Six Days in China: The Speed, Scale and Strategy Outpacing U.S. Innovation - Todd Wanek, CEO of Ashley Furniture

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.

🎥 Watch this episode on YouTube

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

3 Big Takeaways from this Episode:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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Transcript

TechEd Podcast Introduction: 0:09

This is the TechEd podcast, where we feature leaders who are shaping, innovating and disrupting technical education and the workforce. These are the stories of organizations leading the charge to change education, to rethink the workforce and to embrace emerging technology. You'll find us here every Tuesday on our mission to secure the American Dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent. And now here's your host, Matt Kirchner,

Matt Kirchner: 0:38

welcome into the TechEd podcast. It is your host. Matt Kirchner, I have talked a number of times on this podcast already here in 2025 how I took a trip in August of this year that was one of the most transformative weeks of my entire life. And I'm not just saying that in terms of what I learned professionally during my week in China visiting 26 TechEd companies, six days full of visits, seven in the morning till 1030 at night, most of these days, what I learned there absolutely changed the way that I look at all kinds of things. I was on that trip compliments of a great friend of mine, by the way, by the name of Todd wanick. Todd, as many know, is the Chief Executive Officer of Ashley Furniture industries. It's his third appearance on the TechEd podcast. As a matter of fact, we're going to have some fun breaking down that trip to China, talking about the incredible transformation that's taking place across the Pacific Ocean, and what that means for us here in the United States of America. Todd, it's such a pleasure to have you back. Thanks so much for being with us. Thank you, Matt, pleasure being here, and you know this, I'm so grateful for that time that we spent together in China. And you know, you and I were together back in March, and you were talking about what you're seeing over there. I kind of made a little off handed comment that said, Well, if you're ever going and you have some room, let me know. And lo and behold, a couple weeks later, I got a text from my friend Todd wanick, and not long after that, we were off on our way to China. So thank you so much for that experience and what it's done for for for us, for our companies, for you know what's going on with the TechEd podcast, for our audience, I can't, can't. Thank you enough for that experience. Well, I really enjoyed the time too, Matt. It was incredible just sharing, we were on a bus together, which is actually probably the best part, and just talking and brainstorming the whole time and go see somebody, and we talk and brainstorm and talk and brainstorm. I think you came away with 70 pages of notes, I came away with a comparable number of notes, a page of notes. It was just absolutely incredible. So thank you for joining us. Yeah, you bet. And I bet. I've gone back time and time again to that, and it's informed so much of, you know, strategy and different businesses and different initiatives that we're involved with. So I know, I know we're going to get into this, and I want to let our audience know we came up with a really creative idea, actually, Todd and I did together when we were on that trip for how this podcast, how this episode is going to run, we both came up with five questions that flowed out of our recent trip to China, and Todd's actually been there once since then. And so I have five questions for Todd. Todd has five questions for me. We traded questions in advance. I've got them all right here. So the way we're going to do it is that I will ask one of Todd's questions that that he is asking of me, I'll respond to it and then give Todd an opportunity to expound on my answer. Then we'll go on to one of my questions for Todd, and we'll do it in exactly the reverse order. So this is going to be a really, really fun episode. Why not dive right into it? Todd's first question for me, the first of five is, why is China more effective in their efforts to modernize their economy than is the United States of America? You know, I think there's a lot of reasons for that, and some of the examples for this. I mean, just to put this into perspective, you know, right now, the United States has one nuclear reactor under construction, and it's going to cost $30 billion during that same period of time, actually, August of 2024 China approved 11 new nuclear reactors in China, and they are going to build all 11 for what it costs us to build one here in the United States. That's just one example of the incredible innovation that's taking place and how quickly they're modernizing it. I think there's a number of reasons for that. You know, if we sit here in the United States and even looking over the course of the last call it 60 or 80 Days, and you see, and I don't know if dysfunction is the perfect word, but you just see how hard it is, in some cases, at the national level to get things done. Here in the United States, China has exactly the opposite situation. All their decisions are made at the national level. Here in the United States, where we are graduating, I think 36,000 lawyers a year. In China, they're graduating 1.5 million engineers a year. And even if we look at engineers to engineers, maybe 400,000 engineering degrees here in the United States versus 1.5 million in China, they are an engineering driven economy here in the United States, 51% of our senators. 51 out of 100 are attorneys. 30% of the House of Representatives. Attorneys in China, Chairman Ji's entire Politburo, all engineers. They're systems thinkers, and they understand how to build things. They understand how to get things done. They're also they're the benefit of. Central planning, say what you want about communism. I have certainly no fan. There is something to be said for being able to centrally plan everything and systematically build and innovate the way that they are. And I think that's a big, big contributor Todd. What would you add to that?

