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The Current Transcript for March 17, 2025

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

CHRIS HAYES: The thing that's finite is the attention that we have. So when you live in an era where information is constantly expanding, the competition for that finite attention becomes ever, ever more ferocious.

MATT GALLOWAY: More than steel or oil or critical minerals, Chris Hayes says attention is our most valuable resource right now, and he should know. The cable news host's job is to keep your eyes glued to what he is talking about on television. His new book, “The Siren’s Call”, is about what happens when we are engineered to pay attention to everything all at once. And in 30 minutes, Chris Hayes will be here to talk about the attention economy, his own uneasiness with his role in distracting us, and why he calls Donald Trump's ability to grab hold of our attention both repellent and transfixing. Also this morning.

SOUNDCLIP

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: It was very much a normal day at the office, I guess. There was certainly no indication of what was to come. We were working away at about 300 feet down inside a structure on the seabed.

MG: What was to come for Christopher Lemons was anything but normal. Working for an oil and gas company on the floor of the North Sea, he found himself stranded, alone and rapidly facing the end. His wild story of survival is now the subject of Last Breath, a feature film starring Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu. In an hour, 25 minutes without oxygen at the bottom of the ocean and living to tell the tale. We begin, though, with a new prime minister thrown straight into a national crisis. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

PARTISANS PANEL

Guests: Chad Rogers, Mélanie Richer, Susan Smith

SOUNDCLIP

MARK CARNEY: We will relentlessly pursue this positive agenda because Canadians know that negativity isn't strength. They know that negativity won't pay the rent or the mortgage. The negativity won't bring down the price of groceries. Negativity won't win a trade war.

MG: It's not quite the “sunny ways” of 2015, but Mark Carney is clearly trying to put a spin on things and focusing on an upbeat tone. The former governor of the Bank of Canada was sworn in on Friday as Canada's 24th prime minister. Today, he is in Paris, then London to shore up support with European allies. He's off to Iqaluit tomorrow. And pretty soon, of course, we could be in a federal election. There is a lot going on. And so back with me today is our panel of partisans. Susan Smith is a Liberal commentator, principal and co-founder of Bluesky Strategy Group. She's in Washington, DC, today, which is perhaps something to talk about. Mélanie Richer is an NDP commentator with Earnscliffe Strategies. She's in our Ottawa studio. And here with me in our Toronto studio is Chad Rogers, Conservative commentator. He's with Crestview Strategy. Good morning, everyone.

ALL GUESTS: Morning.

MG: Susan, what do you make of the tone of Prime Minister Mark Carney, still getting used to saying that, in his first few days in office?

SUSAN SMITH: I think the tone is reassurance, mark, Matt. That's what I feel, that he wants to reassure Canadians that he's serious about dealing with the trade challenges that we have, and about ensuring that the Canadian economy can stand on its feet with its other trading partners and allies. This is, I think this is what he wants to convey to Canadians. You opened with the clip about, you know, not negativity. This is not a prime minister who's going to tell you that Canada is broken. But at the same time, he has called his new cabinet a wartime cabinet. So that signals that we're braced and ready, and he's going to work to set the country on a course to be able to deal with the trade adverse and other adversity that we're dealing with with the US and globally as a result of Donald Trump.

MG: Mélanie, what do you make of those early signals?

MÉLANIE RICHER: Yeah, I think we could see somebody who looks like he's off to the races, which is kind of funny that he's, you know, crisscrossing so far, going to Europe and coming right back when we've got election calls coming on. I hear what Susan says about, you know, telling the world that this is the new leadership and what Canada will be doing or what Canada’s place is. I kind of find it a little bit weird that you're, you know, going to Europe right before we're supposed to be in an election, when folks don't necessarily know who Mark Carney is yet. I think Liberal members got to know him in the last few weeks, but I don't know that Canadians totally have gotten to know him yet. So it'll be interesting to see what he has to say when he's back here at home and what the rest of the week looks like.

MG: Chad, what do you make of that? I mean, he said very clearly in that clip that we played that he's not going to be focusing on negativity, that negativity is not going to win a trade war. What is he trying to say in that?

CHAD ROGERS: Well, it's interesting that he doesn't focus on negativity before and after he slams the opposition leader for inadequate experience or his view of the world. I mean, Mr. Carney is a brand new baby politician asking for an 11th year for a Liberal government. It's a tough thing to sell. 100 years ago, when I was a young man, I worked for a provincial government. I worked in the legislature of Nova Scotia. And they have a beautiful, beautiful thing called the red room right across from the assembly where we used to do all the press conferences. And we did this massive redesign of the welfare system and announced it in the red room. And it was a horrible failure, and we couldn't figure out why until we played the news clip back later with no sound on. And it was a bunch of white guys in a room that looked like it was the castle of Marie Antoinette talking about how much we cared about people. I think it's awfully hard if you're Mark Carney, the Goldman Sachs banker in your suit and tie, walking around the Key Dorset, or visiting Buckingham Palace and claiming I'm really attuned with inflation and street level crime and all the problems we're going to discuss in the 45th Canadian election. I think it’s a bad strategy choice.

MG: So he said today that he is in Paris because, in his words, in these current times, it's more important for Canada to strengthen links with reliable allies.

CHAD ROGERS: I don't think the temporary interim guy is the one who's doing the new global deals for Canada. I think we're in the 45th Canadian federal election. I think this was a really weird first week pageant when Mr. Singh and Mr. Poilievre are going to be out saying prices are too high, there isn't an adequate supply of homes, and our communities are less safe. What are you doing about it? And Mark Carney's reporting live from a series of castles visiting his European friends. It's a weird choice.

MG: Susan?

SUSAN SMITH: We're in a trade war. We're also in a serious situation where the president of the United States calls Vladimir Putin more often than he calls Volodymyr Zelenskyy or his European counterparts in the EU and his NATO counterparts. So Prime Minister Carney is doing the responsible thing. He's been invited to France to speak with Prime Minister Macron, President macron. Then he's going to the UK to speak with Keir Starmer and the king. These are… he's already spoken with Ursula von der Leyen. He's spoken to Zelenskyy. These are important trading relationships for Canada where we can trust our trading relationships with Canada. It's also important from a global security perspective. Canadians will have plenty of time to get to know Prime Minister Mark Carney during the election campaign. So it's traditional for global, for our prime ministers to meet with their global counterparts. Typically, it's the US we start with, but we are not in a normal day and age. And so I think these are very important face to face conversations. The important thing is Mark Carney doesn't have to introduce himself to them. This is the differentiation between Pierre Poilievre, who's never held a global role or never held a broad leadership role at the national level. Carney has these relationships, and they're going to be critical as the economic world order is being tipped over.

MG: Chad, is it not, just the last point on this, is it not prudent to try to figure out if the United States, and we'll hear more about his relationship or such there is with Donald Trump, but is it not prudent if the United States wants to cripple this economy and maybe take over Canada, to reach out and figure out what those other contacts might be?

CHAD ROGERS: Well, I have to put my paid consultant hat on here, not my partisan hat. And I have to look at the last US election where the Kamala Harris campaign said, every day, what we have to take to the voter is how we fight Donald Trump, not that we have a two thirds wrong track number on the economy and street level crime. And her failure to talk about that and break from the Biden agenda to talk about what she was going to do to make streets safer and bring prices down cost her a national election. I'm kind of shocked to see the Carney team embrace the Kamala Harris strategy of let’s talk about the big things and let's talk about the Trump things, as opposed to let's talk about how people are hurting.

MG: Susan, just briefly on that.

