Clay sits down with author Chris Fenton

Basically a fascinating exploration of topics and ideas that maybe we don't get a full length discussion for on the daily radio show. I of course him Clay Travis, and we're joined today by a guy that I'm fascinating to talk with. His name is Chris Fenton, and he has written a book called Feeding the Dragon, Inside the trillion

dollar Dilemma facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American business. You guys, if you listen to this program regularly or listen to read me, know that I have been sort of on the forefront of the relationship between America and China and why I see it as a new modern day Cold War going forward, a battle over whose intellectual ideas and

property rights and everything else. Is going to dominate in the twenty one century, and I think lots of Americans have been caught flat footed on exactly what's going on with China. And we bring in Chris Fenton now and I said, he just wrote a book. But Chris, your background, you have a knowledge about this sort of entertainment culture battle going on in sports and entertainment with China and the United States based on what what's your background and

how did you end up doing what you did? Well, that's a great question, and I covered some of it early in the early stages of the book. But UM, just a brief snapshot. First of all, thank you for having me on the show. Secondly, UM, I grew up in South Florida, big Miami Hurricane fan, UM, big fan

of pop culture. I'm years old, so I was sort of at the perfect prime moment to UM engage with pop culture both through my UM the MTV you know, music videos and the start of that network, and the v the vhs and VCR tapes that Blockbuster got so prolific at delivering UM and through that, I just really over time was thinking, Hey, I want to get into the cultural aspect of of the business community. How do I do that. I ended up going to Cornell University

got an engineering degree there. UM, and uh, I was sort of lost in There wasn't a lot of great opportunities and it was a little bit of a downtick in the economy, and I just hopped in my car and drove across country um and slept on fraternity couches of of five Gama Delta across the way. I think I stopped in sixty three spots. UM. I actually was a terrible football player for Cornell University, but I bonded

with Cornell or with football guys at different schools. I actually crashed on a couch of University Nebraska's Fiji House for a while, and they had a lot of football guys there and I got to know them and and over time, I eventually got um to Las Vegas, where I thought I was going to plant my my, my, my roots because it was sort of a booming economy at the time. And uh, a buddy of mine in Los Angeles talked me into visiting for a weekend. I ended up driving out just to visit him and never left.

I was just like, this is the greatest place on Earth. It's beautiful at seventy two and sunny every day. The girls are absolutely spectacular looked at and and it's the center of pop culture. So what could be better. So my very first job was as a waiter at the Olive Garden um right off u C. L A's campus in Westwood. It's not there anymore. I used to go visit it every once in a while just to reminisce um. And then from there it led into a Hollywood career.

So what did you okay? So you start waiting tables in l A, which is honestly an l A story. A lot of people understand when you get out there, even with a graduate I mean a degree from Cornell University. So you work at the Olive Garden and then your first job in the quote unquote entertainment industry is what and how did you get that gig? Yeah, it's funny. I was waiting tables at the Olive Garden, which is UM, as you know, not not the most high end psycholo restaurant,

but for me it was UM. I had a lot of hospitaliano and I was waiting on two guys on a double date. When was a guy named Chris Moore who had just left UH an agency called I C M and was producing a little movie that started a guy that no one knew named Ben Affleck, and he said, hey, what are you planning on doing? I said, I have no idea. He's like, well, you should get into the

Hollywood business. It's the Wall Street of the nineties. And he invited me into this UH pick up basketball league and and there I met a bunch of guys who no one knew at the time. That was a huge agency. Leaders Patrick White Sow and Ari Emmanuel of Ben Affleck. Matt came in. They're playing in the basketball league. All of us were there, like we we all were short of I mean, were a few years older, a generation

slightly ahead of me. But it was all just a bunch of guys sort of trying to make it in the entertainment business. I mean even White Soul, he was a guy from Iowa. So um, A lot of this just sort of transplanted there and we're like, okay, how do we figure this out? And all right, so I'm gonna I'm gonna cut you off here, but I gotta know, how would you assess the respective basketball games who had the best talent of the group that you played with.

So you were talking about these young actors and these young agents who people, if they're familiar with the larger Hollywood universe, will know even if they don't know the ones who aren't actors. But how would you break down McConaughey, Damon and uh And and Athleck as basketball players? And how about the guys who were going to end up being super powerful agents, how would you break down their ability? I would say Patrick White soul was was a tremendously

skilled player. He played growing up and I think he actually played in college a little bit. Ari was just tenacious, persistent, really difficult to get around, great defensive player. I would say Matt Damon was probably one of the best athletes I've seen as a as an actor. And by the way, most actors get that reputation of not being athletic, he was super athletic. Um Ben was actually a good player

on the inside. Actually, Um slightly twisted his ankle on my playing defense against him, and I think I got a lot of crap for that for a couple of months afterwards. And then Chris Moore went on and produced Um Goodwill, Hunting and The American Pie franchise, great power forward, A big guy. Um. Some people might know him from his work on Project green Light on HBO for for several seasons. So this is pretty fascinating in and of itself.

So you're playing in this basketball league, you're Cornell grad and how does that lead to the first quote unquote gig. So you're working at the Olive Garden, you show up out there, you start playing a basketball league with guys who are young and starting to kind of make their move but not really that well known at the time.

And then what happens. Yeah, so then they then everybody said, hey, look, if you want to get in the business, well we'll set up some meetings and um, but we can't promise anything. Everybody's sort of very self interested, but will obviously help you out and give you advice. So I got a bunch of meetings, but it didn't lead to anything. I actually didn't really even know what I was doing in these interviews. Um, you know, I talked about somebody I

want to run the world or whatever it was. It was never about Hey, I want to do anything I can for you. If that means delivering a stool sample to your doctor, I'm happy to do that, which, by the way, was something that mail room attendees had to do with William Morris um. But I ended up getting a temp job through a temp agency as a music facts clerk at the William Morris Agency, which doesn't exist anymore.

It got taken over by Endeavor, and I fact um music contracts all day long for the Lights of the Eagles, Red Hot, Chili Peppers, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, etcetera. And I would just read and study those contracts all day long. It was unbelievable. I mean you could see what the riders were, and the riders are sort of the backstage perks that these guys would have. I mean the Eagles and the Health Freezes Overtour had backstage perks. So it's cost sixty THO a show on the top of the

million they were getting guaranteed. So it was really interesting. And then he saw it down in dirty guys like Glenn dan Zing and the fact that he just wanted three girls that lived within a twenty dollar cabs fair of the venue, you know. So it was pretty eye opening.