Todd Wanek: 5:14

I would agree. I think that, you know, the centralized control is absolutely one of the biggest things that they've achieved. They run it like a business. And, you know, we look at word, we're debating and arguing, they're looking at it, and they're running like a business. And I think that's that's an incredible approach. I love their five year plans. I've been following their five year plan. They're in their 14th five year plan right now, and there's a lot of innovations that have happened. If you go back and you track them, and you look at the progression of achievements that they've achieved, that they've accomplished on each one of those plans. It's amazing. They became an engineering society. They became a technology society. They were formed, their education, all those things were done primarily because of their their centralized control. Now there's advantages and disadvantages of it, right? The one advantage of speed,

Matt Kirchner: 5:59

yeah, no question, yeah, the advantage, the advantage of speed and scale, I think, is the other one. I mean, just the scale at which they're doing, things that we could come up with, with example after example, anything you would add to that, I know you're fascinated by some of the dual circulation, the green transition, common prosperity, and so on.

Todd Wanek: 6:15

Yeah, and, you know, I think you and I have kind of changed some videos that are going on right now. The tallest bridge that's been built in China. Some of the other engineering feats that they've accomplished, I just look at the technological self reliance that they have, and they're really focused on that and building their own computer chips and rare earth minerals and things like that. They've just achieved a lot of things within their society. They give them an economic advantage over almost any other country, and it's all

Matt Kirchner: 6:40

intentional, and it's all planned, and they execute incredibly well as well. Once they once they come up with that plan, they have a way of getting things done. So agreed on that. I know we're going to get into some of the rare earth minerals and some of the other aspects of their economy and how they're creating simultaneously kind of protectionism and an export economy as well. We'll do that in a bit. I want to move on and make sure that we're getting to all of our questions. My question, my first question, for Todd was this, you know, one of the things that I learned that I didn't know beforehand was this whole idea of coding and programming here in the United States versus in China and here, all of our code, all of our computer code, all of our AI algorithms, they're all locked down, right? If a company like, like meta, for example, is creating their next amazing algorithm, it's not like they're going out and sharing that with the world. China is exactly the opposite. I mean, literally. When they come up with new code, when they come up with new algorithms, when they program a new function into into hardware that's on GitHub, within a month or two, there's, there's literally no IP, no intellectual property in China when it comes to at least, you know, public code and code that's taking place in in their private companies. Contrast those a little bit Todd the closed source versus the open source. What are the advantages and disadvantages and what do you like about each

Todd Wanek: 7:53

Well, I think closed source helps a company. You know, in the US, we're really focused on capitalism and increasing value of companies, and I think that's a big part of the closed source system, is the fact that they're trying to protect themselves in China, it's very open source. So an open source allows them to do an accumulation over time and cumulative learning. And I saw that happen actually, from August in my I just got back a couple weeks ago, from China to November, the speed of change within that period of time was absolutely mind blowing. And it happened because of open source. I saw different humanoid robotics. I saw different actuators. All those things were happening because it's an open source collective system. And I was just absolutely blown away with what was happening, because they're all improving. And once one, I think you and I talked about with a humanoid robot. Once one learns how to walk, they all learn how to walk. Yeah, and it's just amazing how fast progress is being achieved because of that.

Matt Kirchner: 8:47

And I think it, you know, there's a couple, a couple things that I would add to that. I agree 100% and I think you started by talking about the benefits of capitalism. And there certainly are lots of benefits of capitalism, and many of us have enjoyed those benefits for a variety of reasons. I'm saying this is almost like an existential test of which model is better, right open source and the Chinese model or closed source. And kind of profit driven here in the United States, we're able to recruit the best and brightest talent, because the you we can pay these engineers, AI engineers, tremendous amounts of money, