♪ ♪ >> Hello.

Welcome to another edition of Canada Files.

I'm Jim Deeks.

Our guest on this episode is Doctor Joe MacInnis, a medical scientist.

A name you may not know but who has had as much influence on public and scientific understanding of the worlds' oceans as anyone in history.

Collaborating with fellow pioneers like Jacques Cousteau and film producer, James Cameron, Joe MacInnis' innovative work has taken him from the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic oceans to the North Pole.

Throughout his career, he has written several books on the subject of leadership and teamwork in such high-risk environments.

Despite his recent 84th birthday he's not slowing down one iota.

>> Joe, I want to start our discussion at the beginning of your career.

I'm intrigued by a boy who grew up in central Canada in Ontario, 1600 miles from the nearest ocean-- the Atlantic, grew up to be one of the foremost experts on undersea human performance.

How did that happen?

>> Jim, thank you for the invitation to share some ideas together.

I'm looking forward to this conversation.

I was lucky.

I grew up in Canada, lived in Toronto.

I spent summers up in the wilderness, north of the city.

It was about that time, that I discovered two master passions that have followed me since.

A fascination with the natural world and the human family.

It was the natural world that took over my young life.

We lived in Ontario, in a place surrounded by 1,000s of lakes One of them was Balsam Lake where I spent my summers.

I remember looking at the liquid crystal face of this lake.

Finding a mask, going underwater, and spending time with the sunlight, shadows and mystery.

I remember asking how deep could I go and safely.

Most importantly, what would I find if I spent time in the depths.

Looking back, that master passion has followed me all my life and what gave me a push towards the ocean.

Where I ask the same questions.

>> You went to university, straight into medical school.

Did your medical studies have any influence on the ultimate career choice that you decided on?

>> First thing to know is that I was not a good medical student.

I struggled with my subjects.

But medical school gave me some great gifts-- teaching and understanding.

Where I could embrace my second fascination -- the human family.

I studied physiology and pathology and most importantly,psychology.

I came away from that experience, excited about these two things, the human family and natural world.

Being fortunate as a child, I guess, I came out of medical school, did my internship.

Just at the same time, the Mercury astronauts were orbiting the earth.

Jacques Cousteau was building undersea stations.

I was able to find a way to get into that field.

I met Edwin Link who gave me a job.

Ed is the father of the simulation industry.

He had an undersea project, the American Man in Sea .

Ed gave me a Link Foundation fellowship to study diving medicine at the University of Pennsylvannia.

And to join his American Man in Sea program.

Fortune's child .

I was very lucky in the timing.

>> We could spend days talking about the many projects you've undertaken over the last almost 50 years.

I would ask you about your top three career experiences.

Tell us about each of them.

>> You've reminded me.

My first deep sea expedition was in 1964 with Edwin Link.

We had two divers living in a small station on the edge of the Continental Shelf.

In 2019, I had the good fortune to join a team diving seven miles into the Tonga Trench.

There are 55 years between those two events-- 60 deep sea science and engineering projects.

The three most important would include the North Pole.

In 1974, sponsored by the Canadian government, I led the first team of scientists to dive at the geographic North Pole.

We spent three days there making 10 dives.

We had a biologist and geologist and were studying the ice formations.

and the creatures that lived in this crystal clear water.

At the North Pole, every direction is south.

All the time zones meet.

The sun never sets.

I can remember making the first dive At the end, I paused.

I looked around.

As I made this 360 degree slow-motion spin, I imagined I could see the Atlantic in one direction, the Pacific in another direction.

And for the first time in my life, I had the sense of the global ocean as one united ocean.

140 million square miles, all of it of a piece.

I think the second significant would be the Titanic .

I had the good fortune to make my first dive in a French government research sub.

I can remember dropping through 4,000 metres and landing on the upper part of the ship.

Looking at those broken portals, and torn pieces of metal collapsed the years.

We spent five hours there, taking pictures, collecting artifacts, with lots of time to think.

What had happened on those decks in 1912?

That sociological cocktail of cowardice, chivalry courage, panic and prayers.

When you dive the Titanic , one of the questions you ask is, "What would I do if I was on the ship and it was going down?"

My third would be, not long ago, I had the good fortune to be the medical advisor on Jim Cameron's seven mile solo science dive into the Mariana Trench.

The Mariana Trench is in the Western Pacific, east of Japan.

It is a place of freezing cold depths, hurricane winds, and ship-breaking waves.

It's the toughest expedition I've ever been on.

We lost two of our team-mates in a helicopter crash early on in the expedition.