And then over time I figured out who inside the agency could lead me into the mecca, which was getting into the William Morris mail room where I could get promoted into the agent trainee status making a whopping three dollars a week, and that's exactly what I did, so you get into the agent. I'm kind of fascinated by

this too, because there's so many people. Hollywood agency is very much of a meritocracy, right and for people out there who are listening to us right now and think, oh, I'm somewhat interested in the agent business as it pertains to Hollywood. What is a job in the mail room entail? Yeah, a job in the mail room is essentially Mr Miyagi um watching over you. And we had a guy named Marv ALBERTI was the mail room, the career mail room

guy who led all these young trainees. And it was trainees that were essentially Steven Spielberg's nephew or David Geffen's you know, uh, you know, best friend's son or whatever it was. And then there were all kinds of crazy sort of Harvard law grads and everything else in there.

And our job was essentially the deliver mail throughout the agency, so we would learn what every department was doing, whether it was commercials or TV syndication, cable or the movie business or television or at the time we were dabbling because we were representing um sort of some sports stars

in various aspects. So we had that, and we had the music department, and over time you got promoted into what they called dispatch, and that's where you learned how the whole town work because you had to deliver packages and scripts and so on all over Los Angeles. You learned where Warner Brothers was in Paramount and Sony, and you learned where Quentin Tarantino lived and where you know,

Russell Crowe lived and everybody else. So it was really interest sing because during that time you never understood why they had you do that, but it was essentially the wax on wax off method of Hollywood training, and over time you just sort of absorbed a lot of how the business operated. Okay, and so where does that lead? You start in the mail room and by the way,

you kind of dropped it in there. But there are literally guys or girls who would graduate from Harvard Law School so desperately want to get into the entertainment business that they would take these three hundred dollar a week jobs in the mail room to try to work their way up. Yeah, essentially the ones that ended up getting through, and I was I was very lucky because I had uh A president of the company, a guy named Jerry Katzman saw me walk into his office one day and

asked me, what shoot is that that you're wearing? And I said, oh, you like it? And he's like, where is it made? And I said, oh, I don't know. And I opened up the the inside and I said, oh, Yugoslavia. And he's like, where would you buy a Yugoslavia in shirt? And hear a suit and I said, well, it's up on Hollywood and bind you know that store. He's like, what I cost you? It's like, I think thirty three bucks because they got three. And he's like, I'm hiring

you as my morning assistant. And he took a liking to me because I was a guy that completely was unprivileged and just wanted to get promoted as quickly as possible. And those were the people that when the men and women that ultimately made it through those Harvard Law people, they decided, hey, you know what, I gotta go on and do something better. The nepotism sort of people were

just not motivated enough to get through the system. So we all got through and I became an agent at twenty four and um, you know, I was making seven fifty dollars a week, but they said, hey, it's seven fifty dollars a week plus all you could eat, so

um that made you had an unlimited expense account. And I think in my first year I spent something like a hundred and twenty five thousand bucks on my am x UM on top of the thirty thousand or whatever I was making a year, So people thought it was a millionaire at the time, but I was literally making zero. All right, So what does a young agent's job at that point in time consist of? In uh, in l A and who would you represent? What kind of clients

would you have? Well, at the very beginning, you're doing really the grunt work, so UM I would cover shows like uh, the Tonight Show and have to, you know, make sure Arnold Schwarzenegger has everything he needed backstage two UM new shows that we were launching, like Ricky Lake or the Danny Bonaducci Show, crazy things like that. UM Old agents would give me clients that were completely unhirable, like one of the first director clients I had his last credit was a leave at the Beaver episode from

like thirty years ago. So it was crazy stuff like that. But then over time you started to sign your own clients, and I got really lucky. I came across a young guy named Michael mcculler's who was working on the MTV Movie Awards, with a young actor named Mike Myers, and they wrote a script called Austin Powers and the next thing I know, I saw it the New Line and

it becomes a huge hit. And then I came across this young author and a guy that was in the music business who was David Being and Brian Coppelman, and they wrote this fantastic script called Rounders, and we went out and sold that. So that's sort of how the weird part of Hollywood works. It's not necessarily a cream rises to the top business. It's a lot based on luck, but it's a lot based on perseverance and persistence, just

like you built your career. So Rounders say, Yeah, everybody, I bet almost has has watched that movie at some point in time, what made you think, oh, this could be something? Well, I wasn't sure of that. I actually read the script and I thought, this is an amazing story, but it's not practical or realistic, Like this world doesn't exist. And Brian and David were like, oh, definitely it does.

Let's show you. And they would drive us around to like places in Commerce or Hollywood Park, which I didn't realize had like a underground poker facility, all these different things, and you saw this like underground world of people and characters and rich and poor sort of battling against each or in these poker parlors. And I had no idea it existed, nor did most people. Like that was way

before the poker craze. And and quite frankly, I would say that that script and the cast that was put together and the way that was directed, it was Mirrormax at the time that really brought it to life and made it successful. That really kicked off the poker craze. It really did kind of take off in a huge way. And you guys were a part of that. So that

movie happens, and then what so you're learning now. I don't know if you've listened to the Winds and Lost his podcast before, but I'm always interested in how do you get from one place to another? Because everyone's story is so much different. So you're a young agent, you got this huge expense account, you got a successful story with Rounders. What then happens? How does it go from there? Yeah, so then it's in And I walked through the book.

It's really a Jerry mcquied story in a lot of ways. Um, I had a lot of big players that were big fans of mine. But like you said, it's a bit of a meritocracy. So I had one particular boss that had it out for me. We actually lost a client um to a competing agency, and he pinned it on me, and I tried to fight back, and ultimately one day I called into an office and I write very openly about it in the book. It was a terrible moment um and and they said, hey, we gotta let you go,

And I said, are you kidding me? And they're like, yep, but you know, we won't tell anybody. It's all good. And the problem with Hollywood is when you get fired, the rest of the town already knew for hours before. So I remember walking out of that room and seeing everybody passed me in the hall, and I could just tell they all knew exactly what happened. It was the worst day, and I literally walked into my office. Um there was a guy Will Lowry, who actually lives in Nashville,

tennesseee right now works for Endeavor. He was my assistant. I said, hey, by the way, just pack up my stuff bringing outside. I'm leaving. I'm not coming back. And I walked out and I literally felt like Jerry McGuire with a gold fish in my bag. Even Will was like, hey, I gotta stay here. I need the job. I was like, dude, don't worry about it. I'll be fine. And I walked home and I was just, uh, just devastated. I was twenty nine years old, and I literally was. I felt

like Jerry McGuire At the time. I was very much on the rise at that company. So it hit me like a ton of bricks. And when you know, when something like that hits you, you just don't know how to react right away, and you get really miserable about it. So immediately, obviously I started to hit the phones and

try to get clients on board. My now wife was sort of cracking a whip on me right, making sure that like I got my ship together and stopped moping around, and uh, you know, I would talk to clients and they would be like, okay, maybe I don't know. But

then ultimately they didn't come. And the one sort of rod Tidwell that decided to go with me into whatever venture I had decided to do by myself with this little Chinese production company that I had signed on a whim because they did this little movie that I thought was very interesting. And they said, hey, no one's called us from William Morris. We'll go with you. Just you our eyes and the years in North American. Let's figure something out. So I hopped on a head over to

China and it was unbelievable. I looked around. I said, there is opportunity in this place, like count me in. So you flew to China? What year is this? When you're twenty nine years old? You lose your job at William Morris. By the way, can you tell us who the who the client was that you lost? That was such a big deal. Yeah, he's he's actually a friend of mine now, so I'm fine saying it. But it was Jerry O'Connell, who, believe it or not, played Cush

and Jerry maguire. Uh, yeah, it was, you know, I mean, look everybody's in you know, everybody's going to do what they gotta do, and he thought he actually left for Patrick Whitchel, which was even crazy here, and Patrick was at C A A at the time, So it was it really hurt and it really wasn't my fault, but the fault got put on me, and ultimately the senior agent one out over me and I got thrown out on the streets. So, by the way, yeah, Jerry was

hot there. What's it like to be an agent and constantly live in fear that you might get a call from a client and they're saying, hey, you know, I'm going somewhere else. Is that something I imagine now it's even more stressful because people have got phones, and I think they probably make even more rash decisions. I would just say in general, because you know, we don't have that, uh, that that sort of governor on us. Certainly, you can look at the way people use Twitter now and I

would imagine the agency job has gotten even tougher. But also it's easier to reach out to somebody, right if somebody else is trying to poach away a client. What's that feeling like? Do you always just kind of have a dull apprehension in your stomach associated with being an agent. Well, you gotta realize that it's so difficult and you're you're in the same kind of business, so you know this.

I mean the amount of rejection that anybody on the talent side of the business, whether you're running shows for Fox Sports or your own podcasts, or you're a movie star or director or whatever, the amount of rejection you face on a daily basis is like, of everything you do, of that one percent is the goal that you always have in mind. But that creates a lot of insecurity.

So when you're an agent trying to grab somebody from another agency, all you gotta do is to play into that and say, hey, you're getting all that rejection because you have the wrong agent, Whereas the agent that reps that person has to play into the one percent and say, hey, you have this one percent because I'm working really hard. So it stats the deck in regards to being able to steal clients from other agents, and it's why most of the town works in fear all the time, which

quite frankly plays into the China conversation. Be sure to catch live editions about Kicked the coverage with Clay Travis week days at six am Eastern three am Pacific. We're talking to Chris Fenton and uh, I'm just kind of fascinated by all this. Okay, you got and this is wins and losses. I'm Clay Travis. Appreciate all of you listening along with us. Encourage you to go listen to all of our long form conversations here. Okay, you arrive in China. I'm assuming that was your first trip to China.

What year is it and what do you see on the ground when you arrive in the country for the first time. Yeah, So the first time I started working with the Chinese was around two thousand I set foot in the market around I think it was two thousand four, was the first time I got over there. Um, and then I went regularly ever since. UM And at the time it was interesting I even write about in the book.

They had an operation there that was in Beijing that one night, in the middle of the night, bulldozers came in and cut their building in half. So when I went and visited their office in Beijing, the back half of their their their building had to tarp over it to keep it from the outside elements because literally it was in two zoning areas of Beijing, and that was a perfect example of what was happening in China at the time. They called it the National Bird, was the

construction crane, and they were everywhere. So when you got there, you literally looked around and said, Holy how the opportunities are endless here. The world is your oyster. And you got to realize, like I was a guy living with four other guys. I'm the hot you know, up in the Sunset off the Sunset Strip in the Hollywood Hills. We have parties with many, Me and Matt Damon and even Monica which would come over. It was crazy. And now suddenly I got thrust into China almost like Michael

Keaton and Gung Ho or something. It was just weird, surreal, but that was all I had. Did you speak Chinese at all? I didn't know, not at all, And even to this day I speak a little bit, but I can sing a bunch of songs and Mandarin, which is very helpful. Alright, So, uh so you're repping that like

you got fired. You get fired, and the obviously there's a lot of people out there listening right now who are going to get fired or have been fired at some point in their life, maybe not for any reason of their own, certainly in this era where the coronavirus and everything else with the unemployment rate is up. You have one client in China. What does the client do

uh and what are they trying to do? So the client was h There were three founders of this production company and they were doing Western style commercials in a market where Western style commercials didn't really exist so at in the nineties. If you were Procter and Gamble or somebody trying to sell a toothpaste, they're literally be a camera that has a still shot for five seconds of a Tuba toothpaste on the table and that was your commercial.

They started works, That's the way they would, Yeah, exactly. They started. Um There were two Chinese and one uh, one guy that came in from New York that was there from the early nineties on, and they started directing commercials for Volkswagen in particular and also UM UH various

other sort of um less exciting type of clients. But v W always wanted to have sort of Auto style Super Bowl ads in that market, so they got really good at shooting fantastic Western style commercials with a China flare, and then over time, these companies that used different ad agencies would ultimately come to them and say, Hey, we think you guys have better creative instincts in regards to this market than our ad agency that's based in Tokyo, or in Hong Kong, or in Taiwan or even in

the US. Would you be our ad agency? And right around the time when I dove head first into working with them, um, was when they got Volkswagen as their um first advertising client across the across the market, and at the time Volkswagen was something like thirty market share in that market. They had sixteen different models on sale, So it was a huge effort and it literally transformed the company from this little production house into a full

service advertising agency overnight. So can you explain to people out there who may not have any clue how when you arrive in China, even in two thousand, for I think you said you got over there for the first time, how behind would you say they were from an entertainment and pop culture perspective to where we were in the United States at that time. Well, I know because we did the very first deals in sort of different exercises

that had never been done in that country before. For instance, in the music business, the only music they had from the West there was unlicensed. It was just pirated. So um, folks Volkswagen really liked this song by that bop band Hampsten. I don't know if you remember them, a song called Yeah there is a song called I'll Come to You. And I remember calling the music publishing house it was Sony a TV at the time, saying hey, I want to license this song for China and they said really, right,

no one licenses songs for China. I said, well, we really want to build something special and did that condu with the Hollywood, so we want to do it right, so um ultimately, And what was crazy is everybody thought China was full the money even back then, so they're like, well, that's gonna cost you ten million dollars, right, And I was like, no, all you got is a hundred fifty grand. So you know, you had to work the network and figure out how to get to the right people to

get that deal done. But it was things like that where they had never been done before and we were doing them for the first time and sending the template for many others to do it. UM. It was interesting because the music license same business was nothing in China, and then shortly after we did Hanson some stuff with the Jackson five and various others UM, suddenly it became one of the biggest markets for music license same and we did the same thing in regards to the sports

business UM television. We actually brought the World's Strongest Man Competition over there because ESPN had been trying for years to get access to that market, to do it and to get that show on the air in China, and we thought it was a brilliant idea for a show because it's very simple to understand. It's like big guys carrying heavy objects as fast as they can across the

finish line. So it really had since the Chinese and we did this huge search for the Chinese Strongman Competition and all kinds of other stuff, and ultimately we got more viewers on the final night of airing that show than the twenty five years added up of that show did in total across the world forty six million viewers. Uh, that's how popular The Strongest Man was in Uh in China,

