I tried something different last week, and I'm gonna continue with it. And that is to record the opening after I've recorded my interview with my guest. And the reason being is it gives me time to reflect and hopefully present why I think their story and lessons in life matter to you and to me and hopefully to a lot of people. My guest today is Zita Cobb. We need lots of miracles, but miracles are actually quite easy. A miracle is when someone has a slight shift in how they
see the same thing. I didn't know what to expect. I mean, I've heard such incredible things about this beautiful force of nature. Her intellect, her emotional capacity, and her ability to do is unlike anything I've ever seen. Our entrepreneurs are all in places. They need to be fed and loved and supported. I think what we're missing and if if there's one thing, if I had a magic wand, is to build an architecture for collaboration in each place and across the pillars.
And why this story is so important is that she's applied all of this to where she was born and in doing so, has been part of creating a gift not only to the community that lives there, the world, especially the part of the world where humans still wanna be human beings. We know how to make things. If it's made out of wood, we can make it. We know how to make furniture. We know how to make quilts.
We know how to grow things. We know how to fish. All of those things we would need to bring to bear to welcome guests and take care of them. And And so it's like a way through practice of keeping our skills and our knowledge and building a platform to practice hospitality. I hope you enjoy getting to know Zita Cobb as much as I did. Hi. It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented
by RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast. And ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome, and they're always appreciated. Zita Cobb, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Thank you, Tony. Great to be here. Now my audience is all over the world, and I'm sure most of them have heard of Newfoundland. Some might even even gone to a play. But I just love you to just take a moment and describe what I personally consider one of the most beautiful parts
of Canada. Honestly, one of the most beautiful parts of, the world. Well, the province is called Newfoundland and Labrador. We must never forget about Labrador. And it is it holds up the Northeast Part of Canada. And it's, it gives new meaning to the word rugged in terms of its landscapes. It's a very, very old landscape. The part that I'm from is the Northeast Coast, and that's rougher than rough in terms of landscape. And the rocks that I grew up on are 400,000,000
years old. There's something about the soul of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians that comes out of those rocks and comes out of that North Atlantic and that kind of epic and difficult and noble set of relationships. So let's talk about epic, noble, and in some ways, how challenging it was to grow up there. I was because as a young girl on Fogo Island, you grew up with this incredible community, but not with the luxuries that most people take
for granted, running water and electricity. Yeah. I think I had the real luxuries. The island of Fogo Island is about just under four times the size of Manhattan, so quite a large island with 10 different communities. I grew up in one called Joe Batt's Arm, which when I was growing up had about 900 people. I grew up with this deep intimate relationship with place and with rocks and with the ocean, and we had this confidence from competence. And we always
knew we could make a living. We fed ourselves. We as you say, we didn't have electricity, and we didn't have running water, and we had very little health care. So it wasn't fun when someone had a toothache. I also, spent one year of my childhood life in a sanatorium because I had TB when I was five and six. I understood what it means to be in an active everyday relationship with people and place. You also mentioned in several interviews a defining moment in your life as when your
your father burnt his boat. I'm an eighth generation Fogo Islander. People started to arrive from Europe, to Fogo Island in the mid sixteen hundreds. Generation after generation after generation of us have made a living on the North Atlantic fishing in little boats that we built ourselves, like my father who built
his boat. When the industrialization of the fishery arrived, and it took no time at all to take just about every last fish out of the water because we humans are very effective when we get focused on something, He couldn't see a future. You know, he came home on that that exact day with one fish. Threw it on the kitchen floor, and we all kinda stood there looking at this one fish on the kitchen
floor, and he just simply said, it's over. When I talked earlier about, you know, we're confident people, that confidence comes from the knowledge of the place. Nature knows everything. And every once in a while, we pay attention to it and we learn. Nature knows the cure for cancer. And people who have kept a steady, uninterrupted relationship with nature know stuff. That's where innovation is from. So now you take someone, my
father, who couldn't read. His whole life was fishing, and now there are no more fish. For him, I think the burning of the boat was not willing to suffer the indignity of watching it fall apart and to pull it up on the shore and watch it decay. It was a protest, anger. I think he meant it to be symbolic for us kids to say, stop dreaming. And did you have a chance later in life to talk to him about that moment? Because he, you know, he takes the family to Ontario.
