China Spy Ships, Iran War, TSA Lines, Rebuilding the Rust Belt, & Hollywood Chaos

BREAKING: We're Back with a BANG! 

Sorry for the hiatus, folks—Jen and I have been crushing miles on the road like absolute beasts. But hold onto your seats because Chris is flying SOLO for the FIRST TIME EVER! Picture this: Me, behind the wheel, racing from Amsterdam, NY to Albany Airport, dropping truth bombs and wild stories non-stop. Buckle up—this episode is PACKED with jaw-dropping intel, personal vibes, and insider scoops you won't get anywhere else!

 What's on the menu? Let's dive in:

1. Beijing's Spy Game Exposed! – They're watching EVERY MOVE of the US military off Oman's coast. What's their endgame? We break it down.
2. Iran War: The Real Deal – Forget the headlines; here's the unfiltered truth on what's REALLY brewing in the Middle East.
3. Kaylie Fenton Levels Up! – Our girl's officially a Pi Phi sister! We just crushed Parents' Weekend meeting her new fam—pure vibes and epic connections!
4. Family Glow-Up Alert – Caught up with my parents in NY, and they're straight-up thriving: Looking younger, healthier, and living their BEST life. Heartwarming AF!
5. Pomp Interview Drops SOON – Anthony Pompliano grilled me in NYC—get hyped for the full episode hitting your feeds in days. Business, crypto, and bold takes incoming!
6. Sticker Mule: Rust Belt Revival Heroes – One factory at a time, they're rebuilding America's heartland. Innovation meets grit—total inspiration!
7. BAD COUNSELORS: Movie Magic Alert! – This blockbuster's storming theaters near you. Comedy, laughs, and edge-of-your-seat twists—don't miss it!
8. Hollywood Chaos Unleashed – What's popping in Tinseltown right now? Scandals, stars, and industry shake-ups—we spill the tea!

We ARE PLATE & PONDER... Crushing it across 50 NATIONS AND COUNTING!  Who's tuning in? Drop a comment, share with your crew, and let's make this episode go VIRAL!  Listen NOW!

Transcript

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All right, all right, all right. We're gonna try something different today. Uh Jen and I have been on the road. Actually, Jen is back in LA with a couple friends. I am on the road, actually, believe it or not, between Amsterdam, New York, and Albany, New York. I'm flying out of Albany today down to Nashville. Uh I am gonna try to do a solo session of Plate and Ponder Empty Nesting with Jen and Chris Fenton today, because we have been getting quite a bit of flack for uh being a little slow on the draw in terms of getting a bunch of podcast episodes out while we've been on the road. So um I am going to try to uh make up for that by doing one solo. We're gonna see how this goes. Uh in fact, um I'm very curious whether I can actually do one solo, whether I have enough to talk about. Because as you know, my second half, Jen Fenton, is really the one who carries this show, um, which we are now in 50 countries around the world. Thank you. Uh, everywhere around the world, it's been pretty unbelievable to see some of these nations pop up. We're super excited about it. And uh, I think because of that, we really gotta be on our best behavior and keep this show alive and going, especially with all the stuff in the current news cycle. So, number one is I think it's uh people have asked, like, what is it what that you do when you're on the road? Well, number one is um we will talk about this with Jen when we're back uh together again this upcoming weekend. But we had an absolutely fantastic uh weekend uh down at Tulane University in New Orleans with our daughter, Kaylee Fenton. She is now a Pi Fi at Tulane. There was a parents' weekend involved with all that. We got to meet a lot of the fantastic parents that were uh involved in her life and the lives of her new sisters at Pi Fi down there in Tulane. Shout out to Tulane and shout out to Pi Fi. I don't have the laugh track because I'm actually on the New York freeway um or the clap track, the applause track. So we're gonna have to do this without any sort of sound effects, which is um, I don't know, a little disconcerting because I actually find that adds a little bit of production value to the show. I'm also curious, once I listen to this again before we publish, whether you can actually hear the car that I'm driving. It is uh an actual hybrid, so maybe it's a little quiet when we're on the freeway. I don't know. Maybe it's too loud. Maybe it sounds like Donald Trump when he's on Air Force One answering a really important question, and you have no idea what he said. Anyway, I digress from that. So after that weekend, Jen flew back to LA to um hang out with some friends back in Manhattan Beach. I actually flew up to New York City to both see my parents who I hadn't seen in a while, and boy, do they look great. They're very healthy. I will say New York City is a fantastic walking city if you have older parents and they stay active in a place like New York City. It's amazing how slow their age process goes. I could not be happier for the way they look right now in their early 80s. Um, so