean really? The United Nations doesn’t implement laws. They’re implemented by nations. So, if you actually want to do the things that we say are important, you actually have to engage at the national level. You have to be aware of the legal system. You have to work within the laws. You have to understand the culture. You have to understand the politics. You have to understand all the aspects that go into being an effective advocate at that level. You can’t do Indian policy sitting in New Jersey or Washington. You can’t do European policy sitting in China or India. You have to allow that capability to exist if you’re going to serve the members the same way there that we serve the members in the U.S.

Hellrigel:

Right. That’s where when I talk to members some of them are really active on the Section level because that’s where they feel it happens.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Then some others are regional.

Brantley:

Some Sections are countries.

Hellrigel:

Right, some sections are countries. Recently, I have been learning about the creation of new Sections in Texas.

Brantley:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Who gets to call themselves the Lone Star Section? But we won’t get into that politics. [Laughing].

Brantley:

Well, I’ll flip the coin and tell you even in the United States where we have a national organization, IEEE-USA, when you look at how we’re organized, it’s not organized to optimize the work of the national organization. I’ve got states that are split in half. If I wanted to work on an issue in a state like Virginia, I’ve got different regions in there.

Hellrigel:

Well, that map, I forget what I was doing but if it was Region 2 or Region 3, it seemed a little squirrely to me as a former geography professor.

Brantley:

Yes, yes.

Hellrigel:

It’s something out of Virginia or Maryland and it’s like, wait, what is that group? Not group, it would be a chapter or whatever it was.

Brantley:

Anywhere they have a council that tells you that there’s overlap. There’s a D.C., there’s a Washington Metropolitan D.C. Council to connect the Maryland Section with the Northern Virginia Section and there’s also a Baltimore Section.

Hellrigel:

That was it.

Brantley:

Yes. I live and work in Washington, D.C., but because I live in Columbia, I’m part of the Baltimore Section.

Hellrigel:

Can you choose to be in another? It’s by your mailing address?

Brantley:

I believe you can but if I was a member of the Washington Section then it would be very difficult for me physically to get to the meetings because they’re so far away. [Laughing] The Potomac River runs through Washington. The general rule of thumb is you don’t go across the river. It’s just too far away. Virginia is one side and Maryland is the other. D.C.’s in the middle. You know if there’s a meeting on the other side of the river, it’d take me two hours to drive there in traffic.

IEEE-USA (cont.), Legal and Compliance

Hellrigel:

Okay. Well, yes, mass transit doesn’t always work. These are fascinating trying to figure out what, heads or tails. You, in your comments that you emailed me, we talked about the government fellows. You also have the WISE Internship Program?

Brantley:

That was a program that was invented by volunteers on a napkin in a bar [Laughing]. It’s a wonderful program. It’s having some difficulty currently because there’s not enough societies willing to sustain it. IEEE is one of the last of the societies that actually invests significantly in it. But it’s a multi-organizational society. There are currently about six or seven associations that are involved. The idea is that you are going to select rising seniors, engineering or computer science students, or students that are going into graduate study that is technology and public policy. You’re going to bring them to Washington for the summer where they’re going to do a research paper and they’re going to spend the summer meeting with all the federal agencies and entities that do policy. So, you’d have a meeting at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. You’d have a meeting at the National Science Foundation. You’d meet with the people on Capitol Hill. You would meet with the Congressional Research Service. These students would hear how laws get made, how does Washington really work. Where are career opportunities for people with technical backgrounds who want to do that for a career? So, we would being in these students who really wanted to be not just be engineers, they wanted to influence policy. They wanted to work at the Department of Defense and Technology. They wanted to work in Congress. We’d show them what it looked like. They would also create -- we’d work with them on a topic, and they would create a new research paper that in many cases has been shared with policymakers as information. Very useful information to help them understand an important technology issue whether it’s electric vehicles or climate change or pick your issue. All that material by the way, I like to brag. I used to support that program and I used to maintain their website back in the day when I was starting with IEEE. I created what I considered to be the first open access journal.

Hellrigel:

What is that called?

Brantley:

The WISE Journal of Engineering and Policy. What that means is all we did was take their papers and publish them on a website with a table of contents and a journal title so that they could put it on their resume.

Hellrigel:

Fantastic.

Brantley:

Even now if you go to WISE-Intern.com, you can read the journals for all the different years, all the papers that were published. I constantly used to get requests from Congressional staffers and others who wanted copies because they thought it was really good, informative content. Have there been any subjects like climate change which can get very touchy, are there any subjects that you couldn’t touch? Issues?

Brantley:

The hardest part working with the WISE Interns was -- because they’re coming from an academic environment where they’re talking about big issues -- was to get them to focus on a topic that was specific enough that they could write a useful thirty-page research paper in nine weeks or less.

Hellrigel:

Okay. So, bring it down.

Brantley:

So, you would start with a great big topic like climate change and then you would work it down to something very specific. I mean I was trying to think of a good example. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

Hellrigel:

Well, it could be something like should you rethink how plywood is made or something.

Brantley:

Yes. Or a big one might be what is the role of micro grids. You know? Should we be focused on interconnection and national transmission systems, or should we be focused on making everybody have their own power supply?

Hellrigel:

Right. In history we call that a case study. I just talked to the gentleman who’s chair of the Bombay Section. He said that relying on government and relying on industry to bring electricity to really rural places in India. So, they’re focusing on micro grid and solar power.

Brantley:

Exactly. No, I’m sorry. I was going to say. We had students who worked on energy. We had students who worked on medical technology. We had students who worked on intellectual property issues. We had students who worked on transportation and space issues. A lot of really, really cool stuff to read. And then they would present it, before COVID when you could actually do this, we would reserve one of the hearing rooms on Capitol Hill. They would come up and present their papers and we would invite Congressional staff to come in and listen to their presentations and ask questions.

Hellrigel:

Did you hire any of these people at IEEE-USA?

Brantley:

A couple of them we hired for projects. Several of them have gone on to government employment, working for federal agencies or I have one former intern that is working for the agency -- he was an energy guy who helps works with what used to be the State Department, now specifically with the Agency for International Development, AID. What he does is he goes to places like Kazakhstan and works with the government and brings U.S. resources to help them modernize their electric grids and do all kinds of cool stuff.

Hellrigel:

That’s fascinating. Once again that’s only a handful of people every year but you can see the impact on a much – larger scale as it ripples out.

Brantley:

This is one of the challenges for IEEE-USA because when you look at what impact a single intern, WISE Intern or a fellow could have, they could have an amazing impact. Like the fellows who created the Energy Policy Act or who helped get Congress to recommission the Iowa battleship, but they’re expensive.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

If a fellowship costs you know a stipend is around $80-90,000 a year. That’s bigger than the budget of all of our policy committees. When you’re in the mode of always cutting your budget, the crunch, you’re always having to weigh off what is the value of these things. It’s going to vary. Every year we’re fighting to protect and retain the fellowship program. The fellowship program, they’ve reduced the budget for it so we can only have one or two fellows now. That’s part of the tradeoff. They’ve made other cuts but that was because they couldn’t justify spending that much money on just one or two people as opposed to 100 or 1,000 people.

Hellrigel:

Right. Then the critical or observant thing is when you dial it up and you look at this is IEEE, couldn’t you do more?

Brantley:

Yes. Yes. How can we make money, how can we make more money? The problem with the WISE Internship Program was that these are student internships. They’re great. As a matter of fact, The Princeton Review rated them one of the best internships programs in the United States. A lot of them graduate, they go onto their careers, not all of them stay IEEE members or become active in IEEE. I haven’t had one elected president of the United States yet. Maybe one day I will but the reality is that when you look for the impact, it’s a great experience for them. What’s the impact from a societal impact point of view? It’s hard to measure because they’re graduating. It’s going to be twenty, thirty years before you can assess their impact.

Hellrigel:

Oh, right. Sometimes you’re told to crunch numbers to come up with the impact for the long term. But also, you’re asked to measure some things and not the others. I imagine for example ROTC programs or even the military academies. There’s probably someone that’s crunched all the numbers. We’ve invested X number in you, and you have a six-year commitment and how many stay and how many flee.

Brantley:

Yes, yes.

Hellrigel:

It’s a question that there’s no easy answer to. Now we’ve got the Women’s World Cup going on. You look at some of the early soccer players and they’re getting them at like 12 years old and putting them in their academies. You know out of the Macon area I think, oh, Emily Sonnett.

Brantley:

Yes, yes.

Hellrigel:

On the women’s national team comes out of your area and, so if you look at the investment on that, okay, we got one. But that’s a heck of a one.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

You know? It’s hard.

Brantley:

That would -- yes.

Hellrigel:

You also pointed out that one of the other interests or initiatives of IEEE-USA is career development, professional development.

Brantley:

Yes, I want to speak to that. Let me say one more thing about the government relations side.

Hellrigel:

Yes, sir.

Brantley:

Which is if you set aside the advocacy work, if you set aside the educational work, there’s still a fundamental reality that policymakers need to understand technology. You can’t assume that if you’re not going to carry that information to them: that they’re not going to call you and ask for it.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

One of the things that we did a lot of as a Washington office and as a government relations entity was to field requests for information and assistance from government agencies, from policymakers, from legislators. They not only wanted IEEE to be associated with their legislation because they thought it would bring credibility and influence its passage, but they also wanted us because of our ideas and our knowledge. We would get called. I’ll give you an example of the type of calls we would get. We would get calls from the Department of Labor because they had programs to assist veterans’ transitions. Those who were critically wounded in Afghanistan or in Iraq to help transition into technical careers. They needed help. They called us to help them. We got called by the State Department because when the United States established the provisional authority -- the State Department and the Army Corps of Engineers and a couple of other agencies who helped establish-- the provisional authority in Iraq that was responsible for ruling the country, the United States and its representatives, one of the big problems was getting their engineering schools back in order. What we realized is that they hadn’t had a new textbook in their libraries since 1968.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

They weren’t being trained to be a modern country. They didn’t have the technical expertise to be a modern country. We had to figure out how to help them do that. When the State Department and the Army Corps of Engineers called, we showed up. We sat in meetings, and we talked to people in Iraq about how to get them information and we worked with IEEE to get them access to IEEE Xplore information online.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

We worked to get them supported so that they could come to conferences. Just a couple more examples. We got a call from the [National Science Foundation]. The [NSF] had a special program for students, science and technical students, on Indian reservations, to get these students -- that the great majority of them don’t get off the reservation. They’re in small little technical schools that are on the reservation. They don’t know what’s going on in the bigger world. They don’t have access to what’s going on at the big institutions, the research dollars, the information. So, NSF has a program, and they want to expose them to that but they need people to sponsor those interns. We stepped up and we sponsored interns from the Navajo Indian reservations so that they could see the bigger world and understand what was going on and where the federal dollars where and who supported technology. They, just like our WISE Interns, had an experience that opened their horizons. We get called all the time on specific bills. I want to do this. How can I do it? Can you help me? Can you look at this draft piece of legislation and can you tell me does it work or not? Will it achieve what I want it to achieve? Again, that’s not our agenda. We’re just there to help. My concern is when I think about IEEE and whatever happens to IEEE-USA, those phones are going to keep ringing. Someone needs to be able to answer them. To provide that help.

Hellrigel:

It’s a challenge, too, sometimes, if someone’s trying to get you to say something on behalf of IEEE.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

So, you have to learn to navigate the political corridors.

Brantley:

Exactly. You have to learn what bills not to support.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

In Washington, D.C., government relations, we have an expression called does it have legs. What that means is are the right people in the right positions supporting it and is the calendar such that it actually has a reasonable chance of passing into law. If it meets all those criteria and if it aligns with our recommendations, our policy views, then we will put our support behind it. But if it doesn’t, then we usually try to take a pass. We might do something like here’s some comments. But we don’t actually put our name on it.

Hellrigel:

Right, because all you need is some… my nontechnical word, whack-a-do trying to use you to legitimate --

Brantley:

There is no shortage of whack-a-dos in Congress.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

I can tell you --

Hellrigel:

Trying to use IEEE to legitimize.

Brantley:

This is exactly why you have government relations professionals in Washington. To know when not to say yes.

Hellrigel:

Thank you for the opportunity but…Yes, the wisdom to say, no.

Brantley:

Right, exactly [Laughing]. Also, to know how to say no without alienating a potential ally. The thing about Washington is the people you’re working against today; you’re going to be working with tomorrow. The people who oppose you on this bill support you on that bill. So, you’ve got to be able to work in that kind of environment and not make enemies. You just have to understand how things work.

Hellrigel:

Word choice.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Did you find yourself getting invited to different galas and balls and things like that?

Brantley:

Not a lot. A few parties here and there. I got invited to a few [Presidential] inaugurals. Usually, they have events around the inaugurals.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

Things of that nature. I’ve saved some of them in my mementos. You know the invitations are nice because they come on fancy stationery.

Hellrigel:

Oh, oh, yes, cotton rag paper or --

Brantley:

I’ve been invited to the White House a few times. I’ve been invited to the Treaty Room in the State Department a few times. Those are fun because those go in the memory book.

Hellrigel:

So, have you shaken hands with the presidents?

Brantley:

No, the closest I got to a president was when Bill Clinton was Christmas shopping at Union Station Mall.

Hellrigel:

Okay. Oh, that’s a nice mall.

Brantley:

My wife and I were there shopping as well and so there’s a store there called Appalachian Spring and it was on the news that night, but we were in the crowd watching as he was doing -- it’s open so you could see the whole store. He was in there picking out some earrings and some other things for Hillary.

Hellrigel:

Yes, Union Station and I think it’s the old post office building.

Brantley:

Right next door.

Hellrigel:

That’s fascinating. You’ve spent quite a few years in D.C. I guess, or area around it, well, forty years or so. It’s home.

Brantley:

Yes, it’s a culture and the reality is that wherever you go to college, if you’re interested in government relations, Washington, D.C. is where you want to be.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

Someone argued that’s changed now that there’s so much gridlock that you can actually get more done at the state level. There are people doing a lot at the state level and we used to actually work at the state level on some issues as well. We worked with our members in California on the issues related to what is a consultant. We worked with members in Massachusetts on getting rid of non-compete clauses.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

We’ve done a lot of state work as well. But’s harder when you’re from out of state. You have to use the members to do the work. But you advise them, and you organize them and you help them. You put polish on the things they write.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

You make appointments and you arrange things for them to do.

Hellrigel:

For what you do, do you have to run it past our Legal Compliance Department or?