SUSAN SMITH: Well, the main thing the Conservatives wanted to talk about in this election was axe the tax. Pierre Poilievre had lots of T-shirts made up. I haven't seen in bus when out recently. And the first thing Mark Carney did was cancel the carbon tax. It was public. They, you know, there was a signing. It was very interesting, but it's indisputable that that has been cancelled. So he is addressing the things that Canadians want to talk about. But Canadians won't have jobs if we don't have, if factories are shutting down because we haven't made a pivot from a trade perspective. That's what Prime Minister Carney is doing. That's what he's showing. And his ministers are out already reaching out. The agriculture minister was busy. The jobs and families minister was busy reaching out to their Canadian stakeholders at the same time. I don't think there's a single Canadian in this country that would like Mark Carney to be sitting at home, waiting beside the phone for Donald Trump to call. He said he's going to put, he's going to be action oriented, and this is demonstrating action in my view.

MG: This is what he said on Friday about Donald Trump and the threats coming from the United States. Have a listen.

SOUNDCLIP

MARK CARNEY: I look forward to speaking with President Trump, just to be clear. We respect the United States. We respect President Trump. We understand the importance President Trump places on American workers and American jobs. We want him and his administration to understand the importance we put on Canadian workers and Canadian jobs. And we will look for avenues to work together so that both objectives are met.

MG: But then the Prime Minister said this when he was asked about Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, repeating Donald Trump's argument about why Canada perhaps should become the 51st state.

SOUNDCLIP

MARK CARNEY: It's crazy. His point is crazy. That's it.

MG: Mélanie, what do you think of this? Should the Prime Minister Mark Carney be meeting first with or trying to figure out a way to meet first with Donald Trump, the American president, instead of heading to Europe to build those new ties, as he says?

MÉLANIE RICHER: I think it's a really good question. And if we were in normal times, I think maybe. But I think what we've seen from both the federal government and provincial governments in the last few weeks, few months, is we're trying to appease someone who's not actually looking to be appeased. So a lot of the conversations that we're having as it relates with with President Trump or the people around President Trump kind of doesn't seem like it's making that much of a dent. And I'm not saying that because it is important, but what it seems like is he just kind of keeps talking as if he wants to totally decimate our economy. So how can you meet with someone? How can you propose things that don't really seem to be moving the needle as relates to what the president wants on any given day? So yeah, obviously, we need to build those relationships and we need to do something, but I don't know actually that that's where the Canadian Pulse is right now. I think the Canadian Pulse right now is saying, hey, we need to, you know, stand up to this guy, and we need to show that we're not just going to do everything that he wants us to do. So I don't, I'm a little bit divided on this. Obviously, we need a path forward, but we also need to say, hey, listen, we're not just going to do everything that you want us to do. And I think rightly, that's where most Canadians are at right now.

MG: Susan, you're actually in Washington. How do you think Mark Carney's approach is going to play? It was interesting on Friday. He corrected a reporter who said Trump, and he said President Trump. But he also said that he would meet with President Trump at an appropriate time when the president gave some respect to this country. How do you think that's going to play in DC?

SUSAN SMITH: The fact that President Trump hasn't said a whole lot about Prime Minister Carney at the moment and he's dialed down his rhetoric temporarily on Canada I think shows that there's a potential opportunity for a reset.

MG: No news is good news when it comes to President Trump.

SUSAN SMITH: Perhaps. Perhaps. You know, where's Trump's, President Trump's vision this morning? Look, I think Prime Minister Carney is trying to reset the relationship. I hope that President Trump is trying to reset the relationship, though, you know, Marco Rubio just parroting the line was a bit embarrassing for Marco Rubio, in my view. I think there's an opportunity. Canada will do its best demonstrating respect, showing… he also, Prime Minister Carney also talked about an economic relationship that, you know, they’re business partners. Canada is a client of the United States. And we are, but it doesn't mean we're a supplicant of the United States. So I think, as I said, not sitting by the phone waiting for it to ring is a smart move. And I think they'll at least start off on a good front. But I'm glad Mark Carney hasn't rushed down to the White House to sit in those yellow chairs and see what Mr. Trump's going to wave his hands and say.

MG: Let's talk about things happening here. I mean, his first order of business, the prime minister’s, before he got on that plane was to put an axe through the carbon tax. Conservatives must be delighted, Chad. The tax has been axed.

CHAD ROGERS: Look, Pierre Poilievre and people who were sick of paying too much in a life that got too expensive I think are awfully happy now. Now, he's got to actually do it and pass the law so the next government of Canada actually has to finish the job on what we do about carbon tax. But there's also build the homes. There's also stop the spending. There's also make streets safer. There are a lot of parts of the Poilievre plan. But what you'll find is in common with each one is that they're aligned with pain people are feeling coming out of COVID, coming out of a very bumpy economy.

MG: Are people still paying attention? Just on this question, are people still paying attention to that now? You've said this a few different times, and it's for a lot of people, the sense is this election will be about the guy who is in the Oval Office, that it's not going to be about those other things. But you're suggesting that maybe it will be about those other things.

CHAD ROGERS: I think the politics stops at the water's edge. And by the time we hit the debate mid campaign about three and a half weeks from now, each of the leaders is going to have an equal opportunity to talk about what their plan is for how they would deal with our US neighbour. And I think they're largely going to be equal at those podiums. But like the Harris campaign forgot, the economic pain, the crime people are feeling, the challenges to housing supply are the issues that are going to drive what people do when they walk into a ballot box. And the Trump dimension only increases your economic anxiety about how you're going to pay your mortgage or feed your kids and keep your family safe.

MG: I guess the only thing I would say to that is that Doug Ford just won another majority government in the province of Ontario not by talking about anything other than Donald Trump, not talking about health care, not talking about affordability issues. It was purely about Donald Trump.

CHAD ROGERS: Respectfully, I think Doug Ford never stopped talking about affordability. I think that's the blood that runs through the veins of his entire government. Doug Ford also is one of the few post-COVID premiers who's willing to admit he's wrong periodically, who's willing to stand up and say, we didn't get everything right, who's exceedingly humble. So I think the Ford energy is worth learning from. But I don't know that it's all about south of the border.

MG: Mélanie, it’s interesting. On Friday, Jagmeet Singh, leader of the NDP, described the political landscape as a race to the right between Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre. What's going on there? Is there ground, do you think, for the NDP that has opened up with, I mean, he's been prime minister for a handful of days, but with already what he's doing when it comes to the carbon tax, but also some of the things that he's signalling with his cabinet?

MÉLANIE RICHER: Right. You know, the second thing, Matt, he said that he was going to do was get rid of the capital gains tax, which arguably helps, you know, the folks who are the most well off in Canada. So I think that that's one of the things that he was kind of trying to point to there. It's funny, the Conservatives will want to say to people how similar Mark Carney is to Justin Trudeau, and there's actually room for the NDP or a benefit for the NDP to say the opposite, to say that Mark Carney is actually quite different than Justin Trudeau. And the reason that you say he's quite different is he's not investing in people in the same way that Justin Trudeau, and I'm going to say, because the NDP pushed him too to invest in people there. So I do actually think that there is an opportunity, as Mark Carney is a very different kind of Liberal than Justin Trudeau, to point that to folks and to say, you know, who at the end of the day when these two are saying they want to reduce spending and reduce investments in families, who will have your back? Particularly, you know, Chad talks about affordability. And I think it's a really important thing because, sure, people are really worried about Trump. But what comes next when Trump does what Trump continues to do? Who is left standing to help people? Who's going to, you know, protect jobs? Who's going to invest in our industries? And who's going to make sure that when things go really wrong, who's investing in EI to make sure that workers and working families have that support? I think that this leaves a lot of ground to Jagmeet to take up and to the NDP to tell people that, you know, when push comes to shove, they're the ones that are going to have their back. So I do think that there's a massive opportunity there.