shout out to Richard and Barbara Fenton. Um, also got together with my great friend from Glastonbury, Connecticut, Joe Sposito. Shout out to him, John Russell from Cornell, a Cornell Phi Gamma Delta, and a very longtime friend was able to get together with him quickly. I was in and out very fast. I had a couple meetings there, was not able to catch up with a lot of the people I normally do. Um, but I did have the chance to get on Anthony Pompliano's uh very wide-scale uh covered podcast called The Pomp Podcast. And on that, we talked a lot about the ongoing issues that I think we'll jump into a little bit today. Um I'm actually, just so you know where I was today, I was up in Amsterdam, New York last night, um involved with watching uh involved with a company called Sticker Mule. It's one of the top uh e-com platforms out there, very high technology. But what's fantastic about it is it's actually uh run and founded by the CEO, very innovative CEO by the name of Anthony Constantino. And one of the beauties of Sticker Mule is that its factories are in Amsterdam, New York. And if anybody knows upstate New York, like for instance I have and a lot of my Cornell brethren do, it has been devastated uh throughout the upstate from the offshoring of manufacturing starting circa the 1980s and up till now. I mean, you're talking about everywhere from Elmira to Rochester to Rotterdam to Syracuse to Endicott to uh the Albany area, and Amsterdam was not immune from that either. And when that got devastated, Anthony Constantino was actually growing up in that city watching the decay of his hometown. And he decided to start this company up uh roughly, I think about 15 years ago, called Sticker Mule. And today it employs twelve hundred people in the city. It has taken over old abandoned factories um that were literally bought for pennies on the dollar because they were just decaying. The city did not know what to do with them, and they just simply didn't have the manufacturing that had left after Found's company and some others had left for offshore waters. Uh he actually rebuilt these into state-of-the-art robotics, automated uh manufacturing facto factories with people that he hires from the area that may or may not have been skilled in how to work those machines and how to work that AI and robotic technology, and he actually trained them. So not only did he take some people that maybe hadn't had college degrees or weren't certainly trained in this space, especially since it's moving so quickly, he spends a lot of infrastructure resources and money on getting people caught up to speed on how to work it. And then they're paid extremely well for this part of the state and quite frankly for the country. So shout out to Anthony Constantino for this amazing bringing manufacturing back to upstate New York. Hopefully, there are a lot of other innovators and uh visionaries that do the same because that is obviously something that you need to do, especially when you're driving the New York freeway. You can literally see factory town after factory town, and you know they are depressed, they are not doing well, they are not healthy. And any sort of manufacturing that's brought back to uh uh put a spark under these local economies is extremely welcome. And it also makes us as a country much stronger. Uh actually heading to Albany Airport, I'm gonna head down to Nashville uh to see another client, which is Loam Entertainment, Loam Media. Uh we are in the final stages of locking uh our first picture, a picture called Bad Counselors, which on this podcast I'll probably be talking quite a bit about uh in in order to get people to go to the theater or go onto their streamer and and download it so they can see it and enjoy it. We're really excited about this movie. It's tested extremely well. Um, but we are in the throes of a very disrupted Hollywood ecosystem. So we're actually trying to figure out the absolute best way to release this independently financed film. We're looking at a combo of theatrical and downstream plays, and we're also doing quite a bit of research of trying to figure out where our audience likes to digest content. It is just not simply like the last hundred years where you knew how to do it because you just released it theatrically, then it hit your HBOs and your premium on demands, and eventually worked into the cable and the broadcast networks, and you sold it around the world, and there were various other places that would pick it up and uh all would be good. That is not the case anymore. Uh, it is a very different environment, and it's one that constant needs constant attention in terms of understanding where it's going, diligencing what has been working, what hasn't been working, and understanding how to properly monetize this content, which is not cheap to make. Um so anyway, that will be bad counselors. I'll be down there, and then finally I'll be heading back uh to uh Manhattan Beach on Friday to reunite with the co-host of Playton Ponder Empty Nesting, and we will do at least a couple