We had to overcome this and push forward in their honour.

The reason we succeeded was that we had a transformative leader.

Jim inspired us.

He had invented the machine.

Had spent 7 years of his life focused on what he believe in-- science-driven exploration to get us to this point.

That expedition with Jim as our transformative leader, was a master class in team genius .

>> You mentionned Jim Cameron as the director and creator of the film, Titanic .

With all your public speaking and seminars, I assume, people always want to talk to you about Titanic and what it was like to work with Jim Cameron.

In the totality of your career, is the work on the Titanic a truly significant achievement in your mind?

Or was it overblown or not as significant to you personally?

>> Titanic certainly was a major part of my life for a few years.

It conveniently was at the average depth of the ocean, which is 4,000 metres.

By focusing on the human performance and the technology, at that depth, we were accessing the abyss.

The expedition that I really enjoyed was coming away from the 1987 dive-- my first dive to the Titanic.

Spending three years building the team and the financial structure to make a 90-minute IMAX film.

We did 17 dives.

We did the first science ever done on Titanic.

I remember inviting Jim Cameron to the world premiere in Ottawa at the Museum of Civilization.

Jim was impressed.

We introduced him to the Russians.

He hired the Russians and made 12 dives to the Titanic.

That was the beginning of his blockbuster film.

It was nice to have an expedition and inspire a friend of mine to make his extraordinary film, Titanic .

>> Speaking of expeditions, you led the team that discovered the remains of the famous British merchant ship, the Breadalbane .

Which sank in the Northwest Passage in 1853.

You were also co-leader of an expedition that studied the famous wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald .

The merchant ship that went down in Lake Superior in 1975.

I want to go back to the Arctic and your work there-- your development of the first sub-polar research station.

Why was that so significant?

>> Her name was Sub-Igloo.

She was a transparent sphere that I designed and built in southern Ontario, and took up the Arctic and used for two expeditions.

She was a refuge, science centre, and a classroom.

Her importance to me was that she gave us time inside the ocean to do the science.

Time to reflect, to sit inside a sphere filled with air in a fathom of ice in freezing-cold water.

To think about the meaning of where we were, and the privilege of being there!

That was the significance of this small, world's first manned polar station.

She gave us time to think about where we were.

>> One of the aspects of your work at the North Pole was diving under the polar ice cap with a former Canadian prime minister, the father of our current prime minister, Pierre Trudeau.

>> Jim: He was a mentor to me, on so many things.

He was a man who pushed his boundaries-- physically and mentally.

To take him to a place where we had been working.

Most of our experiments in polar dives were done in Resolute Bay.

To dive with Pierre, and to thank him for his inspiration was special for me.

I had the good fortune to take some folks under the sea and to introduce them to this majestic world.

Walter Cronkite, who was doing a tv series at the time, Twentieth Century .

I taught Walter how to dive so he could lockout of a submarine.

What was impressive was his enthusiasm-- to go through the hardship of learning to dive to get the story.

This was a journalist who would do anything to get to the heart of the story.

I took Prince Charles diving under the ice of the Northwest Passage.

He was making a tour and wanted an extra dimension to it.

Very interested in the Arctic history and the British contribution to that history.

It was a great honour to spend 30 minutes, under a fathom of ice, in freezing cold water in Resolute Bay.

>> The US, Russia and China have spent billions of dollars over 60 years on space exploration.

I know that you support the space program.

You were a very good friend of Buzz Aldrin-- the famous first moon-landing astronaut.

Many of those billions could and should have gone to undersea exploration.

To exploring our own planet and understanding the potential of our oceans more than we have.

>> The idea that money should be spent here and not there is not so essential.

We could argue more money should be spent beneath the ocean.

As I see it, we stepped off this planet in two directions simultaneously.

We went out into space and we went down into the ocean.

Those trajectories have been in parallel since the 60s.

The communication back and forth between astronauts and people working under the ocean was wonderful and still is.

There is great benefit from what we learn through satellites that tell us about the ocean.

The ocean is much better because of what we've done with satellites in space.

I think the expenses are probably appropriate to the missions set in space and were headed off to Mars.

A landing coming up within weeks and we're still working in the ocean.

Two years ago, I was with a team diving 7 miles in the Tonga Trench.

In the last couple of years, all the deep trenches have been observed for the first time.

These two parallel, very exciting journeys-- how lucky we are to have had a front-row seat in our lifetimes of these first steps off the planet and into the ocean.

>> I want to get into leadership but before we leave the Deep , from all the years you've been in and under the oceans, did you see the effects of human activity in the water or climate change itself?