Brantley:

Depending on what we’re doing for the most part, no. We just have to run it through our own governance process. The two areas where there is broader oversight are currently on media communications, when we put out a press release. That has to be cleared through Corporate Communications and the Executive Director.

Hellrigel:

Karen Hawkins?

Brantley:

Yes. It didn’t used to be that way, but it became that was when Steve Welby came in. As a result, we just quit doing it because when you’re working in a news window trying to use media for advocacy, you can’t afford to wait six hours much less six days to get a yes answer.

Hellrigel:

So, has that hindered your capability to do your work? I think that’s a phrase.

Brantley:

Definitely. But what you do is you just shift your time and energy to other areas and try to get it done in a different way. The other area is when we do amicus curia briefs, friend of the court briefs. We’ve done a number over the years including… you asked what my biggest accomplishment is probably. It’s not a personal accomplishment although I did have my hands on part of it was the Festo Case where it was the intellectual property case that involved… when you think about an invention people will often invent around an invention that will create something that’s similar but not the same.

Hellrigel:

So not violate the patents and all.

Brantley:

Yes, not violate the patent. There were two legal norms in intellectual property law that conflicted. One is that you can invent around and the other basically said you couldn’t. The question, the legal question that came up in that case was where you draw the line. One side had one solution. The other side had another solution. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. We filed an amicus brief. Our Intellectual Property Committee, the lawyer/engineers on our Intellectual Property Committee, drew a line and suggested it to the Supreme Court. What we argued was based on the principle of foreseeability. If you could foresee that a use that it was covered by the patent, if you couldn’t then you could invent around it. I had the honor of hearing a Supreme Court Justice ask the lawyers in the courtroom what do you think about IEEE-USA’s proposal.

Hellrigel:

Which jurist?

Brantley:

That was Justice O’Connor from Texas.

Hellrigel:

Oh. Sandra Day O’Connor.

Brantley:

Not only that, not only did she ask the question, the Supreme Court, by unanimous decision, adopted our proposal as the law of the land.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about it and said it was “the most” influential intellectual property decision by the Supreme Court to date and that it would affect 75 percent of the patents filed in the Patent Office.

Hellrigel:

That’s F-E-S-T-O?

Brantley:

Festo, yes, yes, the Festo Brief. I think if you visit our website, the history section.

Hellrigel:

It sounds familiar.

Brantley:

Yes, there’s a history section and there’s a little short, white paper that talks about that case and our role in it.

Hellrigel:

Okay. Yes. Because a few years ago when we were doing an update to the History of IEEE since 1984.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I remember this case.

Brantley:

The reason that’s so important to me, obviously, is because I had that law degree and to know that the Supreme Court voted on and adopted a proposal that I helped develop, it wasn’t my idea but I helped put it on paper and I worked the process to get it approved.

Hellrigel:

So, you’ve actually been in the gallery at the Supreme Court? Or whatever they call it?

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Did you go down and sit in the gallery for different hearings in D.C.?

Brantley:

Always. Whenever we had a witness, and I was in a number of hearings and in small and large rooms and all kinds of committees. Probably the most fun one was when we were giving testimony on appropriations for NASA. We were in a small hearing room; it was literally just a table and the Members of Congress were on one side and we were sitting on the other. About midway through the chairman of the committee called a recess and invited us into their offices where we watched the first launch of the space shuttle.

Hellrigel:

Oh, wow.

Brantley:

Because they wanted to see it and because they had funded it and they wanted to see it. It was a great achievement. Technical achievement and a great advance in U.S. interests in space. We stopped the hearing so we could watch the launch. Then we walked back to the hearing room [Laughing] and continued our testimony.

Hellrigel:

At least they all got along to behave and watch it together.

Brantley:

The funniest testimony I ever saw was when we were giving testimony on technology transfer legislation in the Senate. The chairman of the committee, Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina. It was a difficult, complex subject. We were concerned whether our volunteer would be able to give the testimony the way we wanted if he was asked questions. How would he be able to answer? We got to Ernest Hollings who was the sponsor of the legislation. We thought we were going to get all kinds of detailed questions. He had just been at a football game watching the South Carolina Gamecocks. We’re electrical engineers but as far as he’s concerned, we’re engineers. When he was at the stadium, the crowd does a big chant, and the upper deck of the stadium goes up and down.

Hellrigel:

Oh, it kind of waffles.

Brantley:

Yes, it visibly moves up and down. He wanted to know if, as engineers, we thought that was safe or not.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing]

Brantley:

[Laughing]

Hellrigel:

Oh, gosh. Yes, in my head I see the images of that bridge. Remember the images of that bridge that waffled before it fell?

Brantley:

Exactly. So, what do you do? What do you do? Our guy in the witness stand had the presence of mind to explain that he wasn’t a civil engineer but that he knew some and that he would get the Senator an answer to his question. [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Structural weight of people, the temperature of the thing, the metal --

Brantley:

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Hellrigel:

That’s one of those things that Petroski, the late engineer that wrote the practical books about the pencil and other things that engineering impacts our lives and you don’t think about it until it doesn’t work.

Brantley:

Exactly.

Hellrigel:

But that’s fascinating.

Brantley:

Just to explain to a congressman, electrical flow through the grid and how does it work? Is electricity like water that flows in a canal? What is it? You know? What is reactive power? Why is it important? Bob Noberini, I don’t know if that name rings a bell for you. Robert Noberini was a Con Ed engineer; lived and worked in New York City. When they had the big blackout, which is another example of where we did good working with the media is that we provided experts to help explain what happened and why. But when he was in New York to get the grid back up, when New York City went black, they had gas turbines sitting in a warehouse in a pier that they had to get running to basically create reactive power so that they could actually restore the grid. The problem was no one had turned those turbines over in years. They were run off electricity with a battery backup and there was no electricity to get them ignited. So, they were praying that they could get them started. They weren’t sure they could. [Chuckling].

Hellrigel:

Yes, at that point you’d have to bring in something like cords on trailer trucks and bootleg…

Brantley:

With engineers there’s always going to be a solution but that night when everyone was looking to them to get the electricity back on, they weren’t sure it was going to work.

Hellrigel:

Right. I remember I was running a summer camp in western New Jersey, and we were just at the edge of the Appalachian Trail. It’s right by the Delaware Water Gap. I had the early high school kids up there. We could always see the glow from New York, like the diffusion of the -- and I knew something was up because it was totally black.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

And then I had some of my staff with me and we decided we’re not talking about this. This was pre-cellphone.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I think someone had a radio. We had a few cars and a bus, so we drove the kids up the hill to a campsite. Then the next day we came down the hill and the camp cook who lived down the valley told us what was going on. Basically, we just kept the kids there and I think that weekend we were going to take them home back to Passaic, New Jersey and we just decided we’re keeping them for the weekend.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

We got word to their parents from the office back in Passaic at the Board of Education. Some called their parents. But I knew something was weird when I didn’t see that that light glow over the mountain ridge. I guess they would call that light pollution.

Brantley:

Yes. [Laughing]. Probably so.

Hellrigel:

That’s fascinating that they still had engineers there that knew about that. Where that stuff was kept and how it worked.

Brantley:

Yes. Well, I’m sure they had manuals and plans, and everyone knew that was the backup but knowing what you need to do and actually knowing that it’s going to work sometimes that’s two different things.

Hellrigel:

Well even the deal is that, okay, how do we do this if we have to move things around, traffic lights aren’t working.

Brantley:

Yes. Oh, yes.

Hellrigel:

This isn’t working.

Brantley:

People in the New York subway system that was flooding and they were up to their neck in water.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes.

Brantley:

Hospital operating rooms that were in the middle of operating and they had to move out with batteries and lights in the parking lot to finish the operations.

Hellrigel:

It’s a weird noise.

Brantley:

Crazy, crazy, stuff.

Hellrigel:

It’s a weird noise. I’ve been in some places where the power shuts down and I don’t know what it is, if it’s circuit breakers clanking off or what, but you hear that.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

That ceasing of like the… it’s just weird.

Brantley:

Yes. Yes. The sharp click.

Hellrigel:

The hearings. I don’t know. It sounds like your job was a lot of fun. I’m sure there were frustrations, but a lot of fun times or interesting times.

Brantley:

Let me share one anecdote, too, which is when I started, like I said before, computers were a new thing, there was really no internet. So, if you were a government relations professional and you’re working with volunteers and you’re communicating with people, you did it with letters.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

Or if you were lucky, they had a fax machine. Which meant that you could write something, and it took two or three days or it might take a week for the answer to come back.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

Nowadays as a government relations professional if I want to know what’s going on in Congress, I’ve got dozens of paid subscription and free resources including Congress itself, Congress.gov. Anything that I might want to read or look at, I can get in seconds through the internet. In the old days if I wanted to know what was going on I had to go up the Hill and sit there and talk to people and listen. Nowadays I can just sit in my office and watch it on the computer streaming live. Or I can research it through a service or by going to Congress.gov. In the old days if I wanted a copy of a bill to see if it was good or not, if it worked, if we wanted to add something to it, I had to go up there and physically go to the Capitol, go deep down in the bowels underneath where people get lost and where the trains run, and go to the room where the Government Printing Office handed out paper copies of the bills. Then I would grab them all up and I’d take them back to the office and read them and figure out what to do with them. Nowadays, you know the information comes to me. And I don’t have to do anything. Now if I wanted, and I’ve actually done this, if I wanted to recommend a position statement on a particular issue, like artificial intelligence or you know international fusion or something like that, I call up my ChatGPT prompt and I say draft a position statement for submission to Congress that takes this position.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing]

Brantley:

It supports it with cites and references and data. In thirty seconds, I’ve got a draft position statement that I can then share, read, and make it perfect. You know? Make sure it’s accurate. But the work’s done. That’s the kind of work that if I assigned my staff to do it or me even doing it, might take a week or two. I can get that in thirty seconds.

Hellrigel:

So, the ChatGPT, that’s actually good for that.

Brantley:

It is. Although it has its holes and its weaknesses, and you have to validate things. But it does. Ninety percent of what it would give me is good or better than what we could create ourselves.

Hellrigel:

So, 90 percent, isn’t bad.

Brantley:

That’s right. That’s right.

Hellrigel:

As long as you realize you have to proofread it and not just hand it in.

Brantley:

I’m a big proponent in management and in my personal life of the 80/20 rule. The Pareto Principle. That you get a lot more done if it’s not perfect but it’s good enough. My goal in life was to make things good enough and my challenge in life was I worked for engineers, and it had to be perfect.

Hellrigel:

Yes, that’s the challenge.

Brantley:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

They want it perfect, but they have no patience.

Brantley:

Yes, yes. Yes.

Hellrigel:

Yes. That’s very succinct.

Brantley:

A good anecdote is the story I told you about magnetohydrodynamics .

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

It’s where we missed an opportunity to do something good because we couldn’t get the definition of a word properly correct, to make everybody happy. Again, my solution to that problem was let’s take the word out so we don’t have to define it and go ahead and submit the testimony.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I was at someone’s dissertation defense once. Their dissertation was whatever, yada, yada, yada, and then a date frame. They didn’t cover the last twenty years of that date frame. They’re freaking out in the hallway. I just said change the title.

Brantley:

Exactly [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

So, this person went in, because I knew the committee was going to ask. I was a grad student at the time. I was going to come up the next year. So, I was just there in support. When this person presented this, I was like, oh no, this is a drowning dog. Then I said change the title. So, she went in. She goes I’m going to change the title. They said okay.

Brantley:

Another big challenge for a government relations professional working on technology issues is that, again, a lot of our very competent engineers understand issues and systems and processes and in real great detail. My job as a government relations professional is to take their knowledge and put it in a form that a non-technical person can understand. Sometimes they wouldn’t be happy with it. They’d think it was too simplistic or wasn’t 100% accurate or whatever. You had to be able to convince them that this has to be at the level that your audience can understand. This is how they’re going to understand it. This is how they want to hear it. We have to say it this way. Sometimes lobbying your own members was half the battle because you had to convince them this is the right way to do it.

Hellrigel:

Right. That you as the speaker or the fulcrum, you have to know when to step it up or step it down.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I’ve done everything from giving a presentation to IEEE Life Members to eight-year-olds to international forums.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Right? And like you said, you have to know your audience and that sometimes you’re dealing with very… I don’t know, lack of a better word, egocentric politician kind of people.

Brantley:

Yes, yes.

Hellrigel:

If they feel that you’re trying to make them feel stupid… that’s the quickest way to turn them off.

Brantley:

The first thing that you have to do as a government relations professional when you’re talking to policymakers, you have to explain to them why they should care.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

How does this affect my constituents? How does this advance my policy agenda? How does this help me politically? You have to be able to give them answers to those questions. It occurs to me that I’ve talked a lot, but we haven’t talked about career stuff. I probably should let you ask me some career questions because I think that’s equally important to the policy stuff that IEEE-USA does.

Hellrigel:

Right. We’ve got some career and supporting professionals questions if you want to continue, if we can schedule for part two. I don’t know if you’re feeling burnt out.

Brantley:

As you can tell, I talk a lot. I’m happy to keep talking.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

If it would be easier for you or more efficient to do it as a part two, I’d be glad to do that.

Hellrigel:

No, no, I’m fine. We’ll move ahead.

Brantley:

I’m good for another twenty minutes or so before I have to deal with some other issues. But.

Hellrigel:

Excellent. Well, we’ll get started on that and then we’ll see. When I get the transcript back given that I can let you look at the raw transcript to see what it is before I do the editing.

Brantley:

Sure.

Hellrigel:

Just to see if you want to continue because I know you’ve retired now and you’ve got other concerns in your life. That IEEE leash on you is not ever stretching.

Brantley:

I appreciate that but I spent my entire career with IEEE, IEEE-USA. I really fundamentally believe in what they do, and I think it’s important and I think it has impact. Anything I tell you in creating a history is to make sure that people in the future understand that. I think that’s worth my time and energy.

Hellrigel:

And IEEE-USA is one of the important aspects but a conundrum. In terms of global and local but I know career development and professional development are important issues for IEEE. Let alone IEEE-USA

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

When IEEE-USA, first as this special committee and now as a committee at which it stands, that was one of the significant concerns of the working engineers and of the organization. So, what would you like to add about professional development, Sir?