I can't imagine what it would be like to walk in his shoes at that point. It would be like, to me, a refugee leaving everything they know and coming to another part of the world and knowing nothing. There's a beautiful song about that time of when the Newfoundlanders had to go. And some of them were part of the kind of forced resettlement, and some of them, like my father, just decided it was done. And the song there's a line in the song called The Outpour People, and
it is this. They moved without leaving and never arrived. And you could certainly say that about my father. And he went from being the most dignified person you'd ever know to someone who struggled for dignity. They I went to Ottawa to go to university to study business because that's what he said I had to do to figure out how this money thing works before it eats
everything we love. And they went and my parents and my youngest brother went to Scarborough where, of course, Scarborough had a lot of Newfoundlanders. And many of my brothers were in Scarborough. So that's why they landed there. First time in his life, he had to have a bank account because they had to pay the rent. He really hated having to go over to the bank and make an x in front of these young people who were working at the bank. I can imagine. So he wanted to
learn to write his name. I tried to teach him, and so, yeah, I started with the alphabet like you would, did not go well. And so finally he said to me, which was brilliant, of course, he said, I don't need to know all of that. It's just a shape. So he used to go and draw. It was as if it was a drawing, his signature.
I have to believe not only his mental health, but your physical health would suffer when you go from being someone that had stature and someone that was the head of the family and and now going into a world where, as you said, he was embarrassed because he couldn't even sign his name. It has to be difficult as a child to see confidence disappear in somebody that you've entrusted your life to for so many years? It was I mean, in some ways, it was funny because they couldn't they
would go to the grocery store and not be able to navigate. You know, they spent weeks trying to find cabbage, and they thought iceberg lettuce was cabbage. They'd never seen such a thing. So it was always these very funny stories. I was younger because, of course, in Newfoundland, we only had grade 11. So when I started at Carleton, I was 17. I had just turned 17. But, you know, my father is was a tough cookie mentally and physically. He was able to kinda zoom
out and understand what was happening to him. And, you know, it didn't deteriorate into manifestations of despair you see when people lose their dignity. I think he just found he he just found other outlets. And I think he looked at the whole society that he'd been now cast into with kind of humor. We're gonna
fast forward a little bit. But before we get back to what you're doing in the sense of place, the next move on the chessboard for you is you had a very successful career in high-tech, and you did extraordinarily well. So for someone that came out and was sent to learn business and figure out this money thing, you figured it out pretty well. You know, it's kind of a funny thing. I went, to university to study this money thing with, probably a a bit
of anger about the money thing. Like, I have to stop this money thing. You know? And in the studying of business, I actually fell in love with what it could do. In that time, I don't know if you remember the book Small is Beautiful, it came out when I was in university. Business is about how the part belongs to the whole. And this kind of cauliflower thinking and thinking about fractals and thinking about that Fogo Island is just one little floret in a big cauliflower. What matters is the
stem that holds us all together. How do we get all the flows, the economies, like the flows of things to this all the florets so that they have nutrition, so that the cauliflower is well? So that really changed how I thought about business and and economy and the link between business and economy. Tell me how the whole high-tech world came on because you're starting having this interesting philosophy. And I guess technology in many ways
is the the lifeblood of the cauliflower, if it's done right. Yes. And I grew up in a place that was deeply, and still is, deeply innovative. I mean, this is a sounds like a bit of a crude thing, but, you know, this joke about Newfoundlanders is, Newfoundlanders can put the arse in a cat. And it's true. We can figure anything out. And because we we approach it with the belief that we can, and the reason we feel we can is because we've had to. I love working with
people who love figuring stuff out. I actually started my career because, you know, I'm a Newfoundlander. I I worked in the oil patch for a while. I worked for Shell Texaco first and then Shell. I was responsible for a gas field in Southern Alberta. And I met this contractor that was doing cold regions research, left the oil companies, and I joined this little company that, at the time I joined them in Calgary, had 80 people in
Canada. And some were in Calgary and and focused on the Beaufort. And some were in Ottawa, focused on cold regions technology and icebreakers and all of that. And it was owned by a US company that had been started by two guys who came out of the US Coast Guard. I loved those people. Like, I still do. They were mostly engineers, scientists that were doing numerical modeling and things like that. And
my career really was do everything that they shouldn't be doing. So, of course, you know, I was a controller and human resources and purchasing every single thing. I saw my career as create the enabling conditions so that these people can innovate. You're a microcosm of the of the cauliflower even within that business. You are the stem. I never thought of it that way. I really didn't. But that is how and that's what what I'm good at and what gives me joy.
What does the floret need, and what do these, inventors need? So then I when I left then I joined a company called what was that I joined at JDS Optics, based in Ottawa and founded by four people who came out of Bell Northern Research. It was the most beautiful company. It was privately held. And I joined in 1989 and right at the time that and it was involved in wave division multiple I mean, in fiber optics. Wave division multiplexing
was really just becoming a big thing. And so I was with that company until 02/2001, and it grew to 40,000 people. And in my last two years with the company was a time of integration. I bought 40 companies around the world. It was crazy. When we return, things get really, crazy. When we return, things get really, I don't know, powerful for me. We go beyond Newfoundland and Labrador and talk about what happened and is happening on Fogo Island. This incredible
connection with culture and humanity and nature. People from all over the world wanna make it their place to be. It's also a place for locals to be purposeful, to give and receive gratitude, and to really bring to life the power of humanity when it's working together within a circular economy. I'll build on that after my chat with Zita. Hi. It's Tony Chapman, host of Chatter That Matters, presented by RBC. Ideas matter. Ideas are the oxygen of human
endeavor. They breathe life into how we work, live, and play. Ideas let us create and innovate and overcome complex and often challenging circumstances. Big or small, revolutionary or evolutionary, almost every positive step forward begins with a good idea. So bring your ideas to RBC because they matter, and they'll bring theirs because you matter. Ideas happen at RBC.
I used to work for a man who come to work as a technology company every day, and he'd say, the most most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing. I think the most important thing was said by Schumacher in the seventies, nature and culture are the two great garments of human life. And business and technology are the two great tools that can and should serve them. My guest today is
Zita Cobb. She came from a small fishing village, built an extraordinary career in finance before returning back to that village, and working with everyone there to create the Fogle Island Inn. And the lessons learned are lessons could benefit all of Canada. You could have just spent the rest of your life enjoying life. I mean, you did very well intellectually, emotionally, financially. It was a great run. But you chose to come back to Fogo Island.
I mean, this is somebody that's traveling all over the world, buying businesses all over the world, and that that that's part of the story I was fascinated with. That was this always a calling for you or did it get to a certain part of your life where you said it's now or never? I'm just curious what was the magnetic qualities that would bring it back. You know, I never lost my relationship with place, with Fogo Island ever. I mean,
I was always going back and forth. I always had this idea I wasn't gonna live very long because in my family people tip tend not to live all that long because we have heart disease. We're, like, half Irish bat you know, bad hearts. As a child, it was always my plan that I am going to sail back across the ocean. I wanna go and see where these ancestors came from, and I want to have that experience
of sailing. And so the first thing I did, and and I actually bought the boat before I left JDS, is I went sailing. So I lived on the boat on sale for five years. The first thing I did at home that was specific to what's mine to do was I started a scholarship program for kids leaving the high school there to go to university. And I was at home for a review of the scholarship as a public review of the program, and a woman set up and said, you're just
paying our kids to leave. Can't you do something to make work? Her question set off a whole bunch of thinking. The answer kind of presented itself. I was sailing, and I stopped one day in Mystic Seaport, which is America's, you know, museum of its relationship with the sea. In Mystic is a is a banking schooner, was a Newfoundland banking schooner called the the Dunton, Leonard Dunton. And the day I was there, there were a bunch of Newfoundlanders there doing a demonstration for
the making of fish. At that very moment, I was in touch with my good friend Pete from the island, and he said, oh, you had a terrible letter from the mayor that your house my uncle had passed away and left me a little house, like a little salt box 700 square foot house. Your house is an eyesore, and you either have to fix it up or tear it down. Tell them we're gonna tear it down. What am I I mean, what am I gonna do with a falling down house?
Then later that afternoon, I'm standing at Mystic Seaport looking around the Leonard S. Dunton, a Newfoundland banking schooner was saved. Somebody thought that was worth saving. And I thought, what am I doing? I have the means to save this house. I have the means to do a lot of things. If I'm not going to do something on Fogo Island, do I expect you to
come do it or someone else to come do it? These things, like, place holds the things that have inherent value to my ability to make meaning and I think everybody's ability to make meaning. Here I was standing in this place that I was so grateful existed because it really gave us access to the past. It it gave us access to the relationships from the past and the knowledge from the past.
And and I was gonna just tear down my own. Ed, did you, at that point, consider it a calling or something I should do as part of my portfolio of interest and activities? Because it truly became a calling. I think it it grew. I think it did start with a, like, a little miracle. We need lots of miracles, but miracles are actually quite easy. The miracle is when someone has a slight shift in how they
see the same thing. If I had been standing anywhere but Mystic Seaport, I'm not sure the little miracle would have set off in my head. But it was a little bit like pulling a thread on a sweater that you just you thought you were just pulling that little thread, and then you realize this is connected to the whole sweater. And before you realize that, you gotta knit a whole new sweater. And so I I think it,
was a series of little miracles that started with that. So let's talk about place based economics because you've framed your TED Talks, you've framed a lot of your conversations around this sense of place. And I think other people have talked about it as the circle economy. The indigenous certainly talk about it within their world. Just how do you define it, and why aren't we not all embracing it? I think we're suffering from a kind of place blindness. Place is a funny thing because,
like, everything is bound up with its opposite. So if you were in a place, and I know a lot of people and a lot of my friends who were born and raised in small, faraway places, they would feel imprisoned to think that they they couldn't leave. You know, they didn't see it as, like, a gift to be a part of
the place, and they wanted to get away from it. So the possibility of moving and being in motion is so appealing to all of us that when the idea of a global village, oh my god, there's all these systems that support you can live where you like and all of this, we just forgot that we are embodied creatures, that we are social creatures, and that we are meaning seeking creatures.
And when you think about place, place holds nature. And culture is a human response to a place, it's the sum of what we have learned and shared in this place. And those things are integral to meaning making. So I think we rushed away from place a bit too soon, and then we woke up and realized, oh, hang on a second. There isn't a global village at all. There's just a whole bunch of villages. We allowed an economy to develop, a global economy, globalized economy to develop, that forgot to knit
the places into it. So the really, the global economy became, you know, a whole bunch of institutions and organizations loosely organized by governments that place wasn't even a consideration, let alone a design element in the economy. So that's what I think we're trying to solve for now. Because, you know, I think ultimately humans are lazy. We are lazy. And so it's like, oh, jeez, we have to go back and clean up and take care of
the place. Yeah, yeah, we do. We're not going to solve a housing crisis by, you know, talking about it or wishing it so. We're going to, like, figure out how to make this work. And so I think the economy should be the sum of its parts. I mean, I could do a whole talk now, which is Canada, much less than the sum of its parts. And it is. We have 4,500 amazing communities that are incorporated, and God knows how many more that are too small and not yet incorporated
and maybe never will be. Maybe that's fine. But if you think about the economy as think about it as plumbing. Well, if the plumbing works, it includes all the little toes and fingers of a place, like a country. That's a beautiful economy. Lifts up, serves, it underpins places. And if it underpins a place and places, then it underpins lives. Well, let's go back to your cauliflower analogy because I I love what you're presenting to me. But I would argue that in Canada,
I would argue in many places around the world, we've cut off the stem. It's to other people's advantage, whether it's social media to herd you in their places with like minded people who like like minded content or politicians who see divide to conquer as their means to an end, we've lost that sense of
identity. So even if we had 4,500 of these little florists out there starting to realize that this connected, we're better and stronger, there's a lot of people that are wanting to build a mode around each one of those communities because it serves to their advantage versus what you talk about, which I also love, was the sense that this culture is a manifestation of the place you're in. Yeah. I I think when we lose our places and I lose our relationship with
places, culture is local. And when those relationships get stretched or broken, I think we're we get lost. I spend a lot of time thinking about where do values come from and how do values shift? Because obviously they do. There's a connection to actions. Right? Actions shape norms. Norms shape beliefs. Beliefs shape values. If you are connected in a place and and an active member of a community that has I mean, that's the beautiful thing about community
is a place. There's all kinds of people there. And whoever you know, all kinds of ages and just all kinds of points of view that you kind of you would need a kind of social literacy to live with people. Because sometimes, like, I grew up next to my father's brother. Those two men did not like each other. And we knew it. But it never was sort of open animosity. It was just you're living next to people that, in their case, they didn't really like each other. But they needed each other.
And so we mucked along together. And out of that came a set of values around how we treat each other. So if you take people away from place and take away the necessity to actually get along with other people, how do we orient? Where are the North Stars? We all have very vibrant virtual lives now that in some cases have almost supplanted our physical lives. And we have retreated from the physical lives because in our physical lives, oh, my God, people are a pain and your hip hurts and everything
online is so much easier. We don't like that friction of the physical world. And if we are unrooted from past and relatives and history and all of that, it's easy to believe the stuff you see and read. We're very vulnerable. So you're countering, and we're gonna talk about the Fogo Island Inn and how that has become a place that is world renowned. So that lady that said, why are you creating scholarships for people to leave? You've created an entity where people believe people from all over the
world have come in. And I understand part of it is what you call this thing about, I guess, a, b, c, d, this asset based community development or Shorefast. So for the people that haven't experienced Fogo Island, what would they experience coming there? And then let's get to the STEM, which is the sense of a, b, c, d. It it is, as we jokingly say, far away from far away, its own rhythms and rituals and is intact. It hasn't been flattened
by the commercialization of every single thing. You're not gonna find the stuff you see chain after chain after global chain. You just don't see that. And its landscape is so shocking, I think, to most people that the minute you get off the ferry, your imagination wakes up because it's a step out of time in a way, but it's actually not behind time. I think it might be ahead of time. People who grow up on a small island like we
did, who are confident, then the key is confidence. Like, if we break the confidence of a people, we have broken the people. Fogo Islanders have their confidence. And when they're confident, they are super open to visitors, like, super open. I think people are shocked that everybody talks to you. And And Mary Walsh, she says, people think that Newfoundlanders are friendly. Mary Walsh says, no, no, we're just nosy. Very nosy. So, like, who are you? And what's your story? And what's your home? And
what can we learn from each other? It's a very natural part. So when you go through ABCD, I mean, you could look at Fogo Island and say, my gosh, it's a bald rock in the North Atlantic and the cod collapsed. Like, what's the point? There's no electricity, no running water. We gotta get the people out of there. Some government officials thought that. And into that breach arrived the National Film Board of Canada
with this beautiful project called Challenge for Change. It was an anti poverty, program project trying to understand the root causes of poverty, urban and rural. And a filmmaker named Colin Lowe arrived with the University from St. John's Memorial. And they didn't have any answers. They just had questions. And this is the beautiful thing. And basically what they were asking people is, well, what do you know? What do you have? What do you think you have? And what do you think could be done? And
of course, local people know stuff. Deep cultural knowledge. But nobody ever asked them questions. And out of that came, this is back when I was 10, building a slightly bigger boat so we could go to the Midshore. That's how we held on. Those people of my parents' generation made a co op, so we held on. In our case, going through a similar process, you realize, we're deeply hospitable people. We should have we should have a world class inn.