I mean, it just blew up. We made it popular because we found this guy out in the rice fields, um out and probably close to the Shinjang province actually, um it was out in the west, and he was somebody that was a big, strong guy, but didn't have the technique for picking up refrigerators or any of that kind of stuff. So we knew he wasn't gonna win, but we created a mentor protege relationship with a guy named Jesse Mrundi who we felt was going to be

the ultimate winner. So even after he got disqualified, he was always on on the screen cheering on the eventual winner of the of the program. So it worked really well. People got really behind them and they got it became a frenzy of a show leading into the two thousand

eight Olympics. So it was a really interesting sort of uh, you know, one of the case studies that we pitched to the movie studios ultimately down the road when we were talking about how do you create relevant sheet for that market in order to get access to the consumer and get the consumer engaged in what you got? All right, these are relatively small introductory aspects of pop culture. Uh. The songs, the handsOn Song, American toothpaste, America's strongest man.

When do all of the you know, big movies really start to recognize the opportunity in China? Was there a lightbulb moment take me into that universe as it continued to grow the relationship between China and American pop culture. Yeah, So one thing you got to realize when you're marketing there is that everything is overseen by the Ministry of Propaganda, which reports directly to the commun This Party of China.

So all the is it literally called the Ministry of Propaganda. Yeah, the Propaganda Ministry or I mean that's kind of crazy, right, Okay, so you have to get everything, okay, to effectively by that ministry, which is directly reporting to the Chinese Communist Party exactly. So you've got to think of it like this. And this is the one of the ways I would always talk to people in North America about it, because there's there's such a glass ceiling of what you're gonna

know about China. There's so much nuquauntch to it. And as an American working in l A and just going back and forth, I had a massive glass ceiling. So the way I look at it and the way a lot of people agree is that the Chinese Communist Party has one major goal, and that's the keep one point four billion people just happy enough that they don't revolt. They don't want another Tianna men Square. Okay, why do

I say just happy enough? Because for one point four billion people to all be happy, there's not enough resources on earth to do that, right, So they need to give all those people all of what they need, some of what they want, and they need to create messaging that they have all that, and then also create messaging that says, hey, if you aspire for more, you can get that, you can get into that middle class. Right, And that is how they keep the populace content and

not overthrowing the CCP. So the Ministry of Propaganda is overseeing the messaging for all those people. Imagine in the United States of America, you had MSNBC, CNN, Richo, Matdow, Tucker Carlson, you know, Steve Bannon, Maria Barderomo, Fox, Fox Sports, ESPN, everybody on the same message all day long, every day. Right, it would be impossible for the American public not to have sort of other thoughts, other ideas, other opinions, because they're just this this this messaging is is thrown down

their throats all day long. Right, That's what's the deal in China. Right. So the idea is, if you're gonna market a product and service in that country, you need to think about does it play into keeping the populace happy?

And part of that is creating cultural relevancy with any of that product and service, which showcases something that's exciting to the Chinese, something that creates pride, something that creates this want and desire of a Western democracy company coming into their market and making it feel special to those people. The other thing is is trying to integrate some sort of middle class objective into that product or service. I e.

That's why there's forced jvs where um. In order to sell a product or service there, you've got to create your own JV over there that's owned by the Chinese, because that's going to create jobs, middle class jobs. Or if you're shooting a movie or shooting the World's Strongest Man competition, you bring over best in class people from Hollywood to help make it side by side with Chinese that are fledgling in that business, so they can learn the skill set and the process to create their own

middle class skills in that industry. Right, So all that stuff you have to think about in terms of the Ministry of Propaganda's biggest objective, which is keeping those people from revolting. So below the Ministry of Propaganda you have various parts of the bureaucracy that oversee different parts of

where messaging is. So at the time, you had a thing called the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television that oversaw under the Ministry of Propaganda anything that was on television, anything that was marketed on television, anything that's in the movie business, anything that's in print, anything that people absorb as some sort of narrative that governed it all. Right. And then below that you had China Film Group, and you had different sports divisions, the sports bureau, et cetera.

So all that plays into what we learned with the sports business that ultimately led to the movie business. Right. One of the things, and I sent you an article earlier just to she because a lot of people forget this, but Lebron James and Nike in two thousand four, this was after his rookie season. He wanted to make Lebron

the next Michael Jordan's in that market. They created an advertisement with their ad agency wid Nan Kennedy called the Chamber of Fear, and in the Chamber of Fear, a series of age they incorporated Lebron James, a kung Fu master and a dragon competing and in the competition Lebron James one and it was the most it was the most damaging commercial spot ever for the NBA, Lebron James and Nike because it insulted the Ministry of Propaganda in a way that said, you have a Western basketball player

defeating a niconic mythical creature up to the Chinese, a dragon and an iconic person in the Chinese culture a kung fu master, and they ripped it off everything that was that was showing it, and it set back Lebron, Nike, and the NBA quite a bit at the time. Now, we got involved with Nike shortly thereafter, along with the China n B A and offso the NBA and we started working with them to make sure that the narratives of everything they were working on always placated the CCP

in the Ministry of Propaganda. How did that initial ad get approved, That's a good question. I I don't know exactly how it got through Chances are a lot of times you're dealing with lower level bureaucrats that will sign off on something without thinking about it, and then it airs, and then there's a bunch of criticism that makes its way to the bosses above, and then the bosses above make that lower level bureaucrat essentially disappear along with all

the ads that were approved. So how long would it take for let's say the Chinese World Strongest Man to get approval through all of those agencies to be greenlit. Well, what's interesting is if you play into that message I was talking about, which is creating this aspirational sort of middle class directive and all the other kind of stuff, it actually really works to put Windier back. So, in terms of World's Strongest Man company Titian, we thought it

would be great to shoot it in Beijing. It was in O five and the Olympics were gonna be an O h, so we shoot it there. We'd have these competitions up on the Green Wall and in the Forbidden City, et cetera. But the Chinese government was like, no, we're not interested in that. We're not going to approve it, but we would approve it if you use it to showcase another city that we really want on the global stage. And we said, well, which one is that? And they

said chang Do. We're like, Chang Do, where is that? And it's out you know, it's out in the Sichuan province and at the time it had I think ten or fifteen million people, but no one had heard of it. But they wanted to showcase it as like this technological marvel. In fact, that's where Intel started its headquarters in the mid eighties for China, and ultimately we said, fine, we'll

shoot it in chang Do. There are all kinds of backdrops and things no one knew on a global stage, but we were sort of forced to use them and showcase them. And it was a hugely successful show. In fact, one thing that everybody can identify with, which is where that what Chang Do is known for are pandas, So we incorporated pandas quite a bit into the show. So what did you do for the NBA after this disaster in two thousand four where they have Lebron James being

able to defeat a dragon and a kung fu master. Well, I mean there were a lot of things. What we really try to do was put the NBA continue what Michael Jordan and David Stern were doing in the early nineties, which was really make the NBA part of the cultural fabric in China. So um Ben involved. We actually represented Kobe Bryant along with obviously Rob Blanka for for several years over there. We did a lot of stuff around

the Beijing Olympics. In fact, we we did this sort of um uh five on five tournament that took the best kids from around the country and they competed, and we had Lebron, James, Kobe, Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony all judged the competitions and picked out who we thought the best player was were and all that kind of stuff.