episodes this weekend, we promise. Um, I actually am, and I think I've hinted on it before, I get to go back into the box at Miracosta High School at Waller Stadium to call the Santa Margarita Mira Costa lacrosse game. I'm actually really excited about it. But I will tell you, if anybody is old school like me, I had the ultimate best playlist ever of roughly 2,000 songs on what was originally Rhapsody. Then Rhapsody was bought by Napster. All my downloads went over to Napster. I paid my Rhapsody sub, you know, my subscription monthly every month. Then when it went over to Napster, I think it went up by a buck. I kept paying it because I wanted to keep those downloads of those 2,000 songs, because let me tell you, they were the best songs ever written, ever sang, ever performed, and ever on a playlist. Well, the worst part about it is that I get a notice from Napster saying, hey, we're getting out of the music licensing uh platform business. Uh, if you want your playlist back, just send us a note and we will get it to you. So I obviously said, I want my playlist. So I sent them the note and they sent it back to me. But instead of sending me the 2,000 songs that I diligently downloaded over the past 20 years or so, they just sent me a piece of paper document that said what those songs were. So now I have to download them all again somewhere. I'm on Amazon Music. But this is a long-winded way of saying that I have to put my Waller Stadium mix back together again, which was roughly about 200 songs that I would play in between the timeouts and the various long referee decision calls and after the goals and after the great saves and before halftime and all that kind of stuff. So if anybody has some great rile me up, get me pumped up type of stadium music I haven't thought about, or I can't remember what was on that list, or perhaps I can't even find the download for them on, say, Amazon Music because whatever that artist doesn't have the license deal with Amazon, uh, please send them to me because I am open to suggestions. I'm really looking forward to calling that game. It's gonna be a lot of fun. I'm gonna see a lot of my mad dog 2025 dads who have younger kids on the Santa Margarita team, and it's just gonna bring me down memory lane. Boy, did I miss that high school lacrosse experience. I'm glad Dylan's up there in McGill doing what he does with lacrosse. I'm also really excited that Kaylee has found a groove down in Tulane and she invites us down for fun weekends like Parents Weekend. That was a lot of fun for the sorority uh and meeting everybody there. So, anyway, it's just a long-winded way of saying this has been a lot of fun this last week, but it's also been crazy, and we apologize for simply not doing the co-hosted usual banter that Jen Fenton and Chris Fenton do on Plate and Ponder. So let's jump into the issues of the day that are quite frankly hard to not think about, even while I'm on the run, and probably while a lot of you are on the run. And I know when Jen and I connect finally after long days and we uh reconnect over what's been happening during the days, it's stuff that we have to talk about too, because it's just impossible for us not to think about current events and what exactly is going on in the world. So, number one is there is a conflict going on with Iran right now. Um, I guess some people are calling it a war with Iran. I would argue that it probably is. I guess the semantics prevent us from simply calling it a war in terms of political terms because that would involve a congressional approval to go to war and actually budget uh and and pay for that war. So it's some sort of conflict. But let's face it, it seems to be um a little more than we bargained for. Now, I will say it's been fascinating to follow what the news has been covering, because as we know, the news does tend to be quite biased depending on what platform you watch. Um, there also seems to be quite a bit of censorship or pressure from various governments, particularly um, say the UAE or Saudi Arabia, or definitely Iran, Israel, US, in terms of what can be shown, what can be confirmed, what we actually know. It's hard to know exactly how many of our servicemen, um, and God bless them for their service to our country. I am so sorry that we have you in another conflict, but hopefully we all believe that this is a conflict worth sacrificing for. But it's unfortunate how few people actually do have to make that sacrifice in order for these things to be carried out. Um, but we are not clear on how many people we have lost, how many people we have injured been injured, and we don't really know the devastation fully of what's been happening on the ground, whether it's in Iran, whether it's in Israel, while whether it's in the Gulf states um that obviously have been affected from Kuwait to Bahrain to uh the United Arab Emirates, whether it's uh Sharjah or Dubai or Abu Dhabi. Um we definitely know Saudi Arabia's taking some hits. Um we know Qatar has taken some hits. We've uh heard of various troops