Six Days in China: The Speed, Scale, and Strategy Outpacing U.S. Innovation

Todd Wanek, CEO of Ashley Furniture

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What if you could get a behind the scenes look at China's most innovative tech companies, factories and logistics hubs—seeing how they really run and asking the questions most Americans never get to ask?

This week, you do. Matt Kirchner and Todd Wanek, CEO of Ashley Furniture, sit down to debrief the trip they took together to China. In a candid, off-the-cuff conversation, they trade questions and challenge each other’s assumptions as they compare what they saw there with what’s happening in U.S. business, policy, and education.

After six days of nonstop plant tours and tech company visits, they debrief what they saw: an engineering-driven society, central planning at massive scale, open-source AI innovation, and humanoid robots that are improving in real time. They contrast that with U.S. politics, policy, education, and workforce development, and lay out the uncomfortable truths and huge opportunities for American manufacturing and technical education.

Listen to learn:

Why China can approve and build 11 nuclear reactors for the cost of 1 in the U.S. and what that says about speed, scale, and central planning
How an engineering-run government and 1.5 million engineering graduates a year are reshaping China’s economy and innovation pipeline
Why open-source AI in China is accelerating physical AI, humanoid robots, quadrupeds, drones, ASRS systems faster than many U.S. leaders realize
How e-commerce “clusters” with 70-story towers, shared training, and centralized services are quietly dominating Amazon, Temu, and other marketplaces
What China’s head start on rare earth minerals, mining education, and mandatory K–12 AI means for U.S. business, policy, and technical education

Watch the Full Episode on YouTube

3 Big Takeaways from this Episode:

China is running its economy like a highly-engineered business, and that's giving them a competitive edge. Matt and Todd break down how central planning, five-year plans, and an engineer-dominated Politburo have turned China into an “engineering society” that can move at staggering speed and scale. They contrast this with U.S. gridlock, pointing to examples like nuclear power, rare earths, and infrastructure to illustrate the gap.

Open-source AI and clustering are creating a compounding advantage in technology and e-commerce. In China, new code and algorithms are often pushed to open platforms, enabling “once one humanoid learns to walk, they all learn to walk”–style progress. E-commerce and tech clusters in places like Shenzhen centralize training, capital, and services, letting thousands of companies iterate together, scrape competitors in real time, and weaponize interest-based social media marketing.

The U.S. must treat AI education, automation, and rare earths as “musts,” not “shoulds.” China has made AI mandatory in K–12 while the U.S. still debates chatbots and bans tools in classrooms. Matt and Todd highlight the mismatch between 36,000 lawyers and only ~300 mining/metallurgical engineers graduating each year, and argue for a national shift: rebuild manufacturing clusters, lower the cost of automation, expand applied AI education, and rapidly grow talent in critical technical disciplines.

Resources in this Episode:

Learn more about Ashley Furniture
Other resources mentioned:
- Industry 4.0, AI and the Future of K-12 Education - episode with Mike Beighley
- Developing an AI Strategy: Best Practices for Business Leaders - episode with Todd Wanek
- Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future - by Dan Wang
- 1X Robotics
- Mining 4.0: Unearthing New Applications of Engineering at this Top STEM School - episode with Jim Rankin

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