So we had NBA players there all the time, right, and it was really important to do that because the Chinese needed to see this willingness of the NBA players coming over there and wanting to be there, and we would teach them different sort of slogans and Chinese and teach them different cultural things, and we'd have um competitions in the Forbidden City that would they would come to and they would be sort of incorporated into the backdrops

of these iconic places for the national televised audience to see, and it was really really important to ingratiate them to that market, and ultimately too, it was how we helped build this China uh NBA also, which was the version that obviously you know of where some of these players that aren't are no longer in the NBA find a home overseas in China and it's really picked up to the point where the ratings for the China NBA are up there on par or not better than what the

NBA was prior to Darryl Mori tweet. So, would that be something that Nike is paying for, uh, for those eyes to be over there in China? Is that a part of their marketing deals or were they doing separate

marketing deals for China related trips. Yeah. No, NBA was involved with a lot of them because a lot of times, I mean you know, Nike was involved with a lot of them because a lot of times the players with their showcasing new shoes that may or may not have just been for the China, the China market or for the global market. Um, So they were over there a lot of times pitching some of the products that Nike had the Nike would pay for a lot of that.

The NBA also, depending on the kind of event that was going on and what was getting pushed with, the NBA would be pushing for it too. And then obviously the NBA was very involved with the building of the China version of it, so there was a lot of

sort of cross collateralization with that too. UM and the Olympics was really sort of this real big coming out party for the NBA, looking at looking at really twenty years of building up what they built UM into the two thous Olympics, which is sort of the culmination of that coming out party. Here we are, we're China, We're on the global stage, here's one of the greatest leagues with the greatest players. UM they find us as a

second home. It was a really interesting sort of moment and and an interesting case study on how the NBA gratiated themselves so well into the Fabrica China. Do you feel like you're an element of Chinese propaganda at this point in time or are you so excited with the business opportunities that you're not even thinking about the larger societal consequences of your choices. It's a fantastic question and

I'm embarrassed to give you the answer. But the fact is, the idea of globalism, that mission of opening that market to any American product and service was by far the number one priority. It didn't matter how it was done. And in my book, I actually talked about how my wife questioned certain things we were doing with the movie business and things, saying do you feel okay about that? Um. There's a lot of moments in the book where um, I reread them now and I go, Jesus, I sound

like I was working for the Ministry of Propaganda. Um. But I never woke up to any of that issue. Literally, this is how embarrassing it is. I never thought about it, never thought I was doing anything wrong until days after the Daryl Morey tweet and I in October of last year, and I saw the reaction of majority of Americans towards this cow town that the NBA was doing to China

in order to get access to it. And that was the moment, that was the aha moment, as ridiculous as it sounds, where I go, oh my god, I was a part of that. And I was definitely a huge part of it. When it came to Hollywood. Why do you think that Darryl more a tweet and the reaction to it in China was suddenly a lightbulb moment for you. Well, it wasn't the reaction and China was the reaction in

the United States. When I remember, I was watching I have a thirteen year old Shawn, and I was watching him play soccer with a couple of soccer dads when I saw that tweet popped up. I've never heard of door Darryl Morey, but I definitely knew of the Houston Rockets because of the al Ming. They're the biggest branded team in China. And I remember saying to the dad next to me, I said, oh my god, this is gonna be terrible for the NBA in China, and he said why is that? And I was like, you watch

trust me. And by the way, within twenty four hours, I was a right. What I didn't see, I never saw coming, was the reaction of this, you know, and I hate to use the word woke, but the American public because of the bumbling and fumbling of the response of the NBA, whether it was Adam Silver, Steve Kerr, Lebron James, or even Darryl Moore, himself about sort of the hypocrisy of the fact that he used his right of First Amendment UM and it was used against him

by China and no one backed him on that. That woke the American public to the fact of Wait a minute, why aren't you not backing him up? Wait what you guys couched out of the Chinese like that where you're just gonna stay silent on this issue when you talk about everything else that Wait, that makes no sense. And it erupted And next thing I know, I'm on all kinds of different interviews and stuff talking about it while

I'm figuring out for myself. Jeez, I just wrote this book about how colorful and Jerry McGuire by story was with China and how interesting the glue is of commerce and culture exchange between the two superpowers. And now suddenly I'm realizing, oh my god, I wrote a book about how smoking is really good for you health wise for twenty years, and then suddenly one day a report comes out and says smoking will kill you. I'm going, what

am I going to do about this book? Right? And that was the that was the thing where I go, Hey, I'm I was in the fog of war of globalism like everybody else, and I finally had a waking moment about it. So I'm gonna be the squeaky wheel in this situation. I'm gonna have this book come out and I'm gonna talk about it, and I'm gonna do it, uh, even though I know a lot of people are not

gonna want me talking about it. And that's where I am, and that why I wanted to be on your show, because you're actually somebody in the sports industry calling it out and saying we need to fix this. What kind of changes were you required to make for movies in China in order to get them in front of Chinese audiences? Do you recall a couple of examples of what was going on prior to kind of your lightbulb moment with

the NBA in China. Yeah. I walk people through various case studies in the book in a in a very sort of fun way, but one is uh. For instance, a movie called looper Um that started Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon, Levitt,

Emily Blunt. It was a sci fi thriller where it takes place in the present day and also forty years in the future, and the movie was supposed to take place in the United States and in France, but it was a movie we thought we could make money in China, even though time travel is banned in terms of content in China. And the reason that's banned is because the Ministry of Propaganda wants to control the narrative of what things happened in history, and they wanted to control the

narrative where things go in the future. So we played into that future and where things where they want things to go in the future. So we we approached the filmmakers and said, hey, what happens if we switched the future in this movie to be China. And the reason for that is China is really where the way of the world's going to be in forty years, Like there's so much of a push to that side of the world.

