Escaping the Zero-Sum Economy: A New Model for Local Prosperity | Zita Cobb

How do we use money? So we use the money to create the economic assets that would be economic engines that could support other things to grow on this side, support the intrinsic assets of governance. And we learned about, I didn't certainly didn't learn it in my career, something called asset based community development. And the questions of that are simple and beautiful. What do we have? What do we know? What do we love? What do we miss? And what can we do about it? Welcome back to The Eric Ries Show. Today, I'm talking with someone whose life story feels like it spans centuries, literally. Zita Cobb grew up on Fogo Island, a remote fishing community far away from far away, where money barely existed and fish served as both food and currency. When industrial fishing came to this remote part of Canada, her father sensed something was wrong. He gave her this warning. You have to figure out how this money thing works. Otherwise, it will eat everything we love. And imagine hearing those words as a teenager and being sent far from the only home you'd ever known, thrust from a nineteenth century existence into the harsh realities of twentieth century financialization. Zita took that advice farther than anyone could have imagined. She turned out to be pretty good at the money thing. She became a fiber optic tech executive and rode the telecom boom, leaving that bubble with both wealth and clarity about what markets get wrong. She eventually returned home to rebuild Fogo Island's economy on entirely different principles. In our conversation, we unpack the core question that shaped her life's work. How do you use money without letting it destroy what you value most? And we dig into the creation of the Shore Fast Foundation and the now iconic Fogo Island Inn, a radical model of community owned business designed to strengthen culture rather than extract from it. This is a conversation about dignity, intrinsic value, community, and the possibility of building an economy that serves people and place instead of the reverse. Please enjoy this conversation with Zita Kapp. Well, Zita, thank you very much for taking the time to have this conversation. Eric, thank you. I find your story really quite fascinating. And I've heard you tell it a few times now. But I thought, if you wouldn't mind, we could start with your father and the advice that he gave you when you first realized you were gonna have to make a trek into the wider world. Would you mind picking up the story there? Yes. I think he nudged me into the wider world a little sooner than, at least think about it sooner than I would have ordinarily because I was about 10 when the inshore fishery that we were a part of collapsed as a result of the industrialization of the fishery. And I grew up in a as an eighth generation Fogo Islander families that …