With Anthony Constantino grounded by travel delays, Chris Fenton steps in to join host Sam Stone—and what unfolds is a compelling discussion about rebuilding America from the ground up.

Fenton shines a light on Constantino’s remarkable transformation of Amsterdam, New York, a once-declining Rust Belt town, into a model for modern American manufacturing. Through his company Sticker Mule, Constantino didn’t just renovate abandoned buildings—he reimagined what a factory could be. By combining cutting-edge technology with deep investment in skilled local workers, he’s created a blueprint for the future of industry.

As a native of upstate New York himself, Fenton recalls how places like Ithaca, Elmira, and Cortland were devastated by offshoring in past decades. But stories like Sticker Mule’s show that economic revival isn’t just possible—it’s already happening.

From Amsterdam to Arizona, Sam and Chris explore how high-tech manufacturing, like the TSMC semiconductor plant, is reshaping the national economy and restoring American leadership in production. This isn’t nostalgia—it’s a new chapter for Main Street.

Transcript

**Chris Fenton: **Anthony got stuck in an air travel hell. So I'm I'm filling in for him. And Anthony Constantino. is a really interesting friend of mine who is he was considering a run if Elise Stefanik ended up staying at taking the UN role in Congressional District 21.

She ultimately stayed with the UN, but she is now considering a governor run. which would then probably put Constantino as a front runner to run as a Republican candidate for that open seat. So we'll see how it plays out. But I give huge shout outs to him as a buddy because I literally watched him stay

in upstate New York, a Rust Belt manufacturing hub that was completely decimated by offshoring. of all these different factories, and he built this state-of-the-art factory sort of in multiple buildings that were abandoned in the 80s and 90s to build his company Sticker Mule.

And it's really a sight to behold if you guys are ever interested in sort of seeing. What happens when you actually bring manufacturing back to a decimated town? And that's in Amsterdam, New York.

**Sam Stone: **I can't tell you how excited I am when we're going to have him on the program, you know, maybe next week or in the coming weeks here, because I am from that general area. Also, I grew up outside of Lake Placid, New York. I remember Amsterdam in the early 80s. I mean, to say it was blighted doesn't even come close to the decimation that overtook that community with the loss of the manufacturing base.

And people like him bringing back manufacturing to New York, people now think of New York as Wall Street. But the reality is New York's strength was built on Main Street. It was built manufacturing in all these small towns all the way up along the Hudson River.

**Chris Fenton: **Oh, it's so true. I mean, I went to school at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and there was I mean, this was 1993 when I graduated. So it's a ways back. But there were all kinds of different statistics that like in Tompkins County, the county where we were. If you got outside the city limits of Ithaca, there was a large percentage of homes without even indoor plumbing, right?

And you had Elmira and Cortland and a lot of these places that were huge hubs of manufacturing that sort of put the U.S. at the top of the heap as far as production capacity here. And those towns got decimated from offshoring. And you look at Amsterdam, New York, and what Anthony did that's really interesting,

and I don't mean to be sitting here bragging about my buddy, but he didn't just build manufacturing complexes for Sticker Mule to put 1,200 people in that will eventually be replaced by automation and robotics and AI. He actually put in state-of-the-art technology that's advanced to the point where he's sort of 10 years ahead of the curve.

And then he trained these people, these American workers, to learn how to use these machines, machines that have essentially replaced machines that probably hired 100 workers apiece. Now are state of the art high tech workers getting paid really well in that part of the state. And they're not going to be replaced anytime soon because he's already transferred

into that next gen manufacturing type of complex.

**Sam Stone: **Well, and that's maybe a broader topic we can touch on a little bit. But this idea that American manufacturing or future manufacturing is doomed, I disagree with entirely. It's just changing in the way you just talked about where we see, like, for instance,

here in Arizona with Taiwan Semiconductor coming in, building the most expensive, largest chip factory in the country. They're hiring thousands of people and training them. That would have been 10 or 100 times the workforce 20, 30 years ago. But now those folks, it's still a huge number of people. They're making really, really good money.

The future here for manufacturing is going to be in high-tech manufacturing like Anthony Constantino has built at Sticker Mule, like they're building at TSMC, right?

**Chris Fenton: **Right. Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting.

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