Brantley:

The topic, professional development, is a broad one because there’s so many aspects of what it means to be a professional. Technical is definitely a part of that. We never tried to address the technical part of professional development. We always viewed that as being the purview of the technical societies and you know, we just didn’t want to get at cross purposes with the Technical Activities Board. So, we focused on soft skills. Focused on you know, interviewing, on team how to work effectively in teams. How to plan your career. How to think about career transitions. We tried to create products and services around each of those needs targeted at the audiences that needed them. If you’re a student, you have to learn how to interview. If you’re mid-career, you’re thinking about what does it mean to change employers. If you’re thinking about retirement security, what do you need to know to plan for a secure retirement? When we talk about professional development, it wasn’t so much technical or how to use tools or how to do your job. It was really more about how to have a good career or how to have career vitality was a concept that we liked to focus on. Now part of the problem with that is that members value that and they think it’s important and as a result of that everybody does it in various forms. So, sections do it. Student branches do it. MGA does it. Educational Activities Board does it. Societies do it in various forms. There’s always this concern that there’s a lot of repetitive services. At one point in time, I think we had the first job listing service in IEEE. This was at a time when you could -- it wasn’t on the internet, it wasn’t on the world wide web, it was actually on downloadable auto-response email lists. We would get job listings and create these documents and you could download them in your email. That actually became a significant financial contributor to IEEE-USA, probably our biggest non-assessment revenue source.

Hellrigel:

So, you charged for it.

Brantley:

We charged employers to post their job ads. What happened with that was we weren’t the only ones, right, in IEEE. Spectrum was running job ads as print ads in the back of Spectrum and when the world wide web came along regions had job boards in their newsletters. We knew that we were moving to digitalization. We knew that it was a revenue source. IEEE decided there was going to be an IEEE Job Board and they basically bought us out. They paid us a transition fee for a couple of years, and they basically told us to retire our job board. So, our biggest revenue source, one of the things that was valuable to U.S. members went away. It was replaced by the IEEE Job Board which unfortunately for many years didn’t have very many job listings.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing].

Brantley:

It became a place where companies who wanted to put those misleading job listings that were designed to --

Hellrigel:

Oh, oh, post it because you have to post it, but it’s already filled.

Brantley:

Yes, post it because you have to post it. Make the job requirements so specific that no one is eligible, and you’ve got it. You know IEEE had other good job ads posted. But it had people marketing and selling job ads and they were working with national companies, and they weren’t working with regional and small local companies which is where a lot of the jobs are.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

For the member looking for job listings what they got wasn’t as good as what they had before. They were upset about that. But we couldn’t do anything about it. Another big product and service that we offered was the annual salary survey and the salary calculators. What we did is we invited all U.S. members to participate in the survey. Not all did, but we got a very sizeable percentage who did. Collected the data, ran it through regression analysis and put the data into an online database where people could benchmark their salary against different criteria.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay.

Brantley:

They could look at region. They could look at size of employer. They could look at job title. They could look at level of employment. We used to hear from members all the time, saying I used your data and I got myself a raise.

Hellrigel:

Did the companies want to slap you?

Brantley:

No. I think what started to undermine the value of the job listing, of the salary survey, and the tool, was just the fact that with the internet, so much free information, everybody was providing salary surveys. That Pareto Rule which is that although we had the best, the most data granular but the bottom line is you could get “good enough”for free on the web. You know it showed up when you searched on Monster.com.

Hellrigel:

Did members have to pay to access this database?

Brantley:

No, they didn’t have to pay but they had to participate in the survey.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

If they didn’t participate in the survey, then they had to pay.

Hellrigel:

Okay, but how laborious was the survey? Like they would say I work for Acme Box Company, I have a B.A. and an M.A.?

Brantley:

It was the most granular survey in the field, and it took more than an hour for most members to complete.

Hellrigel:

Wait a minute. So, by granular you’re saying it’s a really detailed survey.

Brantley:

Yes, lots of detailed questions. Probably too many for, certainly for the current market, probably more information than is needed. We tried to create a business, selling the data to companies so they could use it in their HR process. But the reality is that small companies would just have their IEEE employees get the data for them for free.

Hellrigel:

And give it to them, yes.

Brantley:

Big companies would hire compensation firms like Mercer to develop their data.

Hellrigel:

And they’re free.

Brantley:

So, Mercer might buy our report but then they would take that data and build it into their model and sell it to 100 different companies.

Hellrigel:

Wow. Yes. Short of finding out who in their office downloaded your --

Brantley:

Or they’d do their own surveys, and their surveys were good enough. They didn’t need our data. Bottom line is it’s become less useful. It’s an expensive survey to conduct.

Hellrigel:

Do you still conduct it?

Brantley:

Yes. But we’re having to reassess the future of it. There’s a contingent that thinks it still has value, a member benefit, and we just bite the bullet and there’s others who think it’s lost its value. Then there’s others who think that if we did it right or in a different way, we could make money off of it. So, there’s no consensus on how to go forward.

Hellrigel:

Are there any people that say look at your budget and this is a line item in the budget and you’re like, okay, annually this costs us X to produce? And that’s when they’re going to say… maybe not?

Brantley:

Yes, we’ve done ROIs, we’ve done net margins. We’ve done all kinds of analysis for board members who, again, you have a board of fifteen, sixteen or eighteen people. Some of them want to crunch the numbers. Others value the member experience. Others don’t want to make a decision because everything’s good.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

[Chuckling].

Hellrigel:

Yes. They have other topics they want to talk about.

Brantley:

Exactly. Exactly. So, the result is you never get a decision and you’re left trying to figure out what to do.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I’ve heard that’s a common practice with, well, any kind of boards, any kids of committees, to make a decision, and not to say we’re going to look into it further, we’ll come back in a month. [Chuckling].

Brantley:

We tried for many, many years to build a conference business around professional topics. We started by building what was called the PACE Conference which was really sort of a train the trainer kind of thing. Here’s all of our content. Here are the volunteers for the sections. Here’s what you can take back to your sections. Over time we saw less -- it was very expensive; it was very similar in nature to the IEEE Section Congress. It’s a very expensive congress conference for us to run. We were subsidizing everybody’s travel and participation. So, we tried to evolve that. We tried to create conferences that people would pay for around career topics that didn’t really work. We did it for a number of years. Again, if you look in the book, I wrote the sort of a history of the transition. Realizing that we couldn’t afford big conferences, but that the future was with the Young Professionals, we tried to create a Future Leaders Conference. But as the finances became tighter and tighter, we tried to broaden it. We tried to focus on getting subsidiary revenue sources. We tried to figure out some way to at least make them break even. We just weren’t being successful because we were subsidizing too much.

Hellrigel:

Did you ever have a conference that wound up like, okay, you put all this money into organizing it and then maybe not as many members come to it. How do you regroup from a conference that drags you into the red?

Brantley:

Well, most of the professional conferences were run in our budget. They weren’t isolated. The calculation was difficult to make a net margin because first of all you weren’t recording labor costs. Second of all every different entity was subsidizing its own people to go. So, it might be this committee or that group or the section. We would give money to the Regions for professional activities, and they would give it to their volunteers to come to our conference. But we didn’t know who got money or how much money they got.

Hellrigel:

Or who would be coming as the rep.

Brantley:

Exactly. So, what we tried to do was just make sure that on the direct expenses that we had to pay: that we knew how much we were subsidizing, and we would try to keep within that budget. But that budget was always a break-even budget. In a bad year we might lose, $20-30,000 but it was all absorbed in the budget.

Hellrigel:

That would be one big headache.

Brantley:

Now when I say lose, that’d mean that we spent more than we planned to spend. It doesn’t mean that we actually… we didn’t make money on any conference.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

It wasn’t a plus or minus calculation, like we made or lost on our investment. It’s that we actually spent more than we budgeted to spend.

Hellrigel:

Yes. You’re expected to be a revenue source.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Not a revenue absorber. But once again as we talked to earlier, it’s hard to put a money value on services that. How do you know what the real value is to a person?

Brantley:

Yes. Yes.

Hellrigel:

If you help somebody on that job board find a job and it means now I can pay my college loans off or I don’t get my car repossessed, and I can send my kid to the dentist, how do you value that? That’s one of the conundrums if you’re always having to count things by their dollar worth.

Brantley:

Yes. We tried to launch a subscription-based career professional magazine called Today’s Engineer. It didn’t work financially. We actually thought it was so valuable we made it a free member benefit. Then it devolved over the years. The current iteration of it is IEEE-USA Insight which is a web-based, digital publication. With digitalization we looked for opportunities to innovate. We were developing a lot of content in our magazines and thought, well, how can we reuse that. That led us to create eBooks. The IEEE publication staff fought hard to kill it. The reason being that they were also trying to get into publishing technical eBooks with Wiley and they thought our eBooks would confuse the market.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay.

Brantley:

They also argued that ours weren’t of equivalent value to the members, they weren’t good enough, they weren’t peer reviewed. So, we fought to save them. We instituted peer review of a sort. We created an editorial review committee for every eBook we published. We worked really hard. We started getting all kinds of nice awards and recognitions for our eBooks. There’s a long list published in the history I sent to you. We worked on ways to promote and bring in better quality writers and more visible writers, Disney Imagineers and all kinds of interesting people. I think we got eBooks to a point where they are a credible benefit for those who use them. The trouble is no one wants to pay for them.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

Yes. The other innovation that we focused on was with the internet. Obviously, a lot of people were doing webinars. Could we do webinars based around speakers on career, technical, professional and policy topics? We worked really hard at it and created some good content but weren’t reaching a large audience until we were able to get permission. The best marketing tool promoting those webinars was the IEEE V-tools. When we would promote those webinar offerings, publicize them through V-tools, we had to get permission from each regional director for it to be sent to the members of their region.

Hellrigel:

Oh, boy.

Brantley:

It took us almost ten years to convince the MGA to allow us to take a broader approach. We got all the regional directors to just agree one time that we could do it. Then when we would put out a notice of a webinar, instead of just going to Region 3, it went out to all six regions at the same time. Suddenly the participation in our webinars skyrocketed and became some of the highest participation rates in IEEE.

Hellrigel:

Yes, these roadblocks that are there and it’s like you just find yourself like doing it, errrk, like a cartoon character, like wait a minute, why is this door cemented shut?

Brantley:

[Laughing]. There are a lot of those types of roadblocks that are created by the fact that all of us are doing similar things in similar ways. No one wants to be seen as a competitor. Quite frankly I understand where MGA’s position was, too. For a long time, we had a lot of older members who just didn’t like email. They didn’t want emails in their inbox.

Hellrigel:

Some of them won’t open (them) and then they’ll ask me something and it was like, okay, I got my email. The problem is every three years our email is deleted because some projects take longer. But I found the trick, someone from SPS wrote in big letters: URGENT REPLY NEEDED NOW or something like that.

Brantley:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Or REPLY NEEDED. I would say nearly 90 or 95 percent of members say, hey, I get emails and I was like, well, how do you know -- I don’t know what the volume is of their emails but if I send you an email I don’t know if I have to like make -- I said do I have to make it dance or…?

Brantley:

[Laughing]. Well, that’s the other problem which was also a reason MGA was very strict is that everybody wanted to send email and they wanted to send email with great frequency. For a lot of members, they were inundated with email. It wasn’t just people who didn’t like email, it was people who just couldn’t manage their inbox (because) there was so much IEEE email. I’m very sympathetic to that ‘because I had to deal with the same problem myself as a member and as a staffer. I think working with tools, giving the members opt-out, implementing all the requirements of the European rule. Just also just having a new generation that’s more used to the technology and is not afraid of the delete button. It isn’t a big issue anymore. It seems to work. But it was a real problem for a long time.

Hellrigel:

Right. That they realized that “reply all” is an option, not a mandate.

Brantley:

[Laughing]. Yes.

Hellrigel:

When I get things, I’m like why am I getting this email. So, I can understand how their email box grows.

Brantley:

I’ll tell you a story since it is history and it’s fun to have anecdotes. I had a committee, I forget what the issue was, but someone had come across a document that was a classified document that had been made available through WikiLeaks.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Brantley:

That member, that volunteer, circulated the document to our committee email reflector which included my staffer and about twenty other members. One of those members worked at a national laboratory and it was flagged by the national laboratory as a leak of classified information. We got a call from the FBI.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

They came down and I had to work with the network folks in New Jersey and they figured out exactly what happened and why. There wasn’t any concern that we had broken any laws or anything. But it was classified information, so they had to make sure that we followed a certain procedure. They confiscated my staffer’s computer and cellphone because the email, a copy of it, was on her computer and cellphone.

Hellrigel:

How long did it take to get it back?

Brantley:

I think it took us about a week or two before we got it back. Of course, that creates a challenge because we don’t have a lot of spare computers lying around the office. So, one of my most important staffers didn’t have a computer for a week.

Hellrigel:

Right. I just got a corporate phone, but people still call my personal phone and if it’s your personal phone that disappears it’s… yes.

Brantley:

Yes, so just a little anecdote about how email can screw you up if you’re not careful.

Hellrigel:

Yes. But it sounds like you’ve tried all of the suggested, potential revenue makers and then even out of the box options.

Brantley:

Yes. We tried to create an innovation institute with the idea that companies would -- we have a lot of retired executives who could speak about innovation processes and how you can be more innovative, and we thought we could sell that to companies. That was the brainchild of Ralph Wyndrum, former IEEE president who’s a former U.S.A. president. I can’t recall all of them but again if I refer you to the history I sent you, there are any number of things we tried to create or do. Again, the ultimate measure became usage and revenue. We never generated the usage level or the revenue level to justify continuing them. Or we were put in a position where some other component of IEEE was in a position to compete with us and do it better because they had funding from Future Directions or some other group to do it. We started an Entrepreneurs Network and then IEEE started an Entrepreneurs Network, so we stepped back out of it, and we did just entrepreneurship policy. Again, it’s that issue that IEEE is a big playing field and there’s a lot of people with similar interests trying to do similar things.

Hellrigel:

It’s hard to keep track of who’s doing what. We’ve got Women in Engineering.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

But then I find out that every little nook and cranny has got this women’s group. Not every, but so many and I was like… another like what the heck moment. It’s like why don’t you let others know about it? When I gave this lecture on women’s history, I’m like how am I supposed to know you have a group? Within your society.

Brantley:

Yes. When I became managing director, one of the big criticisms of IEEE-USA was that we were redundant. A lot of the things we did were redundant. It was my priority to address that. I think we accomplished two significant changes. First of which is we actually looked at everything that people said was redundant, and if it was, we quit doing it unless we were doing it better, or we changed it in a way that it wasn’t redundant. Or we partnered and said let’s work together and pool our resources and do it even better by working together. That was my approach to trying to address those criticisms of IEEE-USA. I think we made some progress although once you get that rap it’s hard to get rid of it. People still think we’re duplicating efforts.