Who knows what's going to happen with France, like China is on the front page of every paper, blah blah blah. And Brian Johnson, the filmmaker, ultimately, over a long convincing period, decided to say, Okay, let's do that. And then we went to the CCP and said, hey, we're gonna make this movie and we're gonna showcase China as the place everybody wants to be in the future. What city do you want us to showcase? They said, Shanghai. Great, How

do you want Shanghai to look? And they said, well, we wanted to look like the most like modern day Marvel metropolis you could ever imagine. We said, great, here's a bunch of modeling we did with c G companies. What what buildings do you like? What do you want in the backdrop? How do you want it to look? Here? The colors, here, the queues, all that kind of stuff, And we worked with the Chinese officials to make what they thought was the perfect backdrop for these locations, and

we did it. And then on top of it, in the movie itself, we cast the Chinese actress so we could showcase the fact that we were providing interesting sort of artistic opportunities for their for their people. We shot a lot of it on the ground over there. We did process and skill exchanges with best and class crews in Hollywood along with their people that were in that fledgling industry, so we were showing that we could bring

middle class jobs into their film industry that way. And then on top of it, We had lines in there where Jeff Daniels. If you've seen the movie, Jeff Daniels is a mobster from the future. He comes back into

the present day. Joseph Gordon Levitt says one day when I retire and moving to France, and it goes, now, you should move to China, and Joseph Lovely goes now, I'm thinking I want to move to France, and Geffino slams his fist on the table and he says, I'm from the future, you want to move to China, And it was one of the most infomercial moments you could

ever imagine for China. But then on top of it, our energy screenings, which are the test screens we did here in America, that was one of the highest testing moments in the movie too, because it was sort of a fun comedic moment. Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows at Fox Sports Radio dot com and within the I Heart Radio app search f s R to listen live all of this. Initially, like the stories that you're telling,

I can see how they happen. And we're talking with Chris Finton. His book is Feeding the dragon inside the trillion dollar dilemma facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American business.

You can see how these small things start to be given to China, and initially they don't seem very substantial, but then they continue to grow and grow to the point where with the Darryl more A situation, and if people don't remember, he's the Houston Rockets GM who basically tweeted support for Hong Kong democracy protesters, and the reaction in China was Chinese values no longer now are limited to China. We expect for Chinese values to be propagated

around the world. And effectively, what they were saying to the n b A is your employees don't have First Amendment rights to say whatever they want, even if they're not making those comments in China if they offend our cultural sensibilities. And so for people out there who are like, why should I care about this, it's because China is now trying to propagate Chinese values around the world, much of which is in direct contravention with basic human rights

and ideals espoused by America for a century or more. Yeah, that's and that's why I was excited to talk to you about this. Subject because you and I see very eye to eye with that issue, right like I think you and I differ differ on the cold Are we

at cold war right now? Because I would say we're so entangled with commerce and trade that it's almost impossible to call it a cold war like we had with the U. S. S R. But your your idea that they are encroaching on our First Amendment rights when we're on our soil here is what really really bothers me, and to me, I'm not I'm not looking to the NBA of the sports community or Disney in the Hollywood community.

It's try to figure out how to solve the atrocities too wiggers, or to tell the Chinese to pull back their encroachment from Hong Kong, which happened twenty seven years earlier than they promised. I'm saying these two entities need to come together and support each other and create a united effort to stop this cross border censorship that the

Chinese have started doing. In relatively recent times. It was one thing to answer things for inside their borders, for their populous to see, right, they want to keep one point four billion people just happy enough that they don't revolt so you know, they don't want things that are going to create envy or create these aspirations that make people want to live in a full democracy or whatever. That is fine, that's your market will censor for you.

And I get it. Hawks are gonna be mad at me for saying this, But I'm okay with that because we do the same thing for Japan, We do the same thing for South Korea. Would do the same thing for Middle Eastern countries. We censor for their own territories. Right.

The problem is is when they say Darryl Morey, and by the way, Daryl Morey reached out to me, he seems like a super cool guy like Darryl Morey used his First Amendment rights as an American citizen in Houston, Texas, on American soil and says, I do not agree with what China is doing here. I support the Hong Kong protesters.

He has every right to do that. And quite frankly, the Ministry of Propaganda and their firewall can keep that tweet from being seen by anybody inside of their country, so they can't say, oh, that's going to create it a revolution or whatever, and we're piste off. No, they can fire wall that instead. What they're saying is, oh, we're gonna fire wall that all day long from our populace ever seeing it, whether you say stuff like that or not. And there's all kinds of instances of that.

But on top of it, we don't want somebody in Argentina seeing that tweet. We don't want to see somebody in Germany seeing that tweet. We don't want to see somebody in Hennessee see in that tweet. We want to control the narrative of what the global of what the Globe says about China, and that they claim is their prerogative. And I'm saying no, We've got to stand up against that.

And the only way we can do it, and this is the solution, right And I get the callouts of Lebron James to stand up for these people and to say the right things and to do what we think is best. The problem is with Lebron is if he does that, he gets replaced by the next basketball player that's willing to keep his head in the sand. If Disney stands up, he gets they get replaced. Their theme park suddenly gets shut down. Universal takes it over along

with their Universal Beijing Park. Universal and Warner Brothers movies take the place of the Disney movie. It becomes the sacrificial land whack a mole situation, right, and nothing changes. The only way it changes is what Americans have done all our history, which is strength in numbers, unify and create leverage. If we have the sports community back Daryl Morey and say, you know what if you take if he takes a stand on our soil and exercises his rights,

we stand behind it. China, if you retaliate against that. We are not sending our products and services over there. Nike is not sending our shoes over there. We're shutting down our factories. NBA is not going to play the games, which obviously that's already been taken care of. The Premier League is going to stop working with them, which is, by the way, something else that's happening. Anything involved with

the sports industry. Shuts off that water, you know, that that current of of flow, and then on top of it, we get the I O C behind it, which is the ultimate leverage. Point two aging Winter Olympics, and the same thing can be done by Hollywood. Disney stands up and says, hey, we're not We're not capable of stopping what's going on with leakers, but we can voice it so that we can ground swell a global effort to

stop it. Right, and we're going to exercise our First Amendment rights, and the rest of the Hollywood community is going to back us, because if China retaliates, we're gonna shut off all movies. We're gonna shut off all Activision, We're gonna shut off all Imax, We're gonna shut off all Hasbro, anything that are partners of the Hollywood community. That's gonna stop. And that becomes an issue for the

c c P. Why because it creates discontent. All that populace is used to getting that stuff, not not used to getting Disney where that's going to create a problem, but they're used to getting Western forms of content products from the sports and Hollywood industry on a whole that's so big that it creates a vacuum if it's all shut off, and the CCP wants to avoid making those people upset, so they'll back off. Be sure to catch live editions about Kicked the coverage with Clay Travis week

days at six am Eastern, three am Pacific. We're talking to Chris Fenton. I'm Clay Travis is the Winds and Losses podcast. Uh okay, So let's go back to the NBA. Lebron James basically lines up behind China. You've got the owner of the New Jersey Nets, who I believe is is It's I. I'm not sure t s a. I. I'm not sure how you pronounce his name. Uh he

is Chinese? Yeah, Joseph's I. You've got Steve Kerr. You've got all these guys that Adam Silver, that are so outspoken about flaws that exist in America, which are a pen prick of the flaws that exist in China. Yet none of those guys will speak out in any way in defense of basic American values to Chinese institutions. Is

it just money? I mean? And do you agree with me that there is profound hypocrisy in the way that not just the NBA, but the NBA as a metaphor for the larger American cultural institutions are profoundly rejecting American values in the way that they're interacting with China right now. Uh, with everybody other than Joseph SSI, I'll say that it is money. I think Joseph Si probably has other issues, including family that's in China and his ties with China.