MG: Susan, is this a race to the right? Is Mark Carney pulling the Liberal Party away from the left and opening up that flank for the NDP?

SUSAN SMITH: To the centre. To the centre, which is where I'm thrilled to hear that the Liberal Party are going. Now, look, there's a couple things here. Chad talked about Doug Ford, who's pretty much endorsed Mark Carney, saying he's a really solid guy and he's really good with numbers, which I think that's, and he doesn't talk about Pierre Poilievre. So there's that from an Ontario perspective, and I think that will have an impact on Ontario voters when they talk about the economy. In this election, all of the leaders are going to have to demonstrate that they can walk and chew gum at the same time. Maybe for Pierre Poilievre, he'll walk and chew an apple at the same time. But this election, Matt, and you've said it, is about who can best handle Donald Trump and who can best handle the Canadian economy such that it keeps it robust and strong, we keep people employed, and for the people who do need help as a result, who has got the capacity and the experience to develop the government programs that we need? Of the crew of leaders that people might be considering, there's someone who's worked at the Department of Finance and helped craft budgets and understands how Canada works. You have a career politician who's been around working on his question period lines for 20 plus years and never had a job in the real world. And you have Jagmeet Singh, who's a very nice man, but he's not who Canadians are considering when it comes to dealing with Trump and dealing with the global order. I don't see Mr. Singh being invited to Europe to talk to our trading partners there and our allies there, and I think Canadians are smart. They'll take a pause. They'll look at what matters now and for the immediate future of the country, and they'll make their decisions. They'll make smart decisions. They're smart people.

MG: So just in the last couple of minutes, this is about in some ways, I mean, the Prime Minister, Mark Carney, joked about how there will be an election call certainly before November, but it's likely to come this week. Chad, what were you going to say just briefly, just in terms of what Pierre Poilievre needs to do in that context?

CHAD ROGERS: I think it's dangerous to slime people who've dedicated themselves to public service and served in Canada's parliament and talk about that as meaningless experience. I think being a washed up Goldman Sachs banker who became a bureaucrat in Ottawa is something I could also characterize Mark Carney as, but that would be rude and not respected.

SUSAN SMITH: Wow! What does that make us, Chad?

CHAD ROGERS: You know, I think public service is a good thing. I think you have a really, really stark choice. I think the NDP have an opportunity to come forward and say, we introduced three entitlements bigger than the Canada Health Care Act, and we weren't even the government. Mr. Poilievre is going to say, I have a plan to get the economy moving again and cut spending. And I think the Liberals are going to say, we’d like an 11th year in power, and if you like our values, we have some new ones we'd like to introduce to you. It's a tough race.

MG: Mélanie, just briefly from you, what does Jagmeet Singh need to do to set himself up for this election call whenever it comes?

MÉLANIE RICHER: I always find it a little bit funny when the Conservative is the one pushing what I would like to push, but I'm going to say, you know, similar. There is a lot that Jagmeet can go to the ridings and say to people, listen, you really like this thing. We're here for you. Here's what we were able to do when we were fourth party, third opposition. Just imagine what we could do if you gave us the opportunity. So I think a lot of that, particularly as it relates to affordability, how this puts money back in your pockets, I think will be a smart move for Jagmeet.

MG: The speculation is there will be an election call within the next few days, perhaps within the next week. They will not go back. The House will not resume next Monday. We will see. In the meantime, it'll be great to hopefully have you here as that election unfolds. Thank you all for being here this morning.

MÉLANIE RICHER: Thank you.

SUSAN SMITH: Thanks for having us, Matt.

CHAD ROGERS: Happy Saint Patrick's Day.

MG: and happy Saint Patrick’s.

MÉLANIE RICHER: Yes, happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

SUSAN SMITH: Oh Yeah, top of the morning.

MG: Susan Smith is a Liberal commentator, principal and co-founder of Bluesky Strategy Group. Mélanie Richer is an NDP commentator with Earnscliffe Strategies, and Chad Rogers, Conservative commentator with Crestview Strategy. Your CBC news is up next, and then.

SOUNDCLIP

CHRIS HAYES: Trump, the way he conducts himself is to try to dominate our attention at all times. But I think he genuinely has a true project of territorial expansion and conquest. He wants to make Canada the 51st state. That's not like a joke. It's not a shtick. He wants to do that.

MG: MSNBC host Chris Hayes covers politics. He has put a lot of thought into what captures our attention. He will be here coming up in six minutes to talk about the attention wars, his role in trying to get people's attention, and yes, what is motivating Donald Trump. He has a gift for attention-getting as well. We'll talk with Chris Hayes coming up after the news. Stay with us.

[Music: Theme]

CHRIS HAYES

Guest: Chris Hayes

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current.

[Song: “Too Much Information” by Duran Duran]

MG: Back in 1993, Duran Duran’s song, “Too Much Information”, was all about the lure of television constantly trying to grab our attention. These days, of course, it's not just TV that is consuming our brains. It is the infinite scroll of Instagram and TikTok, the latest Wordle, the latest outrage on X, all part of a system that Chris Hayes calls attention capitalism. In his new book, the MSNBC host argues that our attention has become the world's most important commodity. It's not only driving our economy and our politics, it's simultaneously destroying our sense of humanity. The new book is called “The Siren’s Call.” Chris Hayes, good morning.

CHRIS HAYES: Hey. Good morning. It's great to be on.

MG: It's great to have you here. I really enjoyed this book. This is, I mean, when I say like the most important commodity, people often think of oil and gas and energy. You're suggesting that we live in an attention age. Why would you say that?

CHRIS HAYES: I think because we all recognize at some level this sort of, what we used to call the information age or sort of the digital age, right, that we had this transition from the kind of industrial modes of production that characterized much of the 20th century, where oil and gas and steel and making stuff was this sort of centre of economic activity to one where the manipulation of ones and zeros, right, is the centre of economic activity. But I think the thing we get wrong is we think that the value there is in the information itself, but information is not actually that valuable. It's really cheap and plentiful. It's infinitely reproducible. The thing that's finite, the resource that there's bounds on, the resource that can only be in one place or the other is the attention that we have. And the problem is that, as Herb Simon pointed out in the 1970s, brilliant political scientist and academic, information consumes attention. So when you live in an era where information is constantly expanding and attention is finite, well, then what that means necessarily is that the competition for that finite attention becomes ever, ever more ferocious.

MG: You talk in the book about kind of a slot machine model of grabbing our attention. What is that?

CHRIS HAYES: It's the fact that our attentional faculties are tuned to interruption. They're tuned to the rustle of the predator in the bushes, right? So we have deep within us this ability to be compelled against our will even before our will even gets to decide towards something. So that's the way that a siren wailing down the street works. It's the way that a crying newborn works, you know, or a waiter dropping a tray in a restaurant. In all those cases, the interruption is what grabs us before we get to decide whether we want to attend to it. And what happens when you engineer platforms for maximal attentional extraction at scale is you drive towards this interrupting instinct at the lowest common denominator. It's the way a slot machine works. A slot machine can keep someone spellbound for eight hours, but it never tells a story. It's little interrupting interstitial moments over and over and over again, and that's the way that our algorithms have been engineered.

MG: Can I ask you about the crying newborn thing? How did your sense of attention and our finite nature of attention change when you became a dad?

CHRIS HAYES: Profoundly. I mean, I think attention is at the core of parenting and family life. I mean, the thing that you experience when you have a child is that all of a sudden, your attention is captured by this creature in a way that nothing ever has been, and it never comes back in some ways. And that feeling of attention almost leaving you, I mean, they’re sort of so poured onto one other person or two or three other people in my case is so profound and also so like constitutive of who we are and how we are. Like our relationship to parental attention, to siblings’ attention, to the different vectors of attention in a household are really, really what form us. And it's inseparable from who we are as people. I really think that our social identity is born of the kinds of attention we get and the kinds of attention we don't get and the people we pay attention to in the crucible of our familial upbringing.