Hellrigel:

Right. But it also was a monumental step to do an internal review to see, because sometimes organizations are wagging their finger at their critics and saying forget you. But to truly assess what you could change, partner with, or end, it seems like the practical business approach.

Brantley:

It was hard because a lot of those activities -- a good example was our Student Professional Activities Program. MGA has a Student Activities Committee, and we would do similar programs. They would do them outside the US. We would do them inside the US. The infrastructure of having two different programs of us spending U.S. dollars on a U.S. program and them spending U.S. member dollars on a global program created equity issues and we looked at it and said it’d be better if we brought them together. Basically, we stepped out of the business and tried to get involved in the program and make it a global program that benefited the U.S. and the non-U.S. members. I’m not sure it’s been entirely successful but they’re still working on it. Money is always the thing that’s in short supply, particularly when a global program means you have to play travel costs to get halfway around the world.

Hellrigel:

Exactly. Well, international fares are…

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Really expensive these days, post-COVID.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I know you have to take care of some other responsibilities. I don’t know if you wanted to add something before we wrap up today.

Brantley:

If I could.

Hellrigel:

Yes, sir.

Brantley:

What I’d like to just share a brief thought about the future of IEEE-USA

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

Obviously, I think it’s important. I think it has had significant impact. I think the volunteers and staff are doing really good things. The challenge they have right now is that they’re spread too thin. They’re trying to do too much with too little. They’re not having as much impact. Quite frankly the membership doesn’t care as much as they used to. This idea of profession for many young members is just not as important as it used to be. The nature of employment isn’t the same. The idea that companies are going to invest in you and sort of advance and support your career isn’t quite the same. Now if you want a promotion then you go get a new job.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Brantley:

That’s the rules of the road.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

There are still important services and products that we can provide. But there’s an attitude that I don’t want to pay for things that I don’t want or need. If you can help me do this when I need it, then that’s great but I don’t want to pay for all that other stuff.

Hellrigel:

Right, a menu approach similar to taxes or one person’s idea of big government is another person’s idea of a need and vice versa.

Brantley:

The trouble is that in many and probably most cases that there’s so many different things needed by so many different people. It’s not all the time, it’s only -- for example, I don’t need unemployment assistance if I’m not unemployed.

Hellrigel:

Exactly.

Brantley:

What percentage of members are unemployed? Five percent at any given time. So, for me to be able to serve these segments based on consumption at any given time is almost impossible. There’s just not enough money and resources to create and maintain that service or product. So, you’ve got to invest to have it and then you need to, when the demand increases, you’ve got to invest to increase your capacity.

Hellrigel:

Right. Shift.

Brantley:

You’ve got to have the capacity to increase. You can’t create it on the fly just because someone had a big layoff at a factory in Florida. You can’t suddenly create an unemployment assistance program. So, the challenge is that we really are dependent on a member assessment. The question is how much is too much.

Hellrigel:

Exactly, yes. The elasticity.

Brantley:

Yes. If you could only justify X amount, what is the best thing you can do for most of the members with that X amount? Those are the two real strategic questions that I spent the last ten years of my career wrestling with the board of directors. Quite honestly, we don’t have an answer yet. They’ll make incremental cuts, but they are not willing to change priorities. Not until they have no choice. Don’t fix it until it’s all the way broken.

Hellrigel:

Well, the point you made about adding new programs, when do you sunset, to use a business phrase.

Brantley:

Yes, exactly, exactly.

Hellrigel:

People don’t want to sunset [a program or project], but they want to have a new initiative, and then they want a permanent initiative, but we don’t want to increase assessments.

Brantley:

As IEEE becomes more global and as IEEE-USA has less to offer, then there’s fewer and fewer members who are going to champion IEEE-USA against the forces of globalization. The ones who want to get rid of all the national footprint, who want it just to be global. There’s that problem as well and that that’s ongoing right now because you have at least three different board groups looking at how to do things globally that will affect IEEE-USA

Hellrigel:

That’s like the Humanitarian Group?

Brantley:

John Verboncoeur has a group. The board has a group. Don Wright is chairing a group for the board. There’s a third group that I think, I forget who’s championing it. But bottom line, you’ve got three different groups with three different solutions to the problem, all of which will impact IEEE-USA. Guess what? We don’t have a chair at the table on any of them.

Hellrigel:

Right, that’s the problem, not having a voice but you’re sort of commanded by decisions.

Brantley:

Yes, yes.

Hellrigel:

I know that about a year ago you stepped down from being managing director and you’re the senior advisor so sort of transitioning in a new person.

Brantley:

That was really a gift from Steve Welby. At the time I made that transition he wasn’t sure whether he would be offered or agree to renew his contract. He had several issues, problems that he wanted to solve. He needed someone to think about them and put some ideas on paper related to the global policy activity, related to how we operate outside the U.S., related to how IEEE does mergers and acquisitions. So, he invited me basically just to become a sort of a 1-person think tank which I did for about nine months, eight months. When he decided to step down and Sophia Muithead got the position, then there was a bit of a conversation about what I would do. I did a few research projects for Sophie but eventually she just plugged me into the Climate Change Initiative, and I worked for about five months with Clara [Clara Neppel, Senior Director, European Business Operations] in the European office. Sort of the cross-OU group that was put together to try to figure out how to create a real public affairs operation around the board’s climate change priority. They’re still working on it. I’m afraid politics is… Made things very difficult. I’m not sure where they’re going to end up. But I felt like for five months I was back in the trenches again doing some really good work on an issue where I think IEEE has a role to play. The trouble is that there are not a lot of people who understand that role or how to do it. It was nice to be able to work with a group of people who did.

Hellrigel:

Was that one of President Liu’s interests, climate change? The presidents have shifted a little bit. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to keep track of their initiatives.

Brantley:

Yes, this was really Saifur Rahman’s priority.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

They’d been talking about it for years and there’s a lot of things that have been done that are really good. But this public affairs piece is sort of a missing piece. The problem is there are, again, so many people doing it, it wasn’t clear how the public affairs piece would fit in. Would it be a new organizational unit? Would it fit into this? Would it work for the volunteer activity? Who was going to pay for it? How were we going to sustain it?

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

Right now, [the IEEE] Standards Association is paying for it. But when they agreed to do that: that forced them to rethink a lot of the plans for how it was going to work.

Hellrigel:

Yes, there are a couple of topics that we didn’t get to talk about today. One’s the MOVE truck.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

The other is Standards.

Brantley:

We haven’t talked about our role in technical conferences either, which is something else. My calendar is going to be pretty full until September. I would be pleased though to meet with you in September if you want to do part two.

Hellrigel:

Okay. I’m busy through September 20th. Then I’ve got a window so I’ll send you an email and we can figure it out.

Brantley:

That would be great. I will make myself available at your convenience. Just the next couple of weeks through the end of August it’s going to be hard for me.

Hellrigel:

Thank you, sir. I’m sorry if I ran around chasing my tail a little bit but IEEE-USA is such an important I guess it’s an OU of IEEE with our schematic, organizational tree? But getting the true history of it is a challenge because you’re in DC, I’m in New Jersey.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

At IEEE, I’m a newcomer. I’m only here eight years. It’s extremely democratic in that it’s so broadly spread out but in other ways it’s so extremely hierarchical. Figuring it out.

Brantley:

When I talk to people about IEEE and I’m asked to explain the environment, what I like to say is it’s like England after the Magna Carta [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Exactly.

Brantley:

With all the dukes ruling their own duchies [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Exactly. That’s a great example. Yes. It really is because then you look at it, sometimes it’s like a maze through a castle and if you open the door does it lead somewhere or is it blocked.

Brantley:

Yes, there’s still a king in the IEEE Board of Directors, but we’ll go to the meetings, we’ll listen, and we’ll vote on things but we’re going to still keep doing our own stuff [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Right --

Brantley:

That’s the analogy.

Hellrigel:

Then climate change, that’s a committee of the board now?

Brantley:

Yes, they’re trying to turn it into an organizational unit much like IEEE-USA or MGA.

Hellrigel:

Oh, ooo.

Brantley:

It probably won’t get that far. This is a perfect example. Tom Coughlin is the incoming president.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

He said he’s going to continue to support it, but he’s also said he has other initiatives. So, you can see this committee going on and on and on and the money getting smaller and smaller and smaller over time. The same thing sort of happened when the European members wanted to get into public policy.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Brantley:

They created a committee of the board. European Public Policy Committee. They actually got a $5 assessment, but they have never been able to evolve beyond a Committee of the Board.

Hellrigel:

Yes. I know that when I look to see what’s going on at the European office and it’s like, yes, the big priority of that is Standards. Then a new director of the India office comes out of Standards?

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I do some work with the Standards Association and just trying to figure out how it all works sometimes it gives me a headache.

Brantley:

Yes. When they started creating the shared offices, the idea was that there would be a core of the office supported by the corporation as a whole, overhead if you want to call it, overhead. But that the for the rest, the purpose of the office would be for the business units that needed people in those places, like Standards or like MGA. They would put people in those places and would pay a share of the cost of that office. What’s happened is that most of the usage is really from the Standards organization. So, they’re being asked to pick up more and more of the bill. They actually just took over the Vienna office.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

My understanding and I think I’m correct is that it’s now considered an IEEE Standards office, not an IEEE office.

Hellrigel:

Oh, oh, that’s interesting because that office has been run out of Corporate Activities.

Brantley:

Yes. Yes.

Hellrigel:

That might mean that Clara and her group is going to be shifting.

Brantley:

Yes, Clara and Massimo [Massimo Pellegrino, Public Policy Program Manager], both work for, at least of the last I heard, they work for Konstantinos now. [Konstantinos Karachalios, managing director of the IEEE Standards Association]

Hellrigel:

Wow. Yes, I mean that’s a significant change and even they were in Brussels. Then they moved to Vienna.

Brantley:

They had a contractor company that gave them a Brussels address but when they actually opened an office, it was in Vienna.

Hellrigel:

Okay, that makes sense then. Yes. That it sort of was a mailing address and then because it’s like, okay Brussels, because of, I don’t know, the European court it… I mean it made sense at one point for the EU.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

But if you’re physically not there then… as they say in New Jersey, it is what it is.

Brantley:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

I’ve been to Brussels, [well at least the airport]. I’ve been stuck at the airport there on my way to Rhodes, [Greece].

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I’ve been to Vienna and it’s a nice city but that’s a big change and I don’t even know if that’s been announced.

Brantley:

In terms of site selection, as a member of the Management Council, I got to be involved in some of those conversations. I can tell you that there were a number of sites that were considered including Switzerland which was ruled out because of the labor laws. Belgium was also difficult for the labor laws. There was a strong case for Belgium because a lot of the work we were doing then was with the European Union. But Vienna was a very livable city. With good transportation connections throughout Europe. It was very close to the major European automotive industries. That was of significant interest to the Standards folks.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Makes sense.

Brantley:

So, once you put all the checks next to all of the boxes and weighed them, Vienna turned out to be the place they preferred to be.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I liked Vienna. It’s sort of like when I’m figuring things out and working with Standards a bit, it was like, okay, Standards is being talked about more with a link to Vienna. India, Mysore, well I found out that the name Harish Mysore, Mysore is a region of India.

Hellrigel:

Then he was replaced, and that gentleman’s link is Standards.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Standards is a business.

Brantley:

It is. Konstantinos [Karachalios] has been very strategic and the organization has been very effective in positioning itself globally on a number of issues like internet policy and you name it, ethics of AI, sustainability. I mean in some ways, on their staff, they have public affairs and government relations professionals. They’re doing a great job, I think. They’ve been collaborative with IEEE-USA. So, we worked to common purpose but when you work in the U.S., you work with us. The partnership has been pretty good. I think we’ve made some real impact because of the partnership. They’re dynamic. They create opportunities. They go in and then we step in and help them deliver. That’s what our role has been.

Hellrigel:

I recorded an oral history with Marco Migliaro [from the IEEE Standards Association] that I’m editing now. Just to watch that grow. Even in Piscataway. They [IEEE Standards Association staff] are in the 501 building. [The office building IEEE rents at 501 Hoes Lane in Piscataway]. I did go down there to meet with Bill Reuben and Mary Lynne Nielson. People tell me to take the bus [IEEE shuttle bus]. I was thinking, the bus? It’s a walk.

Brantley:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

I cut across the church lawn and I’m over there. I don’t know. That’s one group that I’m starting to work with a bit more. The Oral History Project, after Kathy Land [2021 IEEE President Susan K. (Kathy) Land] decided we should interview all the Life Fellows and I was like, oh, no. You know there’s one of me and there’s how many thousands of them?

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Thus far, I trained 105 people and I have five people recording oral histories.

Brantley:

Oh.

Hellrigel:

Tom Coughlin actually recorded an oral history with one of his colleagues. I was working with a few staff members at IEEE Standards Association. Out of this now, people know about the Oral History Projects and that. So, I’ve gone from a handful to like twenty-nine projects now. So, I feel like kind of the IEEE growing across the spectrum, but there’s still a staff of one and it’s me [Laughing].

Brantley:

[Laughing]. Well, it’s the power of the volunteer, right?

Hellrigel:

Right, but that’s the challenge.

Brantley:

Yes. That’s the challenge. Yes.

Hellrigel:

Also, that people don’t have the patience for the infant to grow its legs.

Brantley:

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Hellrigel:

You know? Nick, you need to do it yesterday. What they measure as success, it is like, okay, I’m taking someone that’s an engineer and trying to train them in an entirely new discipline. How long would it take me to do it? The other challenge is the time involved. I’ll be quite honest. We’ve spent quite a long time talking but the real time consumption is going to be editing the transcript.

Brantley:

Oh, I know and I’m afraid I’m giving you a book.

Hellrigel:

But, no, that’s cool.

Brantley:

What you said though is that I would say it’s like IEEE-USA. in a sense is that all you can do is do the best you can with what you got, right? That’s what we do. That’s what a lot of people at IEEE do.

Hellrigel:

Right. I mean my motto has always been, not that I’m a gambler, win with the cards you have.

Brantley:

That’s a good one, too.

Hellrigel:

To figure it out and I don’t have the time to waste about what would have, could have, should have…

Brantley:

Yes. Yes.