Um he probably has security interests that he's got to be careful of. But everybody else, it just comes down to money. And yes, is it a hypocrisy, But I feel okay saying that because I was a hypocrite for twenty years too. Like I was a hundred percent complicit in this, and quite frankly, there's not a lot of people that were as integrated in the applied and practical sort of expertise of being as complicit as I was.

And that's why I've decided to become a squeaky wheel on this and I leave that over time, with enough pressure, I'm gonna get more squeaky wheels involved. In fact. Judd Apatality the other day on MSNBC started talking about it, which is interesting. You don't see that from the filmmaking world in Hollywood. You're starting to see various individuals start to take a stance, So we're starting to make a difference.

And what's even more interesting is that this book right which, as you know, the book books don't make you a lot of money, but I have noticed that the higher my book goes up on lists. The less the left side of the aisle, the mainstream media platforms that I need to get on to be a proper squeaky wheel, start to get to the point where they can't ignore

what I'm talking about. Even though they want to protect Hollywood community, they want to protect the NBA and the sports community, they can't stop me from getting on there because we're building enough momentum to start talking about it. And quite frankly, this is the left and right issue, as I talked about before, and if you look at the left side of the aisle, I mean you and rights uh are the freedom of expression and freedom of

creative endeavors, UH, middle class issues, national security. There's a lot of democratic platforms that this falls right smack into. So we need to stop not talking about it. So I calls it a third rail issue. We got to

stop with that. We need to talk about it. We need to apply the pressure to everybody that's involved, and we need to come up with solutions that are better than just calling out, say Lebron James and say hey, do the right thing, Because we don't want to be in a sacrificial lamb whackle mall business where people are just replaced by others that are staying silent and nothing

is accomplished. We need to figure out how to put the weight of America behind this and to get it fixed, because this encroachment is what the Chinese do all the time. They're like an adolescent, They're like a teenager. If you don't push back on them, they keep pushing further. And it's like they had a ten o'clock curfew and now suddenly we're realizing that they're getting home at three am because no one told them that they had to keep

it at ten am. We need to push him back and we've seen it work in the past with China and it will work this time. But we got to motivate everybody to start talking about it and work together to fix it. Should we demand that the Olympics be pulled out of China? In two look, I like, would you like to see? Would you like to see? And the reason why I bring it up you say it's nonpartisan. Uh,

would you like to see a decision made? And one of the things that was great about the response to the NBA and the Darryl Moray tweet was you had Alexandria Caso Cortez AOC and Ted Cruz writing a joint letter condemning the NBA's behavior in their response to China, and it was like, for a lot of people, it was a wow moment over the expansiveness of China's definition of what exactly they were trying to do in the twenty one century. A lot of people suddenly it was

like they realized it. And again, it's not a democrat, it's not a republican. But basically what it is is we are selling American values in exchange for money. Right in general, you mentioned earlier the pent Thing Disney has a amusement park in China that they own of but China owns fifty one percent of so China controls the decisions that are being made there to a large extent. I think one reason Lebron James didn't speak out is because he wants Space Jam two to be on in

Beijing theaters. Right, everybody is making the decision that advocates for their pocket book, but in the process they are selling American values out, which is ultimately allowing China's influence to grow around the world and creating major issues for human rights, democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, all of the things that should be the essence of the American experience. Yeah, I was so in regards the Olympics in two. I am firmly behind the idea of boycott.

Boycotting it if we can can, if we can decide on as a country the important priorities that we want overturned in exchange for still competing in that right, Like, I feel like there's atrocities that are going on around the world. There are wrongs going on around the world, and to try to swoop in and say we want all wrongs fixed by China, we want them to be a democracy or whatever it is. I'm not saying it's not fair. I'm just saying it's not realistic in terms

of the Olympics and whether the boycott. What I would like to see are things that are near and dear to Americans protected, and the First Amendment right is one of those, like we need to be able to voice, whether it's an industry, a political leader, a citizen, what we feel is wrong in terms of human rights abuses that have been occurring around the world, like we do with every other country. China cannot pay for our silence,

and that is what they're doing. They're essentially saying, we'll pay you a lot of money if you carry our narrative around the world, and that needs to stop. So I would say, just in the most basic leverage point and call to action, it would be China, stop with this first Amendment right encroachment. We are going to say what we want to say outside of your soil, and you cannot retaliate if you do. We are not sending our athletes to Beijing, and that, to me is a

realistic goal. Isn't it crazy that the NBA players and owners and and and a commissioner will speak out politically at the drop of a hat on anything in America on their social media accounts. But if you ask them, like I've done this with Mark Cuban, Hey, Mark, you speak out on everything all day long. Will you say that you support basic human rights in China? They won't say it. I mean, I I just I don't understand how they can get and look themselves in the mirror.

Mark Cuban is a good example. This guy is always lecturing people all day long. Uh. Same thing with Steve Kerr, certainly, same thing with Lebron James. They lecture Americans all day long about things that we do wrong. Yet they won't even speak out in any way about one of the things that we have done better than any country in the history of the world, which is propagate basic human rights around the globe. They won't say that Chinese people

deserve basic human rights. They won't say it. Yeah, it's well. And by the way, watch the Oscars speech or the Golden Globe speech and you'll see the exact same hippos from actors and actresses right exactly so. And and the part that's even more troubling to me is that we just witnessed in a domestic issue, obviously, the violence against blacks by police and the BLM movement. We just witnessed the ability for the NBA to lead a sports industry boycott, to make a point and to hold firm on a

position and the whole sports industry back. Then the same thing can be done on an international issue that is this important. I don't know why they don't utilize that ability to do it. They can do it. It's we just saw it happen. And that's the part where it drives me crazy when people say, look, you know, and I get a lot of this not publicly but privately. Hey, I love what you're saying. I wish more people would

do it. I would join you, but I get fired and I can't do it publicly or whatever it is. But also, don't you think it's a little unrealistic to think that all the Hollywood studios could get behind this effort, or all the sports leagues and the sports players can And I go, no, not at all. First of all, that's not American to say something like that, we can stand behind whatever issue we find is most important to

go do that. But number two is we just witnessed it in the sports industry over a domestic issue, which by the way, is a really important issue to handle, just like this one is internationally. Like, we can do this, It's not that impossible. All we need is a handful of leaders. I mean, I would call on an emissary and like Phil Knight and maybe Lebron James and some others from different sports and different sports industry partners to come up, come together and say let's leave this charge