The things and knowledge that we have that we can put into that inn is rare. It's not broken. What was the tipping point that had you going from, wow, we've got hospitality, we know how to do things, we should create a world class into actually putting a shovel in the ground. I think it's when you do it with others. So I worked very closely with two of my many brothers. I think if it had just been us in our close conversation, there's always the option to
back away from it. It's like, Yeah, you know, I don't feel like doing it. I want to go back. I mean, the hardest thing for me was to give up sailing. That was really hard. But because this became a community wide, island wide conversation, you're hardly gonna say, well, I changed my mind. I think I wanna go sailing. Like, I think it's about the commitments we make to each other. I don't remember there
being a moment that we weren't gonna move. Because once you start, once you start the conversations, if they're open conversations, then it it doesn't even belong to me. It belongs to us. Am I going to let you down? No. This co op, this collective of consciousness and energy and heart, It also seems to be manifested in even how you run your business because it's very transparent. People really understand how it all works. That counters the principles of a lot of people that feel control
comes from knowledge. Knowledge gives me power. And you're saying the opposite that by surrendering that knowledge, it gives us collective power. Yes. Exactly. And it certainly gives us more pleasure. And the other thing about the inn, of course, we didn't start, I don't own the inn. Like, I don't own anything on Fogo Island except my car and that little house that I did fix up and I now live in. The inn belongs
to the community because it's owned in this model. It's owned actually by the charity called Shorefast, owns it. It's operated by a separate board that's called Shorefast Social Enterprises. But the beneficial owners are people of Fobo. I didn't I mean, I'm I'm on this planet a bit longer than I ever thought I would be. But when the time comes to go,
nothing needs to be done. Arrangements don't have to be made. And so I think the focus on transparency around the business model is maybe it's a little bit back to my father saying, you gotta go and figure out how this money thing works. Otherwise, it's gonna eat everything we love. Well, I am very excited about how money can work. I'm horrified by how it does work when it doesn't have a relationship with place.
Helping make that visible and helping more people understand that. Like, I think the most important form of literacy we need in this world now is place literacy and economic literacy. And I don't mean by economic literacy financial literacy. I mean more people that understand how the economy works. Like, what are these flows? It's like a big plumbing system. And I think one of the greatest risks we have is that people feel, and many do, utterly
powerless. People would rather have a conversation about their sex life than the economy. Because to most people, it's something that happens to them. And they're frustrated by it and they're just trying to survive it. But we are all economic actors, and we can all be
economic stewards. How do we take what all of you have created and bottle it in a way that some of the other 4,500 communities in Canada are struggling for a sense of place, who they are, why they matter, the questions you ask time and time again, the questions that was answered by the National Film Board. How do we bring that so that we can start making our destiny more a matter of choice than leaving it to the chance of a world that I don't
necessarily have to even connect to? We're building a National Institute for Community Economies, which will have a network associated with it and a digital platform, but it's a it's a way of gathering the good and best practices for community economic development. I mean, we can build a country where all investment is development, and that is such beautiful work. And that is where money meets place. Money making and meaning making are not
opposites. They can come together. The more of us that are engaged in this and aware of that, the more we're gonna get this right. Like, we can do cultural and social and local development at the same time as we're doing investment. Investors growing a capacity to understand place will help. I mean, I think the work really is how do we reconcile the management of institutions with the management of place and
places. That's the work and that's the magic. I mean, and if you think about Canada and these 4,500 incorporated communities, we have very little horizontal musculature as a country. We're like, it's all these kind of vertical silos that are either political or private. So at every turn, you realize that the regional economy or the provincial economy or the national economy is not organized to intersect with place. I can't get
ferry schedule to line up with a plane schedule to come together. They just don't connect because they're optimized in two different systems. The Department of Education doesn't optimize for local. It optimizes for the effectiveness or efficiency, not even effectiveness of itself, not the kids that you're trying to educate. Bringing place into all these systems makes those systems stronger. I I think that's the answer to resilience. I mean, resilience is
ultimately local. If you had a magic wand and you're going in these communities, where's the biggest barriers that if you could just take that friction away, such great common sense? We organize ourselves around a poem. And the poem is the art of walking upright, is the art of using both feet. One is for holding on and one is for reaching out. And you gotta do them both or you're just gonna fall down. And every community is a bit different, but
there's a lot in common. First of all, it's understanding yourself in the world. Understand how you fit into the regional and the provincial and the national and the global. That takes skill sets and experience sets that many local people don't have. That can be solved. I think the thing that is sometimes the hardest, and I see it in big and small communities, is there are very few architectures for
collaboration within the place. So I could name so many communities across the country where you've got the city councils that are doing what they think, you know, my favorite question to ask in any place, who's responsible for the economy here? Must be the mayor. The mayor will be like, no, that he's if it's a he, responsible for the barking dogs and collecting taxes and how do we keep the water running here.