Hellrigel:

I have a new product now called Personal Narratives because some people weren’t following the policy of how to do a complete oral history. They’re sending me a twenty-minute vignette. It’s still important, but I don’t have time and it’s not an oral history and so quality control is one of my issues and concerns that we have a complete oral history so that I don’t have just all this story core level coming in.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Story core level is good for a specific thing like, say, if you go to a conference and it’s the conference of Acme Widgets 35 and we’re going to do a history project on the first thirty-five years. Good, that’s site specific and it’s not going to be starting with where were you born.

Brantley:

Yes. Yes.

Hellrigel:

It’s going to focus on that. That’s manageable. But I need to call it something else. I will call these short recordings a “Personal Narrative” because they are not full-length life story oral histories. That’s where we’re going with that one. But I know you need to move on. We’ll wrap up for today, Sir. Then we’ll email and find out another convenient time. Then in the interim I’ll get the raw draft. I’ll let you look at the raw draft before I edit it, just to see what you feel you need to add.

Brantley:

I probably won’t add or touch it much. I do appreciate you taking out the ums and ahs.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes, we take all of that out.

Brantley:

Anything that you think is extraneous, too. However, it will read like a conversation. I do look forward to having another conversation.

Hellrigel:

Well, thank you sir. Good luck with your home.

Brantley:

Thanks [Laughing]. Yes, they’re quiet all of a sudden. I’ve got to go figure out what they’re doing.

Hellrigel:

It’s a tea break.

Brantley:

Could be. It’s getting toward the end of the day. They may have finished hammering for the day.

Hellrigel:

Well, thank you very much and have a good day, sir.

Brantley:

You as well.

Hellrigel:

Goodbye.

Brantley:

By the way, you don’t have to call me Sir, just call me Chris.

Hellrigel:

Okay, Chris. Thank you.

Brantley:

Thank you.

Hellrigel:

Bye, bye.

Brantley:

Take care.

END PART 1

BEGIN PART 2

IEEE-USA (cont.)

Hellrigel:

Today is November 21, 2023. I’m Mary Ann Hellrigel, Institutional Historian, Archivist, and Oral History Program Manager at the IEEE History Center. I’m with Chris Brantley who’s the retired Managing Director of IEEE-USA. He held that post from 2004 to 2022. We’re recording part two of his oral history. Thank you for your time, sir.

Brantley:

Thank you for having me. This has been a real pleasure to be able to talk with you.

Hellrigel:

Yesterday and for the past few days, I’ve been reading through your fiftieth anniversary publication of the history of IEEE-USA. I’m going to start just at the top. I noticed that you’ve dedicated it to the 2007 IEEE-USA President John Meredith. I noticed that he has also chaired the IEEE-USA History Project that was commemorating the 125th anniversary of IEEE in 2009. If you wouldn’t mind, I wondered if you could briefly explain this dedication because I was intrigued by it.

Brantley:

Certainly. I think we’ve talked about the fact that I’m a sort of an amateur historian at heart as well. That was a common interest that John Meredith and I shared. IEEE was celebrating an anniversary when he was IEEE-USA president. He wanted IEEE-USA to be a part of the IEEE effort, so there were a couple of things that were done. The first thing that I primarily worked on was I collected everything that I could, and had it digitalized to create a section of the IEEE-USA website that we called the History Project. Then we’ve used that as a repository of historical documents as they’re created, for example, important reports or annual reports or composition of the board of directors each year, et cetera. John really inspired me to do that work. I helped John put together a presentation that he gave at a conference, and he also worked with Pender McCarter of our staff on sort of a short history of the organization. Actually, the history that you’re reading is the follow-on to John’s history.

In writing the history that I did for the fiftieth anniversary; the goal was twofold. One was to sort of honor John and the work that he did to document the first fifteen years or so and but then also to bring it all the way up to the end of my term as managing director. It was perhaps a little bit of ego on my part just to be able to look back and see what was accomplished, the years that I worked with IEEE-USA. The timing was right because it was our fiftieth anniversary, and we needed to get something on paper anyway. If there was any surprise, it is that it came out as long as it did. I’m sure Russ Harrison would have rather it would be a little bit shorter. [Laughing]

Hellrigel:

Why is that? Maybe because it took more of your time, or was it going to cost more money to publish it, or…?

Brantley:

Yes, I think because the anniversary year is almost up, and they had hoped to have something by the June Board Series or something that could be handed out. What they ended up with was 200 pages. A little bit more than they could just quickly cycle.

But back to John Meredith. John had been a naval officer and he used to tell me stories of his service during the Vietnam War. He served on an aircraft carrier. We talked about U.S. History. During the Board Series, we’d go out and have meals and just sit and talk about history and different people and historical figures. He was the nicest man in the world. He was one of the best what I call “retail politician.” When he set out to do something, he would talk to every individual whose help he needed and get them lined up and ready to do their bit, and somehow things always got done. You see a lot of presidents and vice presidents and leaders bring initiatives that fail because they don’t have support. Well, John was the kind of guy who built the support before he brought the initiative, so things always seemed to work. I have to admit, I had great admiration for the way he did things, and he was just such a great guy. I enjoyed working with him greatly. That’s why I dedicated it to him.

I hate to put it this way, but without his effort and without me continuing his effort, I’m afraid most of the IEEE-USA’s history would have been lost because we’ve moved so many times. Every time you move all the boxes, stuff you don’t want to pay to keep gets thrown away. A lot of stuff we just didn’t know what to do with. I made it a point to try to preserve as much as I could and digitalize as much as I could. There’s still lots of material in the D.C. office that didn’t get thrown out, unfortunately that we’re having to pay rent to store. But that hopefully one day we can digitalize and make it part of the record.

Hellrigel:

This is stored offsite or just some offices?

Brantley:

It’s in the office. For example, all of our board [IEEE-USA Board] minutes and materials going back to the 1970s. I may have shared a story with you in our previous interview where while I was inventorying that, I found a gap in the records. Through serendipity I got a mailing from a library in, I forget if it’s Indiana or Ohio, and they had all of our board minutes in their public reading files.

Hellrigel:

Huh.

Brantley:

They were emptying out their files, so they mailed them back to me. I have no idea how they got there. I’m sure one of our volunteers put them there.

Hellrigel:

Probably, they came in with their donation.

Brantley:

Yes, could be. But I got them back, they fit perfectly, and it filled that gap in our files. That was a bit of serendipity.

Hellrigel:

Going forward then, who’s going to be in charge of history now that you’ve stepped away?

Brantley:

Well, I presume Russ Harrison. He is the guardian or the preserver or the curator of our history at this point. And his staff because obviously it takes a group of people to keep and manage information and to put it into useable products.

Hellrigel:

I mean there’s still time but it’s getting short to premier it for the board in February?

Brantley:

I don’t know what the plan is at this point. What I gave them was a draft. It still needed some review that you mentioned: the interviews, the commentary by the past presidents. That wasn’t all of them. We just ran out of time but Russ, since he has more time, he may want to get more feedback from the presidents who didn’t have a chance to respond. There are a couple of things that needed to be checked off on, fact-checked, just to make sure.

Hellrigel:

Then I noticed you had inserted places for the photographs and the illustrations.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

They’d have to be pulled.

Brantley:

It’s just that is a huge chore.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

IEEE-USA is so understaffed in communications. They do so much and to clear the decks for a project like this is quite an imposition.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I noticed in your book that you pointed out that since 2000, the professional staff decreased from twenty-eight to sixteen.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

That’s a big drop. That was another point I noticed: in 1998 IEEE-USA became the new moniker or the branding. Then in 2000 there was a shift where I guess the board of directors was streamlined around that time from eighteen to fifteen. The chartered volunteer committees were reduced by a third. The staff was reduced. Then in 2000, I guess was a big gut-check point about costs.

Brantley:

Yes, the reality is for IEEE-USA we peaked at the height of the dot-com boom in I guess right up to about 2000. Then we had the Y2K problem; that was part of that, too. But there was the dot-com bust, and at that point IEEE’s membership in the U.S. started to decline, the higher grade membership in particular. It pretty much declined consistently from 2002 to the present day and it’s been going down. When you’re operating an organization that is losing, you know 2 percent to 3 percent of its revenue every year, because of declining membership, that’s revenue from the special assessment. You’re also having to deal with inflation, so that means you’re looking at the need to streamline 3 percent to 5 percent of your costs every year. Rather than do that every year, what you do is you try some initiatives, you try to create new revenue, you launch new programs, and you prioritize. Then when, or if they don’t pan out, and you’re not making the new revenue, then after every three to five years you basically do the gut-check and you say, okay, we’re going to have to reorganize. We have to streamline. We have to reduce our overhead. We have to reduce our staff. We have to cut back our programs.

Unfortunately, that’s been our history. It was unfortunately the history of most of my tenure as managing director as IEEE-USA was trying to find creative ways of delaying downsizing for as long as possible. One of those which was actually on the list for us to talk about today was this idea of launching a conferences program. We had run conferences that were primarily in the professional space and the career space for years, including Careers Con, the PACE Conference, et cetera. But the challenge with those was we weren’t making money off them. Well, most of the participants were volunteers whose travel was subsidized either directly or indirectly. We tried to expand on that by adding conferences or sessions or tutorials or other things that would expand the audience to bring in registrations, but it didn’t really pan out. We had a volunteer, Russell Lefevre, who at this point he was our vice president of government relations. He was very active in technical societies. He was a member of the [IEEE] Aeronautics and Electronic Systems Society. Russ was a great guy to work with. Russ understood the TAB (IEEE Technical Activities Board) side of the house and he understood how the algorithms worked for allocation of conference revenues. What he did is he introduced IEEE-USA to the business of sponsoring technical conferences. But in order to do that, we had to come up with a rationale for why. We didn’t want to compete with TAB [phonetic] and we didn’t want to rub MGA (Member and Geographic Activities) the wrong way. We had to come up with a set of operating rules for how we would do things. So, the idea was we would sponsor or create technical conferences where there wasn’t an existing IEEE conference where the subject matter of the conference was significant. It was new and emerging technology that had significant public policy or career implications.

Hellrigel:

Doing “new” would get you out of being charged with stealing somebody else’s initiative?

Brantley:

Exactly. It also would be in a niche that no one else was doing or working on. Also, the idea was that it wouldn’t just be technical. We would make a conference that looked at technology, policy, and careers altogether. We did have to negotiate an understanding with MGA that we would not try to sponsor existing regionally or section-run conferences. That’s because those revenues generated from IP (intellectual property) from those conferences flow back to MGA and they use it sort of to keep the budget balanced.

Hellrigel:

Yes. [Laughing]

Brantley:

We didn’t want to rub them the wrong way. What we focused on was working with the Regions to create new conferences. We started using our annual meeting as sort of a testbed working with a Region. They would create a regional conference in association with our annual meeting. We would get economies of scale. We would use the same facilities. We would co-market it. It would try to drive the local conference or the regional conference and that’s where conferences like GreenTech, the Region 5 conference, came from. There are several other conferences that came of that, including Humanitarian Technologies. We found that it was difficult to sustain [because] not all the Regions were interested in doing that every year. The logic for us was that we would -- You know a regional conference has a hard time marketing outside of the region, but if we’re a cosponsor, we can help them market it to the entire United States and try to turn it from a regional conference into a national conference. That was the business model that we tried to follow.

I remember Russ Lefevre told us that the conference revenues were the gift that just keeps giving because once you get your intellectual property into the system that subscription sales, that revenue stream, sort of continues. If you can just grow it incrementally every year, it can grow into a significant source of revenue. We were able to do that, thanks largely to the efforts of another volunteer, Charles Rubenstein who was the Chairman of our Conferences Committee. He was very proactive in starting up a lot of small, mostly regional conferences, oftentimes with institutions like Temple [University] in Philadelphia and others. Again, these were not killer conferences. You might get 100, 150 people there, but the intellectual property fed into the algorithms and generated a nice steady income stream for us. It became our largest source of revenue that was nonmember special assessment.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Brantley:

Yes, it was not enough to keep us from having to make budget cuts or anything like that, but it was still sort of helping us keep the lights on so to speak.

Hellrigel:

So, it was successful, and this is still running?

Brantley:

It is. It has been suffering somewhat for lack of focus from the board and volunteers. It goes through cycles. To thrive it requires hands on support from a conference chair who can really make things happen. After Charles Rubenstein stepped down, he sort of timed out because he was chair for so long, we had to go through a rotation but the board looked at it. We had a near miss with a conference in Seattle that created some financial risk. IEEE was able to clean it up, fortunately.

Hellrigel:

Could you tell me the name of that conference or is that classified information?

Brantley:

To be honest I can’t remember the name of it. It was done in affiliation with the a technical society and with Tsinghua University. It was really sort of an excuse to bring Chinese researchers over to Seattle. It wasn’t well marketed because the conference chairman sort of disappeared for like six months. No one was paying any attention and the hotel started calling asking about arrangements and commitments. Then that’s when I got pulled in to try to clean it up. The board was a little gun-shy after that. Basically, we had two methods of making money. One was registrations, and the other was IP assignments. To get registrations, you had to be a sponsor, a financial sponsor. To get an IP assignment you could be a cosponsor and have them assign the IP rights. Since they couldn’t take the money anyway, they give it to you, and you give them the marketing support.

Hellrigel:

By they, do you mean MGA or MCE (Meetings, Conferences and Events)?

Brantley:

It’s the Region or the Section or whoever was running the conference. The board basically said no more financial co-sponsorships, or it limited them significantly. That cut out about half of our conferences, so the calendar of conferences has been shrinking. The revenue is still coming in, not quite as much as it used to. As long as there is a core of that, they’ll continue making revenue, but there’s no one that’s working hard to create or grow that calendar of conferences. I think that’s a challenge because a lot of people ask the question why are we even doing it [because] it’s not really in our mission statement. We’re only doing it to make money. It’s not really solving the problem financially, so why are we doing it.

Hellrigel:

When COVID hit, and this is March of 2020 and then 2020 conferences aren’t being held, did that have a negative impact on your conference schedule?

Brantley:

The first year we lost probably two-thirds of our conferences and then the one-third that was left was done remotely. There were a couple that were done early in the year that were normal. By the second year, pretty much everyone that was going to have a conference did it remotely.

Hellrigel:

Remotely, yes.

Brantley:

For us, since we were only drawing IP revenue from papers presented, that was fine for us because there was no risk and no cost associated. We were just getting revenue and doing marketing which was staff time that was already bought and paid for.

Hellrigel:

Right, you could have taken a bigger economic whack if you had been continued to be cosponsors of certain things and then all of a sudden, you’re on the hook and having to think, oh, do we go back to this hotel two years in the future.

