Clay sits down with author Chris Fenton

This week on Wins & Losses, Clay Travis is joined by Chris Fenton, author of “Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, & American Business.” Clay and Chris discuss Chris’s journey that led him from Cornell, to the entertainment business in LA, and eventually getting involved with China and the entertainment industry over there. Chris details many of his experiences with the Chinese Ministry of Propaganda, and his “oh my god” moment following the comments made by Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey, which made him realize that changes had to take place.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Wins and Losses with Clay Trevis, play talks
with the most entertaining people in sports, entertainment and business.
Now here's Clay Trevis. Welcome in Wins and Losses podcast.
Appreciade all of you listening. Encourage you to go back

(00:24):
and listen to the thirty some odd podcasts that we
have done. Long form conversation subjects that interests me in
the world of sports, business, politics, media, you name it.
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

(00:45):
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

(01:08):
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,

(01:30):
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

(01:51):
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

(02:12):
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

(02:34):
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

(02:56):
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

(03:17):
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

(03:39):
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.

(04:01):
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

(04:21):
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

(04:42):
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

(05:04):
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.

(05:25):
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?

(05:47):
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,

(06:08):
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,

(06:30):
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

(06:50):
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

(07:11):
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

(07:33):
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

(07:55):
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

(08:16):
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

(08:36):
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

(08:57):
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.

(09:18):
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

(09:40):
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

(10:02):
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

(10:24):
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

(10:45):
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

(11:06):
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

(11:27):
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

(11:50):
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

(12:11):
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

(12:34):
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

(12:55):
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

(13:16):
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.

(13:38):
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

(14:00):
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.

(14:21):
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,

(14:44):
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

(15:06):
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

(15:29):
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

(15:49):
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

(16:10):
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,

(16:33):
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

(16:54):
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

(17:15):
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

(17:36):
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

(17:57):
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,

(18:19):
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

(18:41):
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

(19:02):
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,

(19:23):
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

(19:45):
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

(20:08):
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

(20:28):
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

(20:51):
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.

(21:12):
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

(21:33):
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

(21:54):
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

(22:17):
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,

(22:37):
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

(22:59):
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,

(23:19):
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

(23:40):
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

(24:00):
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,

(24:22):
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

(24:45):
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.

(25:07):
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

(25:27):
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

(25:48):
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

(26:11):
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,

(26:34):
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

(26:58):
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

(27:18):
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

(27:38):
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.

(28:01):
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

(28:22):
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.

(28:46):
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

(29:08):
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,

(29:34):
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

(29:55):
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

(30:19):
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,

(30:40):
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

(31:01):
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

(31:24):
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

(31:45):
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

(32:08):
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

(32:30):
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,

(32:51):
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

(33:14):
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

(33:35):
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

(33:58):
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.

(34:21):
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

(34:44):
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

(35:04):
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

(35:25):
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

(35:49):
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

(36:12):
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

(36:33):
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

(36:56):
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

(37:17):
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

(37:38):
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

(38:00):
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

(38:20):
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,

(38:43):
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,

(39:04):
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

(39:28):
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,

(39:53):
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

(40:13):
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

(40:33):
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,

(40:55):
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

(41:17):
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

(41:37):
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

(41:57):
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

(42:20):
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

(42:40):
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

(43:03):
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

(43:23):
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

(43:45):
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?

(44:05):
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

(44:26):
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

(44:46):
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

(45:09):
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

(45:32):
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,

(45:55):
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

(46:20):
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

(46:40):
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

(47:01):
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,

(47:24):
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

(47:46):
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

(48:06):
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.

(48:29):
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,

(48:51):
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.

(49:13):
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.

(49:33):
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

(49:54):
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

(50:16):
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

(50:38):
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

(51:03):
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

(51:27):
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

(51:47):
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

(52:09):
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.

(52:30):
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

(52:52):
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

(53:13):
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

(53:35):
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.

(53:56):
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

(54:17):
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,

(54:38):
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

(55:00):
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

(55:24):
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,

(55:45):
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

(56:06):
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,

(56:26):
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

(56:48):
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

(57:10):
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

(57:30):
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

(57:51):
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,

(58:15):
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

(58:35):
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

(58:56):
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

(59:18):
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

(59:40):
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.

(01:00:01):
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

(01:00:23):
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

(01:00:46):
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

(01:01:07):
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

(01:01:28):
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,

(01:01:51):
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

(01:02:13):
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

(01:02:33):
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

(01:02:56):
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

(01:03:18):
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

(01:03:39):
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

(01:03:59):
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

(01:04:21):
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

(01:04:42):
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.

(01:05:05):
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,

(01:05:26):
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

(01:05:48):
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

(01:06:11):
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

(01:06:33):
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

(01:06:54):
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

(01:07:16):
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

(01:07:37):
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

(01:08:00):
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

(01:08:21):
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

(01:08:42):
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.

(01:09:02):
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

(01:09:24):
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.

(01:09:45):
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.

(01:10:06):
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

(01:10:26):
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

(01:10:49):
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