I mean, I think what, Hazel McCallian said about Canada I see this a lot, which is, you know, the federal government has all the money, the provincial governments have all the power, and the municipalities have all the problems. What she didn't say is, all of our assets, all of our assets as a country are in a place somewhere. Our entrepreneurs are all in places. They need to be fed and loved and
supported. So I think what we're missing, and if there's one thing, if I had a magic wand, is to build an architecture for collaboration in each place and across the pillars. So where the mayors or the councils come together with the business community, come together with the not for profits, come together with the educators,
because it really actually takes all of us. And to all see ourselves as stewards of our place and the best way to steward your place is steward your economy and that we can do together. What about the what I call the invisible bars of status quo? Because I come to a meeting. I oh, yeah. Let's do it. But then I walk back and the last thing I wanna give up is what I feel I'm entitled
to. I wanna preserve my status quo, whether that's power, that's influence, whether that's a level of entitlement because I've I've done this job for so many years. How do you break that apart? Because when you're talking about collaboration, when I see a silo, I see a moat, and I don't see a lot of drawbridges. And in fact, the middle ground is getting completely disappeared by a bigger and bigger moat. There is a process. There are many
processes for that, but you're I couldn't agree with you more, Tony. Like, that people get very rigid around what they need to believe for whatever reason they need to believe that we can't touch this. There's a fellow, and he's from Alberta, named Doug Griffiths. He's he heads the Chamber of Commerce in Edmonton now. He was on MHA, and he wrote a book called 13 ways to kill your community, which is well worth reading. There is a a case study about our
work that gets at some of this. They developed something called the PLACE model. It's an acronym. It's the l. It's about linking outsiders and insiders. And a part of our process and what we want to build into the institute's knowledge that we wanna get out in the world and add to is this holding on and reaching out. I think about it as hospitality. Someone has to set the table. So if if you're a family that fights with each other a lot, nothing like someone coming over
from dinner, you know, for your dinner tonight to say, okay, stop fighting. Can we please set the table? Just stop fighting and act nice. And by the time the visitors have left, you're actually talking to each other differently. So I I think that is an important part of the flow of energy in a place that helps lessen the moat. How far do we have to get to precarious before we have that willingness to act? Very good friend of mine is from,
Africa. And he said, you know, we we used to be happy with one meal a day and we fought hard for a second. And if we ever got three meals, it was an extraordinary day. So we were always hungry. We weren't entitled. He said his biggest surprise when he came to Canada was it wasn't about working for that second meal or being consumed about finding that second meal. It was expecting
that second meal. And I'm wondering if part of our society, we've gotten to this point because as much as we want that future, we're not standing on enough shifting sand to say we gotta make a leap for it. We have difficulty also making a relationship with the future. One of my favorite books is The Leopard, which is set in Sicily. It's written in 1958 at the time of the reformation when all of the institutions had outlived their usefulness. And society they were struggling to figure out the
path. And the great line from that book is, if you want things to stay the same, things have to change. Can you figure out that your two meals are not gonna be guaranteed? It's a twofold thing. It's because we do want we tend to want to defend what we have or think think we have and fail to see the future and fail to see that it's precarious unless we can figure
out a world that works for more people. But the first thing is, which is I think where place I I see the place as the answer to everything, obviously, is if you see the world as a zero sum game and you're at the center of it, then you're never going to be open to anything. I tell you, if you actually show up in a community and start to muck along with people, you will not see your the more or less is
there a song game, and you will not see yourself at the center. And the minute that little miracle happens, everything changes because in your life arrives this powerful thing called us. My guess, my last question for you, because I've I've taken so much of your time today, have you found your place? My place has never changed, you know. I mean, I I am made of Fogo Island and, you know, that's how I orient in this world. Ottawa is absolutely my second home, and my work is about