Brantley:

Exactly.

Hellrigel:

The conferences have had to deal with that. I know in my profession, history, conferences, some of them were like, we can’t go to New Orleans in September of 2020, but we’ll go back there when it opens up. You didn’t have that headache.

Brantley:

Yes. Now I will add that we also tried very hard to create legitimate technical conferences on specific subjects. We had one we started on RFID technology. We also partnered to initiate the first IEEE Ethics Conference. Now what tends to happen is -- and the RFID conference is a good example -- we were partnered with ComSoc (IEEE Communications Society) and a couple of other groups, regional groups. The challenge was once it was established and successful, they wanted to go global, and our board didn’t want us to be a sponsor of a non-U.S. conference. We lost control of it, and it became a ComSoc conference. It just went away in terms of us. It’s still a very successful conference but we don’t draw any revenue from it. We’re not involved with it. The Ethics Conference was the same. We, IEEE-USA, had a pretty good one, the first one. Then they wanted to meet in Australia. The question was, would we be involved. I think the third one was in Canada. At some point, we just sort of lost control of it and it was taken over by the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT). It became theirs. They tacked it onto their signature conference. Again, we got them started, but we just couldn’t keep ownership of them and continue them. A lot of that was because we didn’t have a staff or a core of volunteers that would actually manage them. We relied on a very small handful of volunteers and when they went away, we lost control.

Hellrigel:

Yes, and if you go through MCE, what I’ve learned at different conferences by talking to the local people, MCE subcontracts with companies that subcontract and subcontract, so it becomes a big management issue, too.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

If you want to bring in and vet other things and then you have a success but then it winds up spiraling in many directions. And if you’ve already shrunk your staff, this is a new initiative for them to do.

Brantley:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Well, you got two homeruns, but then the game continued in someone else’s ballpark.

Brantley:

That’s right, pretty much. It was frustrating for me because I just lacked the resource to try to fight for ownership of those. The board wasn’t really interested, and I understand why because, again, it wasn’t our mission to run technical conferences. But I think there’s still great potential there. If it’s not by IEEE-USA, then I think in partnership with technical societies. The idea that a conference, a technical conference, should be about more than technology, it should be about the context that technology is going to be developed and used: the social implications, the ethics, and the career implications. How’s it going to affect the working engineer? I think all of that is part of the discussion. If more of that was going on at technical conferences, I think that it would grow the attendance and it would increase the relevance of IEEE to groups that aren’t currently members.

Hellrigel:

Well, it would also bring in people that aren’t just driven by the “publish or perish” paradigm.

Brantley:

Exactly.

Hellrigel:

Okay, I’ll go, and I’ll pay this really high registration rate because I’m going to get a publication out of it. But on the other hand, what else are you going to do?

Brantley:

Exactly.

Hellrigel:

I know some conferences have pulled in workshops. Some conferences have also included historical discussions such as panels and round tables. For example, I went to the big Signal Processing ICASSP in Rhodes in June of this year, 2023. They had a lot of different plenary sessions, including a few devoted to the history of the IEEE Signal Processing Society for its 75th Anniversary. They had workshops afterwards, a whole day afterwards. The workshops attracted young professionals, and some attended the history sessions, too. Then they also had some meet and greets with the textbook authors and things like that that some people seemed really interested in. It’s not just listening to a technical paper.

Brantley:

Yes. It’s interesting for me. When I started with IEEE and before I started with IEEE the relationship between IEEE-USA and the technical societies was --… particularly societies like Power and Energy -- was pretty close. We actually would organize panel sessions and bring policy content to the conferences in their general annual meetings and things. We worked together on a lot of activities. The societies would come to us because they had an interest in public policy. We would support them, set up lobbying days on Capitol Hill to support robotics, energy, green energy, and jobs. It’s hard because as the societies have gotten more global there’s been less interest in working specifically on U.S. policy issues. It tends to go through cycles, so you can start to work with the president of that society but two years later they’ve got a different president from a different country, and he just isn’t interested in working on these policy things anymore. So, it’s really hard to sustain. There are opportunities there, but it’s hard to sustain.

I think if I could start my career over again, I would focus more on building that relationship to leverage where all that knowledge resides. That technical know-how resides in the TAB societies and the conferences. Then connect that to the bigger world. That makes them more relevant and makes us more impactful when we talk to policy makers.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Then some of the constraint is, well, you’re IEEE-USA and then your board asks why are you getting involved with UNESCO or the European Union.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

But there is that synergy.

Brantley:

Well, that’s a hard issue for IEEE, too. They created a global public policy committee that is still trying to find its way. They’ve got this new outreach office for global public affairs running out of Region 8. They keep trying to figure out a way to deal with the issue but what they’re trying to avoid is creating another IEEE-USA in India or China or Europe.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

Now there is a public policy committee in Europe, but it is very funding constrained. The reality is you do public policy for two reasons. You do it to give the members a voice. You also do it because you have a public obligation as sort of the stewards of technology to inform policymakers about the issues and challenges and opportunities that are out there. IEEE still hasn’t quite figured out how it wants to do that. It just knows that it doesn’t want to create a lot more OUs (operating units) that it can’t staff and sustain.

Hellrigel:

Yes. As they have their funding crunch and the whole bandwidth issues. But it is a challenge: how do you operate globally and then how do you maintain flexibility?

Brantley:

Yes, this is not unique to public policy. This has always been a challenge for IEEE regardless. But it’s the old acronym: “think globally, act locally.” The policy gets made, it gets made on a national and in some cases regional basis like in Europe. You have to deal with the issues of the jurisdiction. You can’t sit in New Jersey or Washington, D.C. and provide useful insight to policymakers in India or China. You’ve got to use Indians and Chinese as your voice because they are part of the system, they understand the culture, they understand the process, and the issues are different. A big challenge for IEEE-USA, too, is that issues that are important to U.S. members might be contrary to the interest of our members elsewhere. In India, for example, the H-1B. We (the USA) is investing now in chips. Well, we’re investing in chips so that we can be more competitive against China. Well, that’s not going to be good for the Chinese.

If the organization isn’t willing to act in the interest of its member constituencies, then it loses relevance in that space. It’s hard to maintain a credible public policy operation if all you’re doing is running around to UN meetings and talking about motherhood and apple pie issues. You’ve really got to be able to roll up your sleeves and deal with the realities of the needs of each jurisdiction, whether it’s siting of electrical power transmission in the United States, or how do you deal, or do cellphones cause cancer. These issues are just ubiquitous. If you’re not part of the discussion, then you’re irrelevant.

Hellrigel:

Right. Then sometimes there are themes like One IEEE. Okay, there could be a pan-nationalism One IEEE, but like you said you have to act locally. That’s one of the challenges even in IEEE-USA if you’re acting locally. I noticed in the book that you wrote for the fiftieth anniversary, not that you’re lobbying, but you’re communicating technical information to various elected representatives and their staff.

Brantley:

Technically it is lobbying. We disclose it to Congress and to the IRS as lobbying expenditures, but it is under the rules established in the United States by which nonprofits can lobby which means there are things we can’t do. We can’t give money to political campaigns. We can’t engage in partisan communications. But in terms of giving testimony and commenting on regulations, that’s not even defined as lobbying. Anyone can do that. You and I can do that. It’s not lobbying. As a matter of fact, the rationale for that is that the government is asking you for input.

Hellrigel:

Your advice.

Brantley:

Exactly. You’re invited to give a testimony. You’re invited to respond to a public request for comment, so that’s not lobbying at all. A lot of people don’t understand what is and what isn’t lobbying. But the other thing they don’t understand is that nonprofits do lobby. By law, they’re encouraged to lobby. It’s just they have to do it within very strict rules.

Hellrigel:

Right. Making it very clear that you don’t give out money is paramount. Did you go and participate in these activities, or did you bring in the experts from the various Societies?

Brantley:

I started as a legislative representative. Then I was basically working with our policy committees. I’ve been my whole professional life a registered lobbyist and I did all the things that lobbyists do except write checks to candidates or give to public PAC funds or anything like that. But in terms of knocking on doors, having meetings, preparing testimonies, organizing get out the vote, not for candidates but just to encourage people to vote: all those things I worked on, but I also worked with volunteers. We had experts on various subject matter: communications, energy, intellectual property, aerospace. Those committees were made up of volunteers that came from the technical societies and that came from the regions. Outstanding people, some people who had significant experience in the public policy space working in government. One of the founders of IEEE- USA, Leo Young, was a high-level executive in the Department of Defense. He ran research programs for the Department of Defense. There is an overlap. In many cases, our volunteers would go on to serve in government. David Sharma, D. K. Sharma, ran the Research and Special Projects Administration for the Department of Transportation. We’ve had members work -- and Fellows is another example. We have volunteers who go work in the White House or go work in Capitol Hill or go work at the State Department. You have to be careful, and you have to make sure they’re not there to lobby for you. They are there because of their experience and expertise. But you can facilitate the work of government by making these people available to them. So, yes, it was a combination of all of the above. I wrote my fair share of testimonies and knocked on a lot of doors. But I also worked with a lot of great volunteers.

Hellrigel:

Is there any issue that’s more memorable than others?

Brantley:

Well, we’ve talked a little bit already about some of the controversial ones like H-1B [visa]. Whenever someone would question why we would work on an issue that was controversial, I would remind them that the issue that got us created was portable pensions. That was a very controversial issue. Companies didn’t like the idea that their employees could leave with a pension: they wanted retention. But the world changes and circumstances change. I don’t know. There’s a lot of things we did over the years, probably too many for me to recall in any detail, that I take great pride in. Putting your fingerprints on major legislation: energy bills, competitiveness bills, innovation bills, seeing how government has evolved. One was if you look at the National Science Foundation. There’s an Engineering Directorate at NSF but it’s not in the name. It’s really focused on basic (research) and so we worked really hard for many, many, many years to get NSF to focus more and more on applied research and the ability to take the basic and move it into practical applications. Again, not to create products or compete with the private sector but just to bring the technology to a state that the private sector could actually use it. That’s now the law. That was partly because of organizations like us lobbied for that. There’s a new Technology Directorate at NSF that does this kind of work. Yes, I take a lot of pride in things that we’ve put our fingerprints on over the years.

Hellrigel:

Yes. In your book, it’s not a chronology -- well I guess it is. You would go year by year.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

The major developments are very useful.

Brantley:

Those largely came out of our annual reports. The intent there was just to show how we engaged every year. You don’t hit home runs every time you’re at the plate. Every year you try to get some important things done. Election years are challenging. Certain Congresses get deadlocked. You can’t get things done. Nothing gets done in a year. It often times takes three, four, five years, sometimes it takes ten years to get something done or more. Sometimes it takes a total change in circumstances. It takes a crisis, or it takes some existential challenge. Then suddenly Congress wakes up and says, geez, we’d better do something about that. But the fact that you’ve been talking to them for ten years means that when they need to decide how to do it, they know who to call for help.

Hellrigel:

I’ve found that even to chronicle IEEE history, because people are so busy, memories get a little fuzzy, and looking at the annual reports is a good way of picking out what are some of the highlights. That’s useful as a start.

Brantley:

The little secret is that I wrote all those annual reports [Laughing] as a part of my own historical wanting to preserve some history there.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Those were very useful. Going forward, when that gets uploaded on your website and hopefully cross-posted on ETHW, then people will have access because that’s what we’re trying to do.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

It shifts more info to ETHW which hopefully would have a longer shelf life than various websites.

Brantley:

Well, my last comment on that is that, again, the goal is -- and again I’m taking a lot of credit, but I didn’t do all that work. All I did was try to capture it on paper. There’s that aspect. But the most important thing is that with the turnover, you’re constantly trying to sell IEEE-USA both to members and prospective members and to IEEE and the volunteer leadership. In many circumstances you go through periods of time where they would just as soon get rid of IEEE-USA. The question basically comes back, well, what have you done for us, you know? Why should you be funded? The goal for me in writing this was not just to preserve the history but also to make the case for what it is that we have accomplished and what is the value of that. Hopefully the people who understand how things work would read that and understand that we have delivered value on the member dollar. My goal is to get it published and as widely distributed as possible. But again, it is a hard challenge for an organization that’s strapped for resources and particularly time. It will take a while I guess.

Hellrigel:

Right. Yes, publishing and handing it out. But at least then to remind a few years’ worth of elected IEEE or appointed members, hey look at this.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

When you have Tom Coughlin coming in as the incoming IEEE president, the 2024 IEEE President, and he was an IEEE-USA president, and a few others, they understand the value, but he also has traveled so extensively globally that he understands IEEE as a wider entity.

Brantley:

Yes. Tom, like many of his predecessors, they have what I would call the member perspective on IEEE. They see IEEE as a mechanism, as a forum, as a way of serving the interests of the members which is a big part of why we exist. If the members can’t see it, if they can’t understand it, if they don’t understand the value of it, then why are you doing it? The value of having someone like Tom in that leadership position is that he’s been a part of it, he’s seen it, he can explain it to people who ask those questions.

Hellrigel:

Also, that his career is seeing the global shift.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

With the post-1963 and the evolution. He’s been traveling a lot recently as the IEEE President-Elect or incoming IEEE President, one of the Three Ps (President-Elect, President, and Past President.) [Laughing]

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

So, he’s become it’s almost like the you know, there’s Tom.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Yes. I showed up in IEEE-USA’s office to talk to people there and Ann Marie Kelly at the IEEE Computer Society. I look around and there’s Tom Coughlin. [Laughing].

Brantley:

Tom, it was my great pleasure to work with Tom as president. Apart from having very many similar interests like others that I’ve worked with he is a consensus builder and he is very positive. He’s always looking for opportunities to do good things. He’s not there to tear stuff down, he’s there to build stuff up. I really appreciated that about Tom.

Hellrigel:

We were talking a few minutes ago about crises… I don’t know if it’s a good time to segue to the MOVE van.