being deployed in various other areas such as Cyprus. Uh Turkish planes have landed there in preparation for some sort of uh you know partaking in this conflict. And we also know one of our favorites to talk about, China. China is actually uh involved in a, I would say, sort of scouting type of way. Uh they are very curious in terms of how the United States and our allies engage in conflict, kinetic conflict. Why? Because China has not been involved with a direct conflict in quite some time. In fact, there are many uh experts that will say that out of all the PLA officers, there are very few, if any, left that have actually been in a kinetic conflict. And you're sort of going back to the Vietnam days to find those. Obviously, there have been PLA skirmishes, um, various, I guess, contained conflicts up in the Himalayas. Um, there's a definitely a disputed uh borderline between India and China that has caused um actually injuries and death between both countries military. But for the most part, there has been no large-scale kinetic conflict or experience by the PLA. So what are they doing right now? Well, they have moved their largest spy ship off the coast of Oman, and it is essentially um with every part of their radar system watching every move we make on the ground uh with missiles that are transported from site to site, what we're doing with those missiles, whether it's the Tomahawks or various drones, how our Air Force is operating over Iran, what we're doing in terms of the mine sweeps through the state of Strait of Hormuz, and there's various other capacities that they are trying to fully understand what the Americans have and what we don't have, where our strengths are, where our weaknesses are, what type of strategy we have that we implement that seems to work, what strategies seem to not work in today's day and age. I mean, let's face it, since Vietnam, military conflict has changed quite a bit. Not only has the propaganda portion of it become so much stronger in terms of the ability to boost and amplify certain narratives and stories through AI technology and social media and various other ways to get it out there, but you can also throttle or halt many messaging and narratives that you simply don't want the public to be aware of, whether it's outside of the war-torn country, whether it's around the Allies, or whether it's around the globe itself. So there is a lot to learn, a lot to study, and Beijing is all over it. So what are they gonna do with that knowledge? That is a big question. As we know, Taiwan is a big, big quote, reunification reunification, unquote strategy and initiative that Xi Jinping would like to partake in sooner rather than later. So does this military study exercise play into that? I would argue, as I did on Anthony Pompliano's podcast, that China simply would like to reunify with Taiwan without ever firing a bullet. Uh, they are the masters at propaganda, they are the masters at winning over the hearts and minds of citizens through the correct messaging and narratives that they carry out uh through whatever source of news and information that is. And they have done a very good job of winning over a very large part of the Taiwanese population in their hearts and minds that the system of Beijing, the system of mainland China is the system that Taiwan should sway towards and move away from that of the system of the democracy of, say, the United States and our allies. So if they can continue to do that to the point where their whole government becomes a majority of pro-Beijing government officials, and then at various times can win over more and more of the news and information sources on that mainland towards that very objective, they will eventually take over Taiwan without us ever knowing about it. Now, another way we had seen it was the way they sort of slowly infiltrated Hong Kong, roughly 27 years before the agreement they made with uh the Great Britain in 1997 was supposed to happen. We never saw really armed conflict there. We did see a slow encroachment of Beijing controlled apparatus and resources and actual on-the-ground territory. For instance, the train the main train station actually had a side of that station once you got over a certain wall, that became part of the PRC. And we saw that become a major symbolic move in terms of Beijing, showing that it did have true tentacles in Hong Kong and that Hong Kong was slowly becoming mainly in China. We also saw various government officials who were obviously completely pro-beijing. We saw the shutdown of Apple News and Jimmy Lai and various others from uh Beijing uh directives because they were dissenting voices. And then on top of it, we saw the disappearances of people once they crossed that borderline in the train station, perhaps to do their commute to Shenzhen or up the uh Greater Bay region, um, never come back. So we saw this ability for China to show its tentacles in t inside of Hong Kong. And then obviously, once COVID hit, and I was there just prior to COVID, and you could see the slow