MG: I mean, you tell a story at the beginning of the book about sitting down and reading with your daughter, and you are proud of yourself as we would be, because in that moment, you reject the pull of the phone that is in your pocket. And you say in some ways, that that means that you're alive, that you're still alive. What does that mean? This comes up a lot in this book, this idea of what it means to be alive right now in that attention era.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, I'm glad you said that. I think the book is a book about what it means to be alive right now and what it means to be a human right now and how to reclaim our humanity. You know, William James, when he writes the Principles of Psychology in the late 19th century, he's very obsessed with the notion of free will, and I think I have the same concerns. I mean, the book starts with the story of Odysseus bound to the mast because it's a story about Will, and it's a story about the friction between the different forms of our self, the self that succumbs to compulsion and the self that can exercise free will. And I think reclaiming that ability to exercise free will, reclaiming a dominion over our own minds as ours is, in some sense is the key to the project of being a human. And different eras offer different temptations away from that dominion, and this is the one that we have in our era.

MG: I mean, that's hard to get that control back in part because, as you've said, there is an industry that is built around trying to harvest our attention. We have a finite supply of attention. There are only so many humans with so many eyeballs. And so if companies are trying to do that, if they're trying to traffic in our attention and they want to grow, what do they do?

CHRIS HAYES: Well, first, you know, the first part of this growth curve was the deployment of smartphones, right? So if you get these devices in everyone's pockets, then you have a lot more attention you can harvest. But then once everyone has them, then it does get a bit trickier. So you can start targeting children, right? So you can say, well, we're not going to cap it at adults. We're going to start pushing the age boundaries lower, 14, 12. You can put a one-and-a-half-year-old in front of Coco Lemmon's YouTube page, you know, which is what that product is designed to do. You can also start to take people's sleep away, right? They can't pay attention to you while they're sleeping, but if you start to push back the waking hours. And then the thing that's really wild to me is you can try to start to have people looking at two or three things at all times. I mean, you know, I caught my kids at one point playing a video game while watching some movie or show in like a little corner box. And I was like, this is, I don't like this at all. This is crazy. Just focus on one thing. And they’re like, well, you sit in front of the TV with your phone all the time. It's like, touché, buddy. And this is one of those moments. I'm sure you have this too. I think we all do. I’ve definitely caught myself sitting in front of the TV, like our big screen TV with my laptop and my phone.

MG: Yes.

CHRIS HAYES: And like alternating between three. And I just, I have had the thought that if I showed a picture of this to myself 12 years ago, it genuinely would have looked deranged.

MG: Or in the future, people might look back at this moment and say, what were we doing?

CHRIS HAYES: Yes. Yes. And I do think that there is, I mean, one of the contentions of this book is that we've hit a kind of dead end here and that we need to get out of it. And I do think that if things go the way that I hope they do and the way that I think they do, we will look back on that, that moment of the laptop and the phone and the TV the way that you look at images of people, you know, on a flight all smoking in 2025.

MG: Why don’t we hate on Apple as much as we do social media companies? If they're the ones, I mean, they created this device that's in front of me that allows those social media companies to harvest my attention, but it was Apple's creation that gave them that permission in some ways. Why do you think Apple gets a bit of a pass on this?

CHRIS HAYES: You know, I remember interviewing Tim Cook back in 2018 or 2019, and he was like, we're very proud of the fact that we sell a product that people pay for as opposed to having the audience as our product. And that's true. That really is a difference. I mean, you know, they do fundamentally kind of build a better mousetrap, but the transaction there is fundamentally different than the transaction of Google or Meta or X. You hand over your money, they give you this physical product that they have engineered and produced. With the other sort of social media platforms and more sort of attention companies, their product is you to the advertiser. They are delivering you.

MG: One of the things that you point out in the book is that attention is not a moral faculty, that there are certain things we pay attention to, and you would know this in the industry that we're both in, and there are things that we don't pay attention to. How do you work that out? And what's the difference between chasing attention and commanding attention when it comes to figuring out what people will pay attention to?

CHRIS HAYES: I mean, the fact that attention is not a moral faculty is the defining struggle of my professional life.

MG: What do you mean?

CHRIS HAYES: It's what I think about. What I try to do all day is try to direct attention and channel the flows of attention in ways that are going to make the world a better place, or give people the tools for self-governance, or illuminate issues in a way that lead to some positive democratic action. And, you know, if I didn't have that desire, the job would be kind of easier because you just Whatever. You know, you just follow whatever was kind of popping. But the thing that I'm always trying to do is trying to marshal the kind of force of audience attention and then channel it in directions. So when I say attention is not a moral faculty, you know, we all recognize this. There's a category of English words for this category of things that are attentionally salient but dubious morally, like lurid and prurient and, you know, obscene. You know, we know that there's an entire category, and people use a cliche of like, it's like a car crash and, you know, you can't look away, that when you have attention capitalism operating the scale it's operating, it's going to drive towards those sorts of things. And what our job is as journalists is I think we have a professional ethos that is independent of the pure chasing of the faculty of attention, where we make independent editorial judgements about the import of things. And our challenge, and sometimes it's really hard, is to try to get people to pay attention to the important thing.

MG: Can I ask you more about that? Because one of the things that's really interesting in this book is you speaking about your own, I don’t know if culpability is the right word, but involvement in this as somebody who hosts a cable news program and ratings are really important. And you talk about how it's easier to grab attention in some ways than to hold it. How do you think about that in terms of what people will pay attention to and your role, I mean, what the role of the media is in our attention deficit world?

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah. I mean, I think, I think when I started doing this job, and I've now been hosting this show for 12 years and our show for 13 and a half or something, I think I had a much simpler model that was much more about wherever you shine the spotlight, people will look. And I didn't quite take, I didn't take seriously this sort of reality of audience interest and demand as a kind of exogenous factor. From the perspective of the person who's hosting this show on this network with this audience, there are certain stories that people want to pay attention to and certain stories people don't seem to want to pay attention to. And the first step in trying to come up with some kind of higher synthesis where you can feel like you're doing something other than just chasing that attention is to make that recognition. Because then once you make the recognition, I compare it to like a sailboat. You know, the wind is there. You can't control where the wind is and you can't ignore it. You can't just be like, well, I'm not going to listen to the wind. What you do is through the development of technique and craft, you figure out how to attack the boat so that you can kind of sail in the direction you want to go. But that takes skill, and that's a skill that I think I've really tried to develop, to take audience attention from where it might start and get it somewhere that it might not go if I weren't there.

MG: That's a hard needle to thread, right?

CHRIS HAYES: It's really hard. I mean, you know, I'm pretty tortured by it. There's a lot of things in the world that deserve our attention that don't get it. And, you know, it's partly my job to direct that. And a lot of times, I feel like I fail.

MG: One of the things, I mean, you talked about, you know, a car crash that people can't look away from. And that's not a value judgement, but it is the kind of thing that people can't turn away from is Donald Trump right now. You say in the book that Trump is the political figure who most exploited the new rules of the attention age, and that his approach to politics, this is quite an image, is the equivalent of running through the neighbourhood naked. It is repellent, but transfixing. Tell me more about what makes Trump so good in this moment.