Brantley:

Oh, sure, sure. Yes, I was reviewing my notes on that just to make sure I got the years right. But that was really, again, talking about dynamic volunteers: that was really Mary Ellen Randall who was the spearhead on that. It was an initiative that actually started in Region 3 and she engaged Derald Morgan in Region 5. They’d had some conversations with Cisco about the possibility of having a truck. But they needed some kind of structure and way to rationalize this and they needed some money to make it all happen. So, Mary Ellen came to the IEEE-USA board. She sits on the board as a regional director. She asked for IEEE-USA to become the partner in this. It was a difficult decision for us because… well I think three things I’ll say. One is that obviously the money was going to be a challenge. Not because of the truck, the truck was free but it had to be reconditioned, we had to pay insurance. There are a lot of operating costs if you’re actually going to use it. There are a lot of liability issues. The volunteers are putting themselves in harm’s way in theory. There’s maintenance issues. Replacing a tire on that truck costs about $300 bucks. Filling that tank of gas costs hundreds of dollars – It was going to be a financial challenge for IEEE to make a commitment. The other issue was IEEE had concerns. They had liability concerns. What kind of risks are we taking on here? Are we really going to send our volunteers into the middle of disaster zones? What’s going on here? So, we had to talk with Legal about insurance and how to protect IEEE. But IEEE-USA came through. They committed money to refurbish and support the operations of the truck for a couple of years. The idea was that once they got themselves set up they would have their feet on the ground, they would do fundraising and raise operational funds to support the program.

Hellrigel:

It was linked in with the IEEE Foundation more directly.

Brantley:

Yes, we worked with them and the foundation to help create a fund. We helped do some member donation initiatives to support them. Mary Ellen’s smart. She knew where the money was. She knew we had donor funds sitting in the foundation. She kept coming back to the board and asking for operations money. Every time they needed to upgrade the truck or add money for operations then she would come back to the USA Board and ask for more money. I guess at the time I was leaving they were having the discussions with Cisco which was offering a second truck.

Hellrigel:

A second truck.

Brantley:

We had to figure out how we were going to deal with that. There were conversations about did Region 6 want to get involved and could we have a truck in the western part of the USA, west of the Mississippi. Where could you put it? The truck didn’t meet California emission standards so it couldn’t be housed in California and so we had to find a place in Arizona for it. Lots and lots and lots of operational issues. One of the real challenges for us was that I didn’t really have a staff dedicated to support this, you know? Helping them with the financial transactions, helping them deal with vendors and helping them navigate the IEEE issues that had to be navigated. So, we just sort of did the best we could and the volunteers stepped up and we actually designated Mary Ellen as the staff director of the program so she handled the programmatic side of it. We just handled the bureaucratic side of it. The financial transactions and things. Then at one point they needed an operations fund. IEEE and Tom Seigert and his folks stepped in, and they created an operating account so that as they needed to spend funds, they could do it. This was necessary because Region 3 didn’t want to manage their accounts anymore, so they needed a way to actually buy gas and pay for hotel bills and do things that they needed to do. So, IEEE stepped in and set up an accounting structure for oversight and an account where they could operate out of. They’re still looking for a better way to do it but that’s been sort of the make-work solution for the last five, six years. The interest in it has expanded, as you know, outside the U.S.

Hellrigel:

Puerto Rico.

Brantley:

Yes. Well, technically Puerto Rico is part of the U.S.

Hellrigel:

It’s a commonwealth and a territory of the United States.

Brantley:

But it’s not part of IEEE-USA. We couldn’t necessarily parachute the truck in when they had their big hurricane. But several of the volunteers went down and did some field work there. One of the things that followed on from that is the local section organized and now they have a volunteer group there in Puerto Rico that is actually doing MOVE stuff. There’s a volunteer group in India that’s looking at how they can do things. They’re looking. There have been efforts to look at ways of providing assistance without having a truck. For example, a lot of the value of what we’re doing in the U.S. is not necessarily the capabilities of the truck, it’s the volunteers that can go in and set up networking systems for the Red Cross and deal with sort of the technical challenges that they have to deal with. The truck certainly does come in handy, and it gives our volunteers a place to sleep when there’s no hotel rooms available. But a lot of times you can do a lot of good work without a truck.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

They’ve been looking at ways to do that as well.

Hellrigel:

Then is this why Humanitarian Activities is going to maybe take over the MOVE truck? I don’t know.

Brantley:

I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. The reality is there was an IEEE effort to create a Humanitarian Activities Board of Directors. Similar to the Awards Board. I don’t know what became of that. But the idea was that it would oversee all of the humanitarian programs including MOVE. There is the committee that was going to evolve up into that board. I don’t know that it’s made any progress. Again, IEEE has this antipathy to creating new boards and operating units. Part of the goal of driving that was actually Steve Welby’s agenda. His concern was that we were overexposed and taking on a lot of risks with a lot of these humanitarian activities, also, that we weren’t adequately measuring success. We weren’t showing the value. It wasn’t clear what was being accomplished with some of these activities. Now I don’t want to criticize any one in particular, but the question always is can we do it better? Is there a better way to do this? There was no one empowered to ask those kind of questions and that was why Steve was pushing for an oversight board. But the whole issue was never resolved of how does that change the relationship of MOVE in the U.S. to IEEE-USA. I think it’s still unresolved. I have no idea how it’s going to be resolved. I do know that as long as you have dedicated volunteers like Mary Ellen [Randall] and her husband Grayson and others who are actually putting in the sweat equity and doing good things, IEEE seems to find a way to let them do those good things.

Hellrigel:

Yes. They’ve been successful. I know they had the presence at the board meeting in February in New York City. Yes. But the liability, you sometimes things get abruptly ended with that but it’s an important concern.

Brantley:

Well, I know there are other challenges: financial is that they don’t need a huge operating budget, but it is almost entirely through volunteer support of it. Very little staff support for the program. Mostly it’s keeping websites and things like that and monitoring the financial transactions. But the actual work of the program is done almost exclusively by volunteers. They’ve created auxiliaries to give weather advice and travel advice

Hellrigel:

Those that are involved are pretty… I don’t mean to sound a little corny, jazzed up about it.

Brantley:

Yes, exactly.

Hellrigel:

They feel they’re doing good.

Brantley:

Exactly. That’s the power of a program like that is that it engages the members. When you start killing things that engage the members, members get disengaged and they don’t write their dues check anymore.

Hellrigel:

Right. I mean while someone else might be interested in a hands-on project for K through 12 education. I’ve talked to the people from the MOVE truck, Grayson and Mary Ellen [Randall] and others, and they’re just like we did it this way and we were down there for this event, and we did it that way and then with the truck they get to do their camping experience sometimes.

Brantley:

[Laughing] Yes, exactly.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing].

Brantley:

There was one night, I forget, I think it was when they were in New Orleans, perhaps, but it was during a hurricane, and they were in a multilevel building that had a parking garage. They had it parked in the parking garage. During the middle of the night, they went to check on the truck and the water was rising up to the level where that the truck was parked on. If they hadn’t gone down and checked on it, they would have lost the truck, you know? It would have been inundated by water.

Hellrigel:

Flooded, yes.

Brantley:

But it’s done amazing things. I think I told the story that they did a little bit of work for organizations in North Carolina. As a matter of fact, we were connected with the North Carolina Region of the Red Cross before we were connected nationally. That’s an example of where we, IEEE-USA, helped is that we sort of coordinated and negotiated the memorandums of understanding with the National Red Cross to put us under their umbrella. But they had a situation there where they needed a local airport to bring in disaster relief for areas that had lost electricity. The airport didn’t have power to their control tower.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Brantley:

We were able to generate power for them so that they could fly planes in and out for the better part of a day.

Hellrigel:

Well, that’s pretty cool.

Brantley:

Yes, so that kind of stuff is really cool. When they started there, their thought was that people who were affected by storms would need to come to have a place where they could charge their phone.

Hellrigel:

Their phone.

Brantley:

And get battery packs for their phones. In reality, the biggest users of those services were the Red Cross volunteers themselves because they were going out to assist and they needed to have command, control and coordination with their leadership. We could give them battery banks and recharge their phones. They could go out, do their work and come back and get charged up again. Actually, most of the usage, my understanding was, actually the Red Cross volunteers, not the USA volunteers but the other volunteers that actually go out and do the dangerous work. Climbing on roofs and pulling people out of flooded houses and things like that.

Hellrigel:

Right, who knows going forward, if their footprint grows at these things? But maybe it’s because Red Cross doesn’t have its tech van, but the local utilities probably have their own tech van. I don’t know.

Brantley:

The other part of this story here which is one of the reasons Red Cross was willing to work with us was because they actually got out of the business of having these kind of trucks. They used to do it for themselves. They do have technical equipment. When they’re dealing with an emergency like Hurricane Sandy or whatever they will set up command centers and those centers are set up with computers and communications and they need people who know how to do that. That’s where our volunteers are often very helpful because we’re oftentimes on the scene before their technical people can get there. But they do have equipment. They do have gear. We provide backup to that. We help set it up, we help them operate it, and when they aren’t there yet, we use our stuff to do that. We have a satellite link that gives us that and all kinds of good stuff. It’s very much a collaboration. The fact is that now Mary Ellen and Grayson were so anxious to get pitched in that oftentimes they would anticipate the problems and they would move the truck closer to where they thought they would go before the Red Cross even called them. Then the Red Cross would say, please, go here or go there. We’d help them set up their command centers or we’d help them set up their shelters or whatever. That’s one area where we did help people, when they had to go to a church or a gymnasium shelter. We could be there, and they could use our capabilities to make calls or to check the internet, check their email or charge up their phones or do whatever they needed to do.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I guess next they’ll probably link in with Young Professionals to grow their team which is interesting. Yes. I’ve actually been in the MOVE truck. I took a tour when it was down in New Brunswick it was at the Ops Center for events. [It was at an IEEE event in New Brunswick and then across the Raritan River at the IEEE Operations Center in Piscataway, New Jersey.]

Brantley:

Yes, and just back to the other point, there are a lot of folks who do this kind of thing, but they do it in different ways. I forget which of the big appliance companies sends trucks with washing machines so people can wash their clothes. There are people who do medical emergency who will set up clinics and other things. There are a lot of people who get involved whenever there’s a disaster, a lot of people who work with the Red Cross as part of their auxiliary, if you would. So, we’re part of a big collection of organizations that do this.

Hellrigel:

But it’s really grassroots. It also gives a presence on a local level of people who are like I know that appliance company or I know that’s a medical -- what? (Who is) IEEE? I think it’s a good effort. One of the other topics we were going to talk about was standards. I guess that comes in through maybe your policy work. I ‘m not sure.

Brantley:

Well, there are several different points of connection there. I’ll highlight a couple of specific examples. IEEE has taken a global perspective on standards, and it wants to be seen not as a U.S. standards organization. That has changed its relationship to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S. government. In the early days we were working with Standards on U.S. standards. But as they wanted to be more global that became less of a priority. But that didn’t mean that the interest in U.S. standards went away. So, I’ll give you some examples. IEEE had a standard on safe levels of exposure to nonionizing radiation which is associated with cellphones and cell towers. The big issue was do cellphones and cell towers cause cancer. A lot of people wanted to believe or believed that it did. Congress wanted to know. They wanted to know where our standard came from and how could they give credence to the claim in the standard that these are safe levels of exposure, if you stay below these levels. Aren’t we just an industry controlled organization? The companies that are making cellphones are just deciding what the standard is. What we did, working with the Standards Association, is we went to Capitol Hill, and we went to hearings and we helped them give testimony to explain how our standards were developed and how all groups can have a say, it’s not just the companies that manufacture cellphones. What we did is we helped educate Congress about the standards.

The other things we did on the policy side. As you know for years and years there’s been an interest in trying to bring solar into the power distribution of the United States whether you’re doing it at a utility scale or having people being able to put solar panels on their roofs. A lot of that is empowered by standards for distributed connection. How do you connect something into the power grid so that it doesn’t disturb or disrupt the power grid? IEEE has the standard. That created a number of issues. One of the good issues was the opportunity to help popularize and grow the standard. As Congress is looking to do more of this, it became an opportunity to push the standard as a solution to the problem. But then it also became a challenge because every few years people change over in executive departments as well. The Department of Energy forgot that we had a standard, so they were going to create their own standard. We had to educate them that there was a standard and here it is. You can use it. The third example I would give you and unfortunately this didn’t have as quite a good an outcome, was we had a lot of concern in the United States about electronic voting and was it secure and could you rely on electronic voting machines. Because there were many machines but there was no standard that defined how they would operate and how they were secured. IEEE was working on developing a standard. We lobbied Congress to basically set aside funding to develop those standards. We did it knowing that if it was funded, IEEE could go and apply for those dollars to do the work that it was doing.

Hellrigel:

IEEE could get that government funding through the [IEEE] Standards Association.

Brantley:

Yes. The Standards Association would get a government grant or a government contract to do work. We lobbied successfully to get millions of dollars of money to support standards development on electronic voting systems. Then IEEE never took advantage of that opportunity I guess is the best way to say it. Part of the challenge was that there was a time constraint because the elections were coming up and Congress wanted the work done within a certain amount of time. I guess IEEE didn’t think it could do the work in that amount of time, so it just decided not to go after the money. But that’s another example of where IEEE had an opportunity because of the work that was done in collaboration with IEEE-USA and the Standards. Then the most recent one is the ethics of AI which is very much a concern of the Standards Association in which what we’ve done is try to connect them to educate Congress, to educate city councils, educate state legislators about AI issues: what is AI, how does it work, and what are the ethical concerns and how do you actually address those. Is it something you could legislate? How do you go about doing this?

Hellrigel:

That is a really important contemporary issue.

Brantley:

Exactly. Particularly in light of what just happened in Open AI with the discord between their CEO and their board of directors over future direction of their work. It’s a difficult issue and it’s dynamic and it’s going to be constantly changing. There are people who are very nervous about it and the answer is to find somewhere in the middle where everybody’s interests can be addressed. That’s where IEEE-USA can make a difference because we can deal with the technical aspects of it and deal with the realities of what can and can’t be done. Help frame the discussion with that knowledge and that expertise.

Hellrigel:

Then I guess Social Implications of Technology: that group… well the technical societies and councils and all that and then different committees. There are all sorts of different people at IEEE looking at AI now, I guess.

Brantley:

Yes. Same for climate change. Same for any issue that sort of captures wide interest We tend to lag the rest of the world, but we eventually catch up to big important issues like climate change and now everybody wants to do something about climate change.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Part of the problem would be stepping back and seeing where you should really jump on the wagon and which wagon to jump on. It’s always a challenge.

Brantley:

Yes, you’ll remember during the Bush Administration, not the son [George W. Bush] but the father [George H.W. Bush], one of his programs, they called it the 1,000 Points of Light?

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

Well, that’s how IEEE approaches things a lot of times. Let everybody go do something and we’ll just be 1,000 points of light. Then on the other hand you go, well, that’s not efficient, are we really having impact, and can we do it in a more coordinated and more strategic way. The trouble is when you do that, you start to disenfranchise groups of volunteers who no longer can do the things that they wanted to do.