What do you think is the state of the oceans today compared to when you first started diving in the 1960s?

>> Mother Ocean, if she was a patient, would be in the intensive care unit.

The world's largest, oldest, least understood ecosystem is under attack and has been, all the 50 years that I have been pursuing my interests in the sea.

I have seen the changes.

They are dramatic .

She is over-fished, over-heated, and over-polluted from micro-plastics to atomic waste.

My concern about this was what lead to my really serious interest in leadership.

I'm not a biologist but I know about human performance in high-risk environments.

So I thought, if I could focus on leadership, I might make a contribution to the unbelievable harm that's going on inside the ocean.

So I've been focusing for many years on what it takes-- this skills and values of good leadership that will help us bring the ocean back to some kind of normal state.

I'm fascinated by components of leadership that I call deep empathy, deep eloquence and deep endurance.

Deep empathy is having a molecular sense for the people that you are working with.

For the task that you are undertaking, in this case, saving the oceans.

For the terrain, the ocean itself the molecular sense for that.

Deep eloquence is being able to articulate your vision for the future of the ocean.

With words and actions that are accurate, brief, clear, clever.

Deep endurance is having the physical and mental resilience to succeed in the mission no matter how long, difficult or dangerous.

That's the way I'm approaching this catastrophic problem with the ocean.

>> One of the themes you have focusing on recently is the concept of resilience.

Particularly in high-stress environments.

I assume that is a sub-set of the leadership focus that you've concentrated on.

>> My focus on resilience right now was accelerated by the pandemic.

Realizing that, in any crisis, there needs to be a way to navigate through it.

And to recover, and recover from the adversity.

Resilience for me has many pillars but among them: self-care, slow empathy, realistic optimism, and fierce ingenuity which is so important.

That's my focus, to understand how we get through this crisis.

And the other crises that face us including: climate change, nuclear war, cyber warfare, poverty, racism.

All these cascading and going critical simultaneously, are going to need resilience.

My focus at this moment in time and how we can get better at it.

>> You just mentionned a number of existential threats to mankind, not to put too fine a point on it.

What is your view of the future?

If we were talking at the outset of your career, you might say the Cold War is a big threat.

But now we've got so many other challenges that we're facing.

You just passed your 84th birthday.

What is your view, looking forward to when you and I won't be around.

Is it an optimistic or pessimistic view?

>> My current view of the future is what I would call tragic optimism.

The "tragic" comes from size and scale of these cascading crises.

And what it means for my children and grandchildren.

It breaks my heart to look at climate change, and what that's going to mean for my kids and grandchildren.

But I'm optimistic because there are so many beautiful minds working on these problems.

From Jane Goodall... there's a long list of good scientists.

One of them is my good friend, Thomas Homer-Dixon.

He has just written a brilliant book on all of these cascading crises called Commanding Hope .

>> Jim: I really recommend it.

>> You mentionned your kids and your grandkids.

Have any of your family members followed in your footsteps?

Would you like to see them pursue a life or career under the water surface?

>> My greatest achievement is not in the ocean.

It's not underwater.

It's my family.

My children and grandchildren.

It's not my doing.

I was away climbing into submarines and diving under the ice.

The reason my family is successful is because of my wife who took over, was the golden anchor for all the years I was away.

What they are: intelligent, honest and curious is due to her.

They have that!

I'm very fortunate.

They are following their own passions that are artistic, creative and contributing to society.

>> As someone who has literally travelled to all four corners of the earth.

And probably more than any living person, spent more time underthe surface of our oceans, you're still very proudly Canadian.

What has being Canadian meant to you and mean to you today?

>> It's a wonderful question.

Thank you for asking that.

Being Canadian means two things for me.

First, gratitude.

To grow up in this splendid, luminous country with its beauty in the natural world-- and the beauty in its people.

This is the country that gave me my education.

It gave me my health and the idea of possibility!

Secondly, responsibility.

Being Canadian means being responsible for the country.

For the community and for the family.

You could be a citizen scientist.

Most importantly, you could contribute.

It was the former prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who said, "This country is not just governed in Ottawa.

It is governed by the actions and ideas of all of us."

This idea of responsibility has always been central to my thinking.

To give back to the country in a meaningful way by making a contribution to others.

>> Joe MacInnis.

Thank you so much.

You've been an inspiration to a couple of generations of Canadians for your magnificent work under the oceans and on the subject of leadership.

Thanks for joining us on Canada Files .

>> Thank you Jim!

Delighted to be with you.

>> Thank you for joining us as well.

We'll see you next time with more Canada Files .

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