how we put place in the economy. We have to get accounting to change. As long as the balance sheet doesn't show any of our actual assets, we're not gonna change what we do. I think about fish. You know, I jokingly say my father, you say, well, who in their right mind would catch all the fish? And he said, well, you could blame the policy makers. You could blame the the corporations
that own the boats, but I don't. I blame the accountants because we were busy counting the fish we took out of the water and not the fish that were left in the water. I always end my podcast with my my three takeaways, and I don't even know where to begin because I've just been so moved by listening to your, you know, the world according to Cita Cobb. I guess the first word is the sense of how important place is. Realize that our past, present, and
future are connected. And having a constant conversation, not being afraid to plant roots. And then the second thing is just building on that, the florets and this cauliflower and that we're all connected, but I really see this energy force. Your place in many ways is is that connective tissue. I think everything you've
done in your life has been about connecting things, you know. And when I look at that business that you had, it was always about connecting the moving pieces, and we bought and we sold and we brought this back together, but always trying to make something. But I think the most important thing is, I'm not saying it was a throwaway, but it was a simple sentence. It was a whole concept of confidence. How important it is that we have confidence. If we don't have confidence, we are
vulnerable. We're vulnerable to social media. We're vulnerable to being divided by our politicians. We're vulnerable in so many different ways, but we have confidence in in our place and our place within that place. I think it's one of the most powerful lessons I've heard on chatter that matters, and I thank you for that. And I just thank you for spending so much time with me today because you're just a beautiful human being. I'm so happy your place is in Canada. It's our
place together, Tony, and we'll have more conversations. Many more. I've got the greatest job in the world. I get to share stories of people like Zeta Cobb, beautiful human beings, human beings in a constant conversation mother nature and human nature, creativity, and collaborative, circular economy, sharing the wealth of so much to learn from stories like hers. And it wouldn't be possible, Chad, if it
matters, without RBC. So just for the RBCers out there listening, thank you. You should be so for the RBCers out there listening, thank you. You should be so proud what your organization does as an entity or through its foundation to make such a positive impact on Canada. Today, I wanna talk to you about Canada's new economy. What are we gonna create that creates positive energy and purpose, profit, taxes, where wealth is shared evenly versus put in the hands of a few,
where investments are made with intent. I started thinking of our legacy industries and wondering, could they ever change to do that? Private sector, public sector, unions, special interest groups, would they ever trust each other? Would all they all feel that one was trying to win over the other. I'm not sure. I've never really met a person that's willing to give up anything that they feel they work for or deserved. So I thinking, well,
what else can we do? And one of the areas that came to mind and why I did back to back shows, first with Ben Cowan Durr, with his golf courses in Cape Breton, world renowned. And today with Zita Cobb, is tourism. Tourism brings so much magic. Happy people today all armed with camera, video player, and a social media empire. Time in life where we are so thirsty for human nature, mother nature, the nature of things versus the reality of
today. And an industry that when you think of your nature as a stage and what happens around it is the experiences that you create, authentic and real, not synthetic like you might find in Vegas, but real. It's what people want nowadays. And where else but Canada? Our landmass, our beauty. I mean, I see a longevity center near our hot springs, And everything is about living longer and better. I see what we can do with culinary, multicultural,
ecotourism, adventure tourism. Send me your place in the world, and I promise you I'll send back an idea that nothing less will give you a point of discussion. Tourism means the world to each of us, to all of us. And tourism can be one of the pillars that ignites Canada's new economy. And next week, we're gonna talk about farm to fork, and why food means the world to all of us, and why Canada can become a superpower in food. It's
Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening to my rant. Thank you RBC, and let's chow down.