Hellrigel:

But my question would be that maybe they just need to be shifted, you could have a bigger impact if you’d join this group. [As we previously discussed], sometimes every two years, presidents of various OUs and various entities change and then it’s like, oh, we’ve got this new thing and we have a small staff and with the bandwidth issues and then you devote time to it and then four months or five months in, then it just dies. It’s dead. IEEE is so big I think sometimes people might not understand what’s already being done. It’s that education process.

Brantley:

Huge.

Hellrigel:

On the voting machines, I just had a question about that one. This is after the 2020 elections?

Brantley:

This was prior to 2020.

Hellrigel:

Oh, prior to 2020.

Brantley:

Yes, I forget exactly what year, but it was when voting machines, electronic voting was coming into vogue.

Hellrigel:

Right, because my town, we had the old mechanical ones.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

They couldn’t find the parts, but I kind of liked those machines. It was a toggle switch. I’ve also voted when I lived in Ohio where I was given a piece of paper and like a stylus and you punch a hole. This was in the mid-1990s. I was like, okay, that’s a little different.

Brantley:

Well, the big issue, and you may remember the public debate, was whether or not there should be a paper record so that people could validate the electronic vote. And that debate still goes on.

Hellrigel:

In my town in New Jersey, we have a machine that you get a paper record.

Brantley:

Yes

Hellrigel:

You feed it in and then I think it just goes and gets stacked somewhere. But it’s a long piece of paper. You shove it in, press some buttons, and it is electronic, but it produces a paper record for documentation.

Brantley:

Yes. It’s basically the equivalent of a punch card or a data read card. If they have to recount, they can just run it through the machine again and recount.

Hellrigel:

Right. Yes. They might even do that at the end of the day. I don’t know.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

That was a change because for years we just went and hit the little toggle, [switching noises]. They were these big grey machines. They looked like food pushcarts.

Brantley:

Yes. [Laughing]

Hellrigel:

They would wheel them in and now the pushcart is just a big electronic thing.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I don’t know if any parts still use the push tab, those punch cards I used in Ohio. In some places where the population is so small, maybe going electronic seems like an overkill expense. I’m not sure.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

The ethics are a growing part and in some respects in retrospect, maybe not being involved with electronic voting saves some headaches.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Given the 2020 election.

Brantley:

Exactly. It would have created a real challenge for IEEE to actually deliver a meaningful standard in time for manufacturers to create machines that worked on that standard. In time for them to be procured by the states and localities that needed machines.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

It probably wasn’t realistic, but it did illustrate a way of doing business which is you have this need for a standard and you get the government to support standards development and then you compete with others for that money. Which is a way of actually getting good work done. Someone’s got to pay for it [chuckling].

Hellrigel:

Right.

Brantley:

If it’s for society, then society can pay for it.

Hellrigel:

I could see going forward not electronic machines but medical equipment.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Because we have the Engineering and Medical Biology Society and those members backed the artificial hearts, things like that. Then Standards. I could see a synergy and then it fits in with humanitarian efforts. I ‘m not quite sure. I know that there’s been a lot of work IEEE Foundation has that Smart Village where there’s funding for solar panels.

Brantley:

Exactly.

Hellrigel:

One of the challenges is that IEEE is really too big [Laughing], to get your head around everything that’s “being done”.

Brantley:

Ten miles wide and an inch deep sometimes. [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Right. With IEEE-USA, that’s still a lot of territory.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

You have a lot of grassroots initiatives. I’ve attended and participated in a few local Sections’ activities in New Jersey. The people get really excited because they can make an impact on the local level. That’s been interesting. I don’t know if there’s anything else you wanted to cover?

Brantley:

I saw the news of Ted Hissey’s [Theodore W. Hissey] passing.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

I just wanted to add a footnote if I might, just about working with Ted.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes, sir.

Brantley:

It’s funny because everyone acknowledges him as a director emeritus on the [IEEE] Board of Directors. They forget that there was a period of time when he was actually the Acting Executive Director of IEEE during a period of time when they had let go the executive director. They drafted Ted as a volunteer to be the executive director. That’s when I first encountered Ted. That was even before I was managing director. I was working with Tom Suttle, and I was going to Board meetings and so I got to see Ted in action. There have been many comments and eulogies about Ted and his many contributions, and they noted how much emphasis he gave to young professionals. That was sort of his passion. I just wanted to add one more note, which was that he was also very dedicated to mentoring young staff as well. I had that privilege of having many conversations with Ted. He was always a source of advice. He was always asking how things were going. He was always trying to elevate your thinking. Are you thinking strategically here? I adored the man. He was so positive. He was always trying to make things better. He was always trying to build people up. He was always trying to build the organization up. He invested the sweat equity. He put himself into the process. He spent tremendous amounts of time and energy just counseling and coaching and mentoring. I benefited from it personally. I know many of my colleagues on the Management Council benefited from it as well. I just wanted to acknowledge that his impact was on more than the young members, it was also on the staff.

Hellrigel:

That’s a fantastic compliment to him that he worked with staff, that he mentored you, heard you out, and inquired about how things are going.

Brantley:

Yes, yes. How are you doing? How’s your organization doing? He wanted things to be successful so he would offer his insights and his experience to young professionals on the staff to say have you thought about this or here’s how’s that going. Is it working out? What are you going to do to deal with that problem? In my management style I call it management by walking around. [Laughing] That’s what he sort of did. He sort of worked the staff the same way he would work his own staff in his company.

Hellrigel:

Yes, other executives have talked about walking around. You read about who -- not IEEE -- but big corporate America who would eat in the lunchroom with the actual staff.

Brantley:

Yes, yes.

Hellrigel:

Well, some inventors in their workshops who would go from workbench to workbench.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

There are stories about how Thomas Edison would go around and there would be all of these notebooks at different work sites. He would add things to them and sign and date them to document the invention process. He was going around and seeing what things were going on.

Brantley:

I knew every Board Series that Ted would come and seek me out and just ask me how I was doing. Even just that, you know? Knowing that people cared and thought what you were doing was important enough to invest their time in you. That was meaningful.

Hellrigel:

I know it’s also important to overall IEEE history where he is brought in as the executive director and a few other people in emergencies have stepped in but they sort of right the ship after an intended absenteeism at the helm of the ship. I know people appreciated that.

Brantley:

Yes, Wally Reed was another one who did a tremendous job in that role.

Hellrigel:

I know Eric Herz is still thought of very fondly by many people. That was decades ago.

Brantley:

Oh, Eric. I always remember when I was hired. There were three of us new staff in the Washington, D.C. office. All three of us went up to have the orientation. At the end of the orientation, you had a meeting with Eric and Eric would sort of tell you what it meant to be part of the IEEE. Then he’d give you a little gift. I still have mine. I don’t know if it’s in my drawer here or not. But I do have it, which is back in the day before laser pointers, you used to have these telescoping pointers that you’d use to point at things on the wall. He had an IEEE pointer that he gave us all so that we could have meetings and point at stuff. It was fun. That was a great trip. I remember because we were visiting the brand-new building in Piscataway which he wasn’t even at yet.

Then we went into New York City. We had adventures getting into New York City, having to go through Hell’s Kitchen. Then we got into the old building the one that they’ve sold. That was quite a day. Then over the years Eric was very interested in what we did in USA or in USAB [United States Activity Board] in those days. He was very active in the American Association of Engineering Societies. He would come down three times a year to attend their Board meetings and we would staff those meetings. He was a good guy. He was a good guy to work for

Hellrigel:

Yes, so there’s some of those and also that you joined that big move out of New York City was discombobulating in many reasons because IEEE, well, it predecessor organization, AIEE and IRE, had been in there from 1884 and 1912, respectively.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

So, jumping to Piscataway, New Jersey. Financially that made sense and many other companies were also building offices in Piscataway. But he oversaw that. Even the growing out of the office for IEEE-USA in Washington, D.C. You were there for that.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

By setting a footprint, figuring out what offices to take and I guess they moved once?

Brantley:

IEEE-USA?

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

Actually, several times.

Hellrigel:

Several times.

Brantley:

Generally, within the area of D.C. [the District of Columbia] called the Central Business District around Farragut North, but we moved from 19th Street to L Street to 20th Street [during my tenure]. Sort of on the cusp there. Yes, those were challenging days. Even before that, before I came on board, there was a period of time when we were in a building along with the Government Accountability Office, GAO, a little bit further, closer to Capitol Hill. Yes, we moved all around downtown as our leases have expired and found space. Since D.C. is surrounded by jurisdictions and cut off by rivers you can’t really move one direction or the other because then you lose two-thirds of your staff. You have to be sort of in the center, sort of the hub of the spoke of the wheels. So, we always sort of stayed in the downtown area, not too far from Capitol Hill so that we could get there when we needed to.

Hellrigel:

It’s very convenient. When I went down there, I was staying at hotel near Capitol Hill and just jumped on the Metro’s Red Line.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I got off the Metro at Farragut North and walked a couple of blocks.

Brantley:

Ten-minute walk, yes.

Hellrigel:

Yes. It’s very convenient and it also keeps you close to Capitol Hill and you’re not out in Alexandria. You don’t have to go through changing Metro lines. If need be, even if the Metro wasn’t running, it’s not that far a walk if you had to run to Capitol Hill.

Brantley:

Yes, exactly. I tried to get us closer to Capitol Hill. It’s in the area that is called NoMa, North of Massachusetts Avenue. We also looked in the Waterfront. But volunteers were concerned because, at that time, these areas were deemed a little sketchy

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Brantley:

But now they’re like the best places to be. It’s just the nature of D.C. Things change. I remember when we were looking at the places near Union Station that one of the [IEEE] Computer Society presidents, since we were going to join [our offices] together, was along with us looking at real estate and he didn’t like the area. He didn’t think it was safe. The realtor leaned over to me in the back seat of the cab and said see that building over there. I said yes. He said that’s the ATF Building. There’s 12,000 people with guns there. This is the safest neighborhood in Washington, D.C. [ATF is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tabacco, Firearms, and Explosives. It is a law enforcement agency of the United States’ Department of Justice.] [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

That’s actually the neighborhood I stayed in [when I visited the offices of IEEE-USA and the IEEE Computer Society]. I walked to Union Station, hopped on the Red Line, and skedaddled. It was very convenient and you’re a stone’s throw from the Capitol.

Brantley:

Yes, exactly.

Hellrigel:

It’s a nice neighborhood but like much of Washington, D.C. after 6;00 p.m. it gets pretty quiet except for the pub, the Dubliner, near the Capitol. I lived in the D.C. area for a while. When I was at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History on fellowship, some of the fellows went to the Dubliner to hang out.

Brantley:

South of the Mall is all federal and there’s no one there at night, and Capitol Hill, every block is different. Some blocks are safe, some blocks aren’t.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Brantley:

The Dubliner was a great place. I used to go to the Dubliner as a college student. In law school I used to go to the Dubliner a lot.

Hellrigel:

Oh, well when I was there, early this year in late October, it was packed with what looked like aides and interns. It was more upscale than I remembered from the early 1990s. Irish Times right next door was perfectly dead.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

So, I went next door to Irish Times

Brantley:

They had open mic night at the Irish Times. You could hear music over there. The Dubliner was more about food. They actually had a hotel there, too.

Hellrigel:

Okay, yes, because Irish Times where some of the Smithsonian permanent staff used to hang out.

Brantley:

Yes, yes. It was a great place.

Hellrigel:

That was fun. Sir, I don’t know if there’s anything else you wanted to cover?

Brantley:

I think you let me expound on the topics that I had and didn’t have a chance to discuss in the previous one [oral history recording session]. I think I’ve gone through my agenda. If in the future, if you have questions about anything or anything you want to explore just reach out to me.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

I think that pretty much covers it.

Hellrigel:

Thank you, sir. I really appreciate your time.

Brantley:

Please don’t call me Sir.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Brantley:

Just call me Chris.

Hellrigel:

Yes, Chris. I really learned quite a deal about IEEE USA. It gave me a better understanding of its purpose and its continued purpose.

Brantley:

Yes, if I have any regret at all it’s that we did so much work that we don’t get a lot of credit for because we were in a political environment where people didn’t want to hear about us.

Hellrigel:

Do you want to expand on that one?

Brantley:

IEEE-USA, it was the counter to the globalization of IEEE.

Hellrigel:

The global push.

Brantley:

It was about global. The non-U.S. members didn’t want to hear about things being done for the U.S. members. And the U.S. members didn’t understand the difference between IEEE USA and IEEE. IEEE got all the credit and we got criticized when they didn’t like what we did. But if they liked what we did then IEEE got the credit for it. That’s fine. It’s all IEEE but it made an environment that was challenging because you oftentimes had to not blow your horn as much as you might like to.

Hellrigel:

Or wear the IEEE and not the IEEE (USA) hat.

Brantley:

Yes, exactly.

Hellrigel:

The more I’ve learned about IEEE USA, it’s essentially in the foundation of what IEEE is. Because of the platform that IEEE has in the U.S., it’s able to have a platform globally.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I see it.

Brantley:

I’ll end with this remark which is I think IEEE is at a crossroads, an inflection point. A few years ago, it realized what the implications were of becoming a 501(c)(3) that we were a public good organization and we started to focus more on the public good which is appropriate. But what we were was a professional society that focused on the profession. Now we’re pretending to do that still in a way that is not as convincing or as impactful as it used to be. My concern is that’s part of the reason why we’ve had a decline in U.S. membership. I think IEEE is going to have to decide what it wants to be at some point. It can’t be everything to everybody. It has to decide what it’s going to be, where it’s going to have the most strategic impact, and where it can do the most good. I think the world will change for IEEE; you know?

Hellrigel:

And on that note, I will leave you. Thank you very much Chris.

Brantley:

Well.

Hellrigel:

I’ll be in touch. It’s going to take a while to get to the transcript. But if you want, I’ll share with you the raw transcript before I edit it just so you can see.

Brantley:

Whatever works for you. I hope I haven’t said anything that I regret. I’ve probably said things that can be taken out because they’re irrelevant.

Hellrigel:

Well in the editing process, we’ll explain, and we can work on that going forward.

Brantley:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Thank you and Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas and all the fun stuff.

Brantley:

Oh, thank you, and to you as well.

Hellrigel:

Thank you. Have a good day.

Brantley:

You, too. Bye-bye.

Hellrigel:

Bye.