turnover of Beijing's control into that Hong Kong special administrative region. You also saw various protesters and protests get shut down by not just the PLA, but actually the PAP, which is the police force of uh mainland China. There was various uh indicators that this 27 years that was left before Hong Kong was supposed to be fully under the control of mainland China was gonna happen much quicker than agreed to. And once COVID hit, they moved in and it was done. There was no armed conflict. That is the same thing I'm thinking of in terms of Taiwan. But how does that play with Iran? Well, Iran is very interesting because Iran controls a large oil supply and production capacity, which is now obviously some of it has been destroyed, as we've seen from from some of the visuals, and a lot of it has been ch uh held at a choke point where the Strait of Hormuz uh is and what Iran is essentially threatening ships to go through. So what does that mean for China? Well, China's uh uh appetite for oil consumes 90 percent of the exports of Iran oil. That oil goes directly to China. Um that sounds like a huge number. It is for Iran, but when it look when you look at China, the indications is that the Iran uh supply of oil is of roughly a 15 to 20 percent consumption. Of oil consumed inside of mainland China. So say it's 15%, or let's let's give it a rough estimate of 17%. You add on to it our control of Venezuela and the fact that we are shutting down that oil supply chain to China, that's roughly five to eight percent. Let's call it eight percent. We're now looking at a 25% reduction in the oil supply that is going to mainland China. That is a major, major hit. When you think of the fact that mainland China has 1.4 billion people, we have roughly what 350 million or something like that. That's about a quarter of what China has. You could sort of extrapolate and go, well, 25% of oil consumed by China would be the equivalent of cutting off the whole United States of America uh population from having access to oil. That's how bad it is. So China is starting to look at this going, wait a minute, we don't want to get involved in this conflict. In fact, we'd rather never fire a bullet ever. We just want to win over countries and the hearts and minds of the people through narrative and propaganda. Well, when you think about 25% of their capacity, uh needed capacity in order to run their economy, uh, has been taken away, you might find themselves as a cornered raccoon. So that's one of the things that I'm looking at in terms of this uh current conflict. It's something I talked about on the Pomp Cast, uh POMP podcast, and it's something that Jen and I are gonna talk about in a banner situation in upcoming episodes. And let's hope that by the time we really get into a couple more episodes from now, this conflict is well over. I have my doubts, but I have lots of hope that my doubts will get uh mitigated. So let's hope for that. Now, the other thing I want to talk about is the Epstein files. A lot of what has been going on in global politics has distracted everybody's attention from the Epstein files. I would like everybody uh listening to this to start thinking about how do we keep that out there more? Because whether it's tinfoil hat or not, I think it's really important to get to the bottom of what happened to all those victims. And we're talking about thousands of young children, young victims. I think it's important for a society to actually properly investigate something of that magnitude and of that kind of nefarious, actually demonic type of crime. But more importantly, we have learned more and more that there are compromised individuals, whether very high up in technology, very high up in politics, very high up in the military, very high up in the uh financial titans, very high up, and various other uh titans of industry that have been compromised by this individual, Jeffrey Epstein, or by, say, the intelligence companies that he possibly was working for, or by whoever else he was a mercenary for. We have no idea. I do know that we have had lots of protests in the New Mexico area that have forced uh the investigators to look into the Zorro compound that was in New Mexico, a very large compound where apparently a lot of very uh sort of heinous crimes occurred with young people. Uh, hopefully they do find some clues there that lead us towards more disclosure and more transparency about what happened. And hopefully, people um various officials do not jump in the middle of that investigation to try to stifle um that attempt to clear the air and to really try to out what actually happened. Uh clear air, clear mind, clear, you know, just the understanding of what happened, the transparency, I think will be very healing in terms of what this country needs. Skepticism, a cynicism, a belief that the system protects its own, a belief that the system does not uh is not honest with people is not a system that we want to live under. We want to have faith, we want to have community, we want to believe that