CHRIS HAYES: I really think he just has one key insight that is not even a, it's not a theoretical insight that he like cogitated on, but rather a kind of feral instinct. But just that all attention is good attention. Negative attention is basically as good as positive attention. And what you want to do is maximize the amount of attention. And that's not the way most politicians think. Most politicians, they want positive attention. And if they can't get positive attention, they also will just go with no attention. Trump, I mean, the way he conducts himself is to try to dominate our attention at all times. It's a strange, it's one of these sort of moments in history when someone's particular gifts or instincts match the kind of era such that it has propelled him to this position. I think, you know, he got lucky in a lot of ways. He's a guy who's had multiple inheritances in his life, and he's kind of burned through them. But that's his one real skill and that's his one real insight. And the thing about Trump that I will say is that in a weird way, Trump does make my job easier in the sense that I don't feel like, well, we shouldn't be spending time paying attention to him. He is, you know, I think a unique threat to the American democratic order and the world order and is, you know, worthy of sustained mass attention and, you know, organizing to resist.

MG: People in this country are paying close attention to that because I mean, he keeps making these comments about Canada becoming the 51st state, for example. I mean, what do you think is driving that?

CHRIS HAYES: I'm not… It's a great question. I haven't quite solved for this, to be honest. I think I would say a few things. One is, yes, he has an instinct for attention. He knows that it's provocative and trolling, you know, when he calls Trudeau the governor. Like he knows what he's doing. It's a troll. It's a needle. I also think that he genuinely has a strong desire for American territorial expansion.

MG: That he wants Canada.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah. I mean, I think he wants whatever he can get. I mean, these three areas he's focussed on, Greenland, Panama and Canada, I think he views himself as a kind of 19th century imperial monarch, and that in that context, and this is true about the way he views trade, that everything is zero sum. Everything is you're screwing me or I'm screwing you, and I want to be the one screwing other people. And so I think he genuinely has a project, a true project of territorial expansion and conquest. He wants to make Canada the 51st state. That's not like a joke. It's not a shtick. He wants to do that.

MG: How much attention do you think the average American is paying to what's going on in your country right now? You’ve said that, you know, this is a constitutional crisis. You have Donald Trump essentially selling Elon Musk's cars in front of the White House. You have a purge of the US government by Musk as well. How much attention do you think the average American is paying to what's happening?

CHRIS HAYES: Not a ton. I mean, I think that's probably the background equilibrium, is that, you know, news consumption in the US is not that high. It's gotten smaller. So I think one of the things that's actually driving me a little insane is that from up close, what is happening is so clear, like that there is a clear and explicit authoritarian project to end the American constitutional order is absolutely obvious day by day in their actions, and combined with the knowledge that the vast majority of Americans have no idea that's true, don't even really maybe have their arms around what that would mean or why it matters. And the distance between those two is a little difficult to deal with.

MG: Because their attention has been steered elsewhere.

CHRIS HAYES: That's part of it. Yes. I mean, I think the death in the US of news as a, news as a product that you habitually consume and that's been woven into the algorithmic feed, and people increasingly get their news from whatever gets kind of tossed off into the feed. I mean, this is empirically true, that the younger and younger cohorts don't have news consumption as a specific activity. They get news from, quote, social media, which is just like, Lord knows, whatever someone says. But yes, I mean, I think you guys in Canada probably have clearer eyes on this. I think this is true of much of the world that's looking at this, spending a lot of attention on it, and is pretty shocked and appalled, again, across different ideological lines of difference. I mean, that's what's sort of interesting is being shocked and appalled increasingly is a kind of unifying experience for the rest of the world as they watch this proceed, even if they have intense internal divisions about their own politics or even the global order. I think that what he's doing is not that clear to the majority of Americans yet. And there's a real question about whether people wake up to it too late.

MG: Can I just ask you one final thing just about your day job? And that’s you write in the book about social attention and the gaze. You're somebody who's famous. And so people look at you. The gaze is the gaze that you might get when you are out and somebody recognizes you. And this goes back to, you know, how we live online and everybody hoping for a viral hit whatever they post on Instagram or TikTok, that idea of fame and that experience of fame, which is psychologically destabilizing, you say, is coming for us all. What do you mean by that?

CHRIS HAYES: I mean, social attention from strangers is something that we're just flatly not wired for or habituated to, because all social attention we receive in our formative years, unless you're like a child star, is from people that you have relationships with, teachers, friends, family, friends’ parents, right? So that when you get social attention from strangers that you have no other relation with, it kind of tricks your brain into thinking like, oh, this person, this random person on the internet is mad at me. I feel bad because I would feel bad if like my sibling was mad at me or my friend was. But this person isn't a sibling or friend. There's no reason for me to feel bad. Or this person on the street is looking at me in a way that feels like they're coming on to me or they're flirting with me, but they're not flirting with me. They're just recognizing me. But no one looks at you that way. It's a very specific sort of, oh, wait. And so it really messes with your brain. And I think the kind of Ponzi scheme of social attention that is social media is the promise of recognition at scale. But really, all you're getting is attention. And what we really want is recognition. That's to be seen as human by another human. But what we could get is attention. And attention is this sort of synthetic imposter that feels close enough to the real thing to keep chasing it, as we've watched Elon Musk do, for instance, but doesn't actually satiate that deep sort of sole desire for recognition.

MG: How do we regain control of our attention in the face of that, do you think? It feels like there's a lot of momentum around this. The success of a book like Jonathan Haidt’s latest would suggest that people are trying to, at the very least, Grapple with this. But these companies seem more powerful than ever. So how do we start to get our attention back?

CHRIS HAYES: One thing to note is that daily active users for most of these platforms are declining. I do think there's a little voting with the feet that's happening. Too is organizing and sort of consciousness raising. You know, you're seeing that “The Anxious Generation” spent a year on the bestseller list. The book that I just wrote, “Siren's Call”, has found a big audience, and I think people feel attuned to it. And I think the reason for that is that people feel this sort of exhaustion at the personal level. You know, the things that Jonathan Haidt talks about in “Anxious Generation”, I mean, phone free classrooms is just such a no brainer. And I think actually, that same logic should be, is going to be extended increasingly in adult directions. Like it's just crazy to me, if you've ever been in like a conference of adults recently, that no one is paying attention to the speaker. Like we tend to, we tend to externalize our anxiety and neuroses about this entire thing on the kids. But it's like, well, adults are not doing great on this either. So it just seems to me that there's all kinds of spaces where we're just going to say we're not going to have these devices. Either we put them in these cubbies or these lockers or you just keep them in your pocket. But these are spaces that we're just going to interact with each other, or there's a reason that we just don't need them. I think they're going to see more innovation around devices that, you know, can hold your phone or stop your phone or dumb phones, but broadly, I think you're going to see a kind of cultural movement to find ways away from it. And then I think you're going to see organizing around, you know, regulation of the social media companies, and particularly not around speech, but rather around attention. I think it's a really important distinction. You know, speech is obviously and rightly protected by the First Amendment, but attention isn't. And I think there's ways to think about attention regulation that evades some of the speech problems.

MG: I have to let you go, but I have to just, how are you doing in this? You write in the book about another brilliant book. Jenny Odell wrote an astonishing book called “How to Do Nothing”, which kind of changed my life in many ways. How are you doing when it comes to stepping out of that attention economy, or at the very least, trying to grab the steering wheel?

CHRIS HAYES: If I'm going to be totally honest with you, it's bad right now. And partly that's because the book was my binding myself to the mast. The writing of the book was incredibly fulfilling and very mentally calming in a weird way. I think also being, you know, Jenny Odell's book, which is, I agree, just phenomenal and totally unique. She always struck me as like a slightly higher being.

MG: Yes.

CHRIS HAYES: You know, like that she's sort of this like spiritual presence that does kind of float above it all, but like I'm just like everyone else. I'm down in the muck and I'm like the most online person ever. So it's, you know, I do think that's part of, part of being honest about that. And part of the extent the book has sort of found an audience, I think that's part of it.