and let's just get it done. The Chinese will back off, they always do, So how does this end? Like, let's presume what is China's goal? Here. You said earlier that their goal is to keep people happy enough that they don't revolt, that there's not another tenement square. But it seems to me like China's goal is not just that anymore. It's now to start to spread and propagate Chinese values

around the world. If you look at the money they're spending in Africa, if you look at the money they're spending in Europe and Latin America, they are trying to create a series of countries that are basically subsidiary. Are he's subsidizing the Chinese values around the world. It seems like their gaze is no longer inward, but now external,

beyond the boundaries of the country. What based on your experience in China do they want now, Well, a lot of that belt you're you're referring to Belton Road initiative around the world and sort of how they're building in They're spending money like crazy all over the world to try to curry influence in favor exactly. And and a lot of that has to do with supplying commodities and

certain resources to their one point four billion people. So they've got enough food, and they have enough energy needs, and they have all kinds of other stuff to keep them from uprising. That's number one. That's what that Belton Road initiative and a lot of that pushes. But then number two is they are trying to spread their wings. I mean the South China see is a perfect example.

You're seeing Hong Kong for sure, although maybe Taiwan complicated. Yeah, well Hong Kong is a little complicated because technically there was a fifty year deal that they encroached twenty seven years early to get it back on on the PRC sort of territory lists. But um, and then Taiwan is obviously going to be an issue probably in the coming year, which is a little scary. Um. And then we're seeing with it with the Arctic, definitely, with Africa, like you

talked about, various European countries, Southeast Asia countries. You're seeing them spread their wings. Now do they want to be the global dominant player that they want to lead the world someday? I would question whether that's really their motivation. I mean, they are pacifists in a lot of ways. They're not really that big into starting wars, but if you corner them, they're gonna fight back hard. Um. I think that they're looking to say, Hey, this side of

the world is ours. Your side of the world United States is yours. Don't screw with us anymore. We've come to play. Why did you decide to write the book? Now? The book is again feeding the dragon inside the trillion dollar dilemma facing holl would the NBA in American business. He's Chris Fenton. You worked with China for twenty years. I know you said your light bulb moment was the

Darryl Moore a tweet Why now? Presumably no, this this business burns a lot of your bridges of relationships with China. I would think, why now? Why speak out now? Well? Number one is I had planned to write a very colorful sort of memoir anyway prior to the Darryl More things, so I had a lot of it on the page without the thematic of oh my god, what have we done?

Darryl was the one who sort of created that moment that I looped into the thematics of the book um to essentially say, well, now, reader, you understand sort of this colorful journey of how Chris Fenton even fell into this crazy business and then sort of how crazy it was as a business between these two superpowers and the misguided mission that we're all under this fog of war of globalism that turns out to be really wrong. So

now that we're aware of that, what now? And I sort of present certain paths forward that I think we need to start talking about as a country in order to try to rectify some of the wrongs. So why did I write it? It was initially because a lot of people told me my stories are just insane and you've got to put it on the page or telling in a movie or something. But number two is why am I so outspoken in a squeaky wheel about it? Because I believe as Americans we're gonna come together on

this issue. We're not going to fix all the world's evils, and we're not gonna fix all of China's evils, but we are going to come together and decide on this idea of patriotism and patriotism before capitalism. That is my mission that I think is make America great again? Or death panels or Black Lives Matter or whatever is that

is the slogan that makes it very simple. Think about what it is to be a patriot before you embark on free market capitalism, which by the way, I'm a total fan of, and quite frankly, if you look at it that way, I bet you the capitalistic endeavors that we can go after with that first priority in mind become better for all Americans and probably more profitable in the long run too. And the issue for me is how do we start talking about this, like who starts

the movement? And I'm not saying I'm the one guy that starts it, but I'm just saying we need squeaky wheels, we need people to come out, We need platforms, which is why I hope the people that listen to this not because it puts a lot of money in my pocket,

because it doesn't. But the farther up these lists I get with this book, the more I get on the left side of the aisles platforms, because I gotta get in that bubble and talk about it and create a crescendo of pressure so that people start talking about it

and start dealing with the issue. And I do think there's baby steps approaches to it, where we can tackle things that we can accomplish first, with an end goal of maybe somewhere down the road really accomplishing like closing down the concentration camps in the Jinjaang profit But that's not the initial goal. The initial goal is we have principles, values, national security interests that we hold dearly here in this country.

We need to fight back and get them right. We need to create leverage to continue doing work in China, selling our products and services there, because there's a lot of money to make from that market. Quite frankly, we helped build that market into what it is today. It's our turn to get our money out um. And keep in mind, we did this in the early eighteen hundreds with Europe to catch up to them. We had a

lot of protectionist policies. We had a lot of tariffs, we had all kinds of stealing intellectual property to create our own industrial revolution. And then one day Europe said, okay, you caught up to us. Enough is enough, You're not doing it anymore. That's what we need to do with China. Although I will say back in the eighteen hundreds, we weren't spreading the United States propaganda all through Europe. That

wasn't part of the situation. That's one of the issues that we have with China that we gotta address right now. Man This is absolutely fascinating. I'm gonna go read the book. It's Chris Finton. I haven't read the book yet. I will now. I imagine a lot of you will be interested in reading it as well. Chris. Thanks for the time, my man. We will maybe get you on the radio

show at some point in the future. Yeah, Clay, Well, first of all, anybody wants to follow me just um, I'm at the dragon feeder on Twitter, and I'll tell you right now, I have no problem getting up at four in the morning West Coast time to behind your awesome show. I listen to it every day. I love it. I love how you stand your ground on things and you come up with solutions and your fans are fantastic.

And by the way, thank you as a guy who drove down from Cornell every weekend to see my brother at Penn State to watch those big Big ten games, like thanks for getting behind that cause I hope they come back and play some football, you and me both. Uh and again, I just would reiterate with this China

situation as you have as well. It's not partisan, right, I mean, I don't want our battle with China to turn into something where Republicans think we need to be doing one thing, Democrats think we need to be doing another. I know they'll the subtle variations, but we need to be combating them on all fronts in an aggressive manner. And uh, I think you have made that case very

very eloquently here today with us. Thanks my man. By the way, I'll keep you a sight of hope, like maybe China is a blessing in disguise, and it's it's an issue that all Americans can get behind and it unites us as a country, no kidding. When AOC and Ted Cruz are writing on the same letter furious with the NBA for their response to Darryl Morey. Uh, Darryl Morey debacle, you know that there's actually at least something that still unites us. Thank you, my man. I am

Clay Travis. This has been wins and Losses. Encourage you to go listen to the thirty plus conversations we've had. This is yet another in the fascinating line that we have been producing. Thanks a lot, and we'll talk to you next time. This has been wins and Losses. Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows at Fox Sports Radio dot com and within the I Heart Radio app search f s R to listen live.