the system works for the people that work hard and follow the rules and understand the laws. And heaven forbid, if they do break a law, they get punished. Uh it there is a recourse that they have to go through. There's a blind justice system that will figure out whether they're guilty or innocent. And if guilty, they will serve a punishment. But even more so, when they are done serving that punishment, they can come back into that system that will allow them a second chance. Um, that is the belief, the faith that we need to have as a country. I think it will be very healing. And just the Epstein files clear in the air, getting everything out, and having people actually go, hey, you know what? Now I feel like I don't have to just wonder what this was all about. I don't have to be cynical. I don't have to believe that everybody is up to something or up to no good. I mean, in a perfect world, we abate that, we nullify that, and we can move on as a country. That is what I'd absolutely love to see. Um, whether that's just wishful thinking or not, I do not know, but we will find out soon enough. Um, other things that have come up, we do have a major disruption happening in the media space with Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison, somebody who I've met who I actually like and respect. I think he's actually a very competent guy, um, does his research, surrounds himself with smart people. He has uh combined two of the largest studios in uh the Hollywood ecosystem, in Warner Brothers Discovery and Paramount. And I can tell you, my brethren, my peers, the people I've come up with through the media business, are constantly concerned about what this means for our ecosystem, what this means for their jobs, what this means for the future. And quite frankly, as a USC professor, as somebody who's in charge of 58 kids who in a couple years are gonna graduate and will be looking to find a space, a place where they can start their career and hopefully find a thriving career for multiple decades. Um, I'm concerned about it too, because I need to watch this and understand what the heck am I teaching these kids? What should they be focused on, and where everything might be going in terms of trying to create an optimistic look of their future. Because it would be extremely easy just to walk into classrooms and be all doom and doom and gloom. It would be also very easy to walk into my cigar room with my fellow buddies who are in their 50s and be all doom and gloom and say the end is coming. Um, but instead, we're all trying to figure out okay, well, where does this go? What is the disruption creating? What is the chaos, and where are the opportunities? That is really important to us, and it's something that it's uh, you know, as an empty nester nowadays, uh Jen and I can think about a little more and banter about, and it's something that I think will be really fun to discuss as this continues to go on because none of this is gonna be figured out in the next couple weeks. Hopefully, the Iran uh conflict does get figured out in the next couple of weeks. But I can tell you with 100% certainty, we are not going to get through uh where everything goes in the Hollywood ecosystem uh for the next 20 years over the course of the next couple weeks. It is going to be a long slog. There's gonna be a lot of developments. Oh, and by the way, we do have potential union strikes upcoming. So this is gonna be quite an interesting uh several months, several years, and it should lead to very good banter on Plate and uh on Plate and Ponder empty nesting with Jen and Chris Fenton. Now that said, I do have a seatbelt that has decided to say it needs to be seatbelted. So let me see if I can seat belt. All right, perfect. I just seat belted. Now I'm getting on to exit three, where the Albany airport is. So um I'm gonna be a little preoccupied. So what I am gonna do is bid adieu to my fantastic, Jen's fantastic fans that have really pushed us along to continue this podcast going. This hobby uh we weren't sure about. We weren't even sure about how to pull it off. Um, but we have. We really enjoy it. It's been a fantastic empty nesting hobby for Jen and I. It's allowed us um to really sort of hone the craft of of maintaining and improving a constantly awesome uh relationship, even now that we're in our 21st, 22nd year of marriage. Um, and we really appreciate the fact that we have so many fans and so many people that are uh ardently listening to this podcast and actually shouting out when we don't put out new ones. So until next time, I just want to wish everybody an absolutely fantastic um rest of the week. Let's hope for the best for our service service men and women that are overseas. Let's hope for a quick conclusion to it. And until next time, we are Plate and Ponder, Empty Nesting with Jen and Chris Fenton, 50 countries and growing. Thank you. Please download, review, enjoy, engage, and obviously always feel free to DM me because I am listening, as is Jen. Until next time, love you. Enjoy the rest of the week.