MG: I really enjoyed reading the book and really appreciate the opportunity to have the chance to talk to you about this. We say it's one of the issues of our times, but that's because it's true. People are trying to figure this out in their own way. Chris, thank you very much.

CHRIS HAYES: Thank you.

MG: Chris Hayes is the host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. His new book is called “The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Species.” Well, coming up after your regional update.

SOUNDCLIP

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: All of a sudden, you know, I’d become an anchor basically to an 8000-ton vessel. And obviously, there's only going to be one winner in that situation.

MG: That does not sound good, does it? Christopher Lemons was working on a pipeline on the seafloor when things went terribly wrong, leaving him stranded and running out of oxygen. His remarkable story of survival is now a Hollywood film, and we will hear the true story of what happened and how he made it off that ocean floor from Christopher Lemons coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current on CBC Radio. Stay with us.

[Music: Theme]

DIVER

Guest: Christopher Lemons

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current. In 2012, Christopher Lemons was nearly 100 metres below the surface of the North Sea. He was working as a diver for an oil rig company. It is a dangerous job at the best of times, but this was an ordinary day until very quickly it was not. Alarms started ringing. He lost communication with the rest of his team. He was running out of oxygen, and he found himself stranded and alone on the floor of the ocean. And yet, somehow, he survived. His incredible story was told in a documentary. It's now the subject of a feature film called Last Breath. It stars Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu, and we've reached Christopher Lemmons at his home in the south of France. Christopher, hello.

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Hello. Thanks for having me.

MG: Thank you for being here. Go back to that day of September 18th, 2012. How did your day start off?

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Well, I mean, for us, it was very much a normal day at the office, I guess. There was certainly no indication of what was to come. We were working away at about 300 feet down inside a structure, a manifold on the seabed. There was a, we were sort of removing a section of pipeline, really just for us, sort of the kind of thing we do every day, really.

MG: When you say a normal day at the office, I mean, the office is working for an oil rig company. And you're there doing what for them?

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Well, yeah, we work on the bottom of the ocean floor. Yeah. I mean, the oil and gas industry, and which was something a bit, well, commendable, but there we go. And we were removing pipework really from inside a wellhead basically. So an oil wellhead and we were doing some pressure testing. We had a hose coming down from the vessel, which was sort of 300 feet hovering above us, I guess, and we get delivered down to the work site in a diving bell every day. And we attached that diving bell by an umbilical, basically, which is exactly what it sounds like, you know, a giver of life. It provides you with an infinite supply of gas so that you can stay down there for the six hours a day that we spend on the seabed, and also hot water to keep you warm in what a pretty, pretty cost of freezing temperatures. So yeah, we were just sort of doing a bit of pressure testing. We had the spanners out really to start removing the section of pipework before, yeah, before we heard the alarms, I guess.

MG: And so what, tell me about the alarms. And what was your first indication at a normal day in the office in a very unusual, you know, work environment that something was going wrong?

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Well, we heard these alarms. We have an open line of communication in our helmets, an earpiece and a microphone up to a single point up on the vessel, which is a dive supervisor. He was a Canadian, in fact, called Craig Frederick. Yeah, we heard the alarms in the background, but that's not really an unusual thing to hear. We hear alarms being tested sometimes, and there are various oxygen and carbon dioxide alarms going off quite regularly. But there was just something about the way Craig then told us to get out of the structure and get ourselves clear and back to the diving bell. You could just tell from the tone of his voice that this was something fairly, fairly serious, you know, not a drill. I don't remember really calculating what was going on, but you could tell something was afoot.

MG: And the diving bell is, I mean, you’ve described it kind of like a taxi, right? It's the thing that gets you down that far under the surface.

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Yeah, that's exactly right. Because of the depth we dive at, it takes about four days to decompress. So if you were to take stops like a scuba diver does, it’ll take four days to come back to the surface. So we have to live on the pressure in order to avoid that. So we live in these tin cans essentially on a ship for 28 days at a time. So you spend a month in there, and every day, the diving bell sort of locks on to the top of the chambers, and you climb up into it and you are sealed off and lowered down through a hole in the bottom of the vessel, a moon pool down to depth, basically. And that means that when you open the door of the diving bell at the bottom, you've got an equivalence of pressure inside and out so the water doesn't come in, and you can just drop down the last sort of 10 metres to the seabed to do your six hours work. So it's exactly as you describe. It’s a taxi to get down to just the place we work, really. You know, you almost forget your diving sometimes. You get so used to spending so much time down there.

MG: And so the team up top says it's time to get out of here. You need to get back to the diving bell. What happens then?

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Yeah. So we basically did or we tried to do as we were told. There was no other option. And when you're saturation diving, your tissues are saturated with no gases. So the surface is never an option. The only safe haven is the diving bell. That's, you know, it's the only place you can go. And it's fairly easy to get back there and find it even when the visibility is not very good because you simply follow your umbilical. So my colleague Dave Yuasa and I really turned to climb our umbilical, which, because the vessel had lost control and was moving away from our position, had begun to drag us basically, and it moved back over the top of the structure we'd been working inside. So we really followed our umbilicals back over the top of the structure. We had no choice. I sort of climbed hand over hand to get to the top of the structure, and then turned to check for that umbilical, because, you know, it's absolutely critical that we manage that at all times as divers. It wasn't going to catch on anything, but yes, that as it pans out, it did catch on something. And all of a sudden, you know, I'd become an anchor basically to an 8000-ton vessel. And obviously, there's only going to be one winner in that situation.

MG: And so the vessel is moving, you're anchored to it, and you're being dragged.

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Yeah, exactly that, except I'm not because my umbilical has caught fast in this sort of one inch gap as this, you know, as the vessel continues to move away in an uncontrolled fashion. It had really just become a sailboat at that point. There were 35 knot winds, and there was about a five or six metre swell. So it was pretty, pretty rough. And as it does so then, you know, enormous tension starts to come on to the umbilical that is attached to me. It's kind of attached to a harness I'm wearing via a Caribbean eye. So there's nothing you can do to undo it, really. My major concern was actually that it was going to slip around the little gap it was caught in an I would be pulled through, you know, like being pulled through a cheese grater really, which wasn’t a very nice way to go either. But thankfully, I suppose, you know, those are good luck I guess was that it did hold fast, but that meant that, yeah, enormous tension came onto the umbilical when, you know, when the inevitable outcome, I suppose.

MG: You weren't down there by yourself. You had, as you mentioned, a diving partner who saw you were in trouble, right?

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. We always go down as a three. One of us always stays within the diving bell every day, but you're exactly right. I was in the water with my colleague and my friend Dave Yuasa. And Dave noticed I was in trouble, so he sort of turned to come back and assist me. If you see the Hollywood version, we have a bit of a chat. But in real life, we weren't able to talk to each other. I think my communication cable had been severed at that point. So We sort of had a face to face moment where I implored him to give me a hand and he basically looked me in the eye and said, you know, I can do nothing because he was restricted by the length of his own umbilical. We only have about 150 feet out that day. So he's at the end of that and he's being pulled away from me. So we only got to within a couple of metres of each other, and then he disappeared into the darkness, really. I lost sight of him, and then I lost sight of his light. And then he was pulled off into the unknown, really, and in no small amount of danger himself.

MG: What do you remember about that? Because you have a finite supply of resources in the moments that follow as well.

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Yeah, that's exactly right. Just as my, actually, before the umbilical snaps, which it does, I lost gas. So I lost, you know, very abruptly had nothing to breathe. I think the hose must have become kinked because it was being stretched so much. So we carry emergency tanks on our back. Just scuba bottles, basically, it was at that time. The documentary makes a big deal of five minutes. The truth is I probably had about an eight or nine-minute supply of gas on my back, which you can open with a knob on the side of the helmet. But yeah, that puts you in a very, very different world, a world where you've had this infinite supply to one where you have a very finite one exactly as you describe. And you're very much on a or I was very much on a clock at that point. And then yeah, very abruptly after that, the tension became too much and the umbilical snapped very violently, very loud, sort of like a shotgun going off. And that meant the tension was relieved, I guess. And I fell backwards from the top of the structure, which was about 10 metres high down to the seabed, you know, in complete and utter pitch darkness, really. And as you say, I'm on a clock at that point.

MG: What do you remember about that?

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: I feel like I've got a pretty lucid memory of everything in the following minutes. Initially, there was panic. I was definitely. I would never pretend otherwise. I was very frightened. But you’re very much in fight or flight at that point. My only thought was to get myself back to that diving bell, to get myself back to that breathable environment. So I sort of stumbled around in the pitch, pitch blackness and darkness and found the structure very fortunately and was able to climb to the top and look up. And that was the seminal moment, really, when I realized there was nobody there. There was no, there was absolute darkness in the sea above me. The vessel, as it turns out, was nearly 1000 feet from me. They were nowhere near me, and they were, you know, unable to regain control of it. So it dawned on me quite quickly that even if they had been right there ready to rescue me, I was basically powerless to do anything myself. And, you know, even if it'd been there, the margins between getting back into that, into a breathable environment and running out of gas were already very, very fine. So I resigned myself quite quickly to the fact that this was probably going to be, it sounds a bit silly now, but this is probably going to be the place that I die. But that had a strangely calming effect, I think, knowing that I couldn't do much to help myself. And I tried to calm my breathing, but I think almost automatically, my body did that for me. And I pretty much assumed a foetal position in the middle of the structure on the roof and tried to put myself in the best place to be found. And at that point, I'm really completely dependent on them coming back to get me. So they were the start of a few dark moments, I guess. I was, you know, I always feel like a little bit of a charlatan because ultimately, I've sat here absolutely fine. But obviously, it's rare to get this opportunity to reflect on what felt like my impending, impending death. And it was really feelings of grief. Like I said, the fear almost drained out of me at that point. And then I just remember sort of consumed by grief and loss and the thought of my parents being, you know, told the unnatural order of things that their son had died before them, and all the hopes and dreams that we have in life. Obviously, I was in my early 30s, and, you know, building a house and the thoughts of travelling and having children and all the excitement that life has to bring were about to be taken away from me, but not just taken away from me, taken away from me in this really alien, aethereal hostile environment. You sort of wonder, how on earth have I ended up here? I grew up in a sort of middle class family in Cambridge. You know, how I ended up dying in this dark, lonely place. So yeah. Strange moments that I'll never forget. And they seem to last a lot longer than I thought they would. Yeah.

MG: And then you lost consciousness.

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Yeah. I think eventually, the carbon dioxide, I remember the gas getting a bit harder to breathe. So I knew I was running out, but I don't remember those very final moments. I think the carbon dioxide must have built up in my helmet and sort of put me to sleep, really. So that was, you know, it wasn't a terrible way to go. If that's how I go in the end, it wasn't awful. But that's it for me, really. After that, I'm absolutely the damsel in distress at that point. I've got nothing to breathe. And the vessel is still wildly out of control 1000 feet away, like I said. Yeah.

MG: Obviously, you didn't end up staying down there 300 feet. I mean, we're having this conversation now, so unless there's some sort of, you know, post-life miracle that I don't know about. But how did they find you? What happened?

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Yeah. Spoiler alert, I suppose, isn't it?

MG: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Yeah. So they were really struggling to control the boat. They were trying to do it manually with joysticks. And ultimately, they employed, I'm trying to think what the equivalent would be for you. They were a Norwegian crew. They literally just turned the, they turned the computer off and turned it back on again. You know, I don't think it's meant as a compliment. But fundamentally, that's what they did. They reset the system. And, you know, miraculously, it came back online. At that point, they were then able to bring the vessel back over the top of me. And Dave was able to drop back down from the diving bell and come and rescue me. But by the time he gets to me, I think nearly 35, 36 minutes have passed since I ran out of having anything to breathe. So he then basically clips himself onto me and pulls me back up in a heroic effort, really very, very difficult circumstances with the bell moving five or six metres up and down in the rough weather. It’s like a superhuman effort I can obviously never thank him enough for anyway. And then he sort of feeds me back into the diving bell, my head back in, and I'm completely unconscious. Duncan takes my diving helmet off. I'm bright, bright blue, apparently. And he, yeah, he literally gave me two, two rescue breaths. They gave me the kiss of life. And apparently, I exhaled very, very violently and came round basically straight away.

MG: But you were without oxygen for how long? 25 minutes plus, right?

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Yeah. We'll never really know because we don't know how long the tanks on my back lasted. But certainly, there's a moment, and which you will see in the documentary, and they use the same footage in the real film, where a sort of flying vehicle, a remotely operated vehicle finds me. That's about 15 minutes in, and I'm definitely unconscious and out of gas at that point. So yeah, we know for sure it was at least half an hour, you know, possibly slightly longer. But yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't really like the word miracle, but it seems, it seems to beggar belief that, you know, not only I survived that long, but also that, or at least no one has been brave enough to say otherwise, that I survived without any brain damage, of course.

MG: I mean, the sense was because it's so cold down there, that perhaps your body slowed itself down or something like that, and that was enough to preserve you?

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: I definitely think that that played a big part. I’d always assumed that's exactly what it was. You hear stories of kids falling through ice and surviving for long periods. But yeah, I've come to learn that for the body to go properly into status, to the point where it would sort of protect itself, if that had been the case, there's no way I would have been resuscitated quite so quickly. But yeah, I would have been hypothermic, there's no doubt about it. And that would definitely have extrapolated I guess the gas that I had left and slowed my breathing and my heart rate right, right down. But I think more importantly than all of that was that the gas that we breathe, which in that kind of diving, you don't breathe air. That's kind of, that's poisonous, basically, at that sort of depth. We breathe a helium oxygen mixture. And so that night, we were only breathing 6% oxygen in that mix, which obviously, for you or I would knock us unconscious pretty quickly right now. But the miracle of pressure and partial pressure meant that that was the same as breathing almost five times as much oxygen as we're breathing now. So I think that basically saturated my tissues with oxygen, you know, the very building blocks the cells of life had just enough to cling on. But the truth is I don't know. I mean, I've been to lots of places, the British Medical Society and all sorts of conferences where they discuss it, and they find there is almost as disbelieving as I am, really. So yeah, it seems extraordinary.

MG: Why do you think you survived? I mean, aside of all of the scientific parts of it, why do you think you survived?

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Well, it’s definitely not because I deserved it. That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was the gas. I think ultimately, it was a combination of both, of the gas that we breathe, the oxygen levels and the cold, which just dragged it all out. I also think that probably because of the fact that I exhaled so violently in the end, that suggests I had a lung full of still high oxygen content gas. You know, and again, that might have been with a very, very, very slow breathing rate or heartbeat just enough to sustain, almost like a breath hold, a free dive, you know, which people can sort of hold their breath for crazy lengths of time, which I can, incidentally, but, you know, the equivalent because all my bodily functions had slowed right down just enough to drag me out. But I don't know, you know? Answers on a postcard, really.

MG: How are you different now than you were then, do you think?

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Well, I'm a lot older, I suppose, a little bit less naive, unfortunately. But yeah, there's not been an epiphany in my life, if that's what you're driving at. It Definitely, I feel like I have a more acute awareness of death, perhaps. And I think about the fragility of life and, you know, the finite nature of our time on Earth and so on. But I suppose everybody thinks about that to some extent, don’t they anyway? It might be just a bit heightened for me. But yeah, in terms of day-to-day life, I've found that life takes over really, and things are quickly forgotten and you move on and the sort of banalities of existence suddenly take over. You don't spend your days thinking about it. I reflect on it occasionally. But yeah, I also don't feel we were traumatized, or certainly, I think I can speak for the other two in the water that day. We almost had the euphoria of coming through it, so we don't feel traumatized in any way. And perhaps talking about it constantly, which I do. I do a lot of public speaking about it and things like that these days around the world. And I guess that's cathartic in nature and allows you to move, move by and feel a bit disassociated from it in some respects as well.

MG: Are you somebody who stays on the land now?

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Well, no. I went back. We went back three weeks later to the same place. We were the first people back in the water. So I carried on diving for another 10 years just to get back on the bike, really, and I can't really do anything else. But yeah, no, now, I still work in the industry a bit, but I supervise now. So I stay in the dry and the safe. Yes. And I'm quite relieved to say so as well. Yeah.

MG: What is it like to see this, just finally, kind of portrayed by Hollywood? Finn Cole from Peaky Blinders plays you, which is, I mean, that's not a bad person to have lining up behind you.

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Yes. Good looking lad. He has curly hair. If you've ever seen me, you know that's not a very accurate portrayal, but that was very flattering. It's lovely. It's been, it's surreal, as you can imagine. You know, just the fact that the documentary was made felt incredible. But for them to move on and make a sort of feature version with these great actors in has been lovely. Yeah, very humbling and a lovely experience in being involved at arms length, I suppose. And we were at the premiere in New York. You know, I got to party with the stars a bit and stuff. So that's all been a very, a lovely experience. And yeah, they've, you know, there's a little bit of Hollywood embellishment, but they do follow the story pretty closely. And yeah, it's been very flattering and lovely to watch them do it. So a nice experience. Yeah.

MG: I just think it's really interesting, just finally, it's really interesting you use the word luck a lot in telling your story. What does that word mean to you given what you’ve gone through?

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: Yeah. Well, I think our boss, when we came out, I remember he said, someone said, oh, they were very lucky. And he said, well, you know, I think sometimes, people make their own luck. And there's truth to that. I think it's maybe when I say luck, you know, we definitely feel like we suffered a very, a single point failure. You know, it was a mistake ultimately at the point of installation of a computer system that caused the whole incident. But yeah, beyond that, there are a lot of things that lined up in my favour that just meant I just made it back without any lasting damage. So lots of lots of small things. So do you call them luck? I don't know. Yeah. I'm not a great believer in it, I suppose. I use the word quite casually, I think. But yeah, it's hard to deny that. I certainly feel lucky.

MG: I think you are. It's a hell of a story. It's really good to talk to you about it. Christopher, thank you.

CHRISTOPHER LEMONS: My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

MG: Christopher Lemmons is a saturation diver, and the film about his near-death experience and rescue is called “Last Breath.” This is The Current on CBC Radio and the CBC Listen app. My name is Matt Galloway. We have just started on this program a new series of interviews about the challenges of ageing and getting older. These are about kind of the conversations that we aren't having about what changes in our lives when we get older. These are for seniors, for their families, for the people who love them and care for them. And from what we have seen in the inbox, this is a series of conversations that is really resonating with you. Karin Marley is our senior producer, and she's here to read some of your mail. Karin, good morning.

KARIN MARLEY: Good morning, Matt. So Janis Warne from Montreal writes, your piece about having the conversation with ageing parents brought back memories of the fiasco. That was my conversation with my father and his partner. We saw the doctor, who delivered the news that my dad had vascular dementia, something my sisters and I had suspected for a long time. After the visit, I sat down with both of them to have the talk. I suggested that they start visiting seniors’ facilities. I had done some research beforehand and had a few brochures of places recommended by his doctor. However, the next day, I got a phone call from one of my sisters asking me what I had said to our dad. He had called her furious, telling her that I was trying to lock him up in a home and steal all his money. I tried to talk to him afterwards, but he told me he never wanted to see me again and that I was no daughter of his. Needless to say, it was very disheartening. We didn't bring up the topic again. He died peacefully in his sleep about a year later. All that to say, this is not an easy conversation, and what you think you are saying is not always what a person with dementia is hearing.

MG: Donna Laramee writes about what happened when she and her siblings felt they needed to speak with their widowed 85-year-old mother. Donna says, the three of us created a unified message and supported each other. The three of us soon learned it was a conversation that had to be had a number of times. I'm hoping my own two thirty-something children are as patient with me as I was with my mom.

KARIN MARLEY: Tamara Nazarec writes, I'm going to see a retirement home with my 94-year-old dad and his 90-year-old wife today. We are trying to convince them to move as dad can no longer help his wife up when she falls. He needs to drag her to the kitchen stairs so that they can get her up together. We've tried to get someone to come in to their house to make their home safer for over six months. No appointment yet. Our system works really slowly, so the sooner you have this conversation, the better.

MG: This one from Cynthia Armer who writes, I am an almost 69-year-old single, self-employed woman with no children. I've lived alone on a farm for most of 30 years. Prior to 2010, I'd only been in hospitals for birth, working or visiting others. Then I had two hip replacements, two hernia surgeries, a broken ankle and more. For years, I've been thinking about where I will live, and yet I'm not ready to move. I also know I can't leave it too much longer. My dilemma is the paradox of loving my quiet solitude surrounded by nature, my animals and gorgeous views all around, coupled with the reality that despite how rural or tractor savvy I am, the older I get, the more vulnerable I am. Frankly, if I hadn't had my cell phone with me when I broke my ankle, no one would have known I was missing until the turkey vultures circled. To add insult to injury, after two plus decades of living alone, I doubt I'd be a good roommate. I'm territorial. My farmhouse isn't laid out well for privacy. Learning how to ask for help has been a hard-won lesson for this FIF, fiercely independent female, and yet one of necessity.

KARIN MARLEY: Tractor savvy. I like that.

MG: Yes.

KARIN MARLEY: Katherine Haggart from Toronto writes, last year, my in-laws moved to a retirement home, a thing that I didn't think would happen. They initially resisted. However, over many months, the discussion shifted, and they understood that they were going to be a part of all decisions from which retirement home? How far away is it from our friends and family? What sort of food is available? Is memory care available should one of us need it? Can we bring our car? This is a bragging point at the home that they still drive. Now, when a fall happens, and it has, the staff is immediately available to help. They have lots of activities to pass the days when they used to be alone a lot. As busy adult children, we cannot be there for them at every moment. Their living in a retirement home has been a great relief.

MG: Karin, thank you very much for this.

KARIN MARLEY: You're welcome.

MG: Karin Marley is a senior producer here on The Current. You will hear more in the series of conversations on Getting Older. This week, we have a story about choosing the right Long-Term Care Home. We're also working on stories about solo ageing, caregiving, divorce later in life and finding the humour in ageing as well. This is something until the serum, magic serum is developed that we are all going to live through. We are all going to get older if we're lucky. And so if there is an experience that you think we should talk about in this series of conversations, do get in touch. You can email us, thecurrent@cbc.ca. That is The Current for this Monday, the 17th of March. Q is up next on CBC Radio One. We have been celebrating this moment by playing some great Canadian music. We continue that today with a twist. It's Saint Patrick's Day. Here are The Irish Rovers and “The Unicorn.” I’m Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll see you tomorrow.

[Song: “The Unicorn” by The Irish Rovers]

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Monday, March 17, 2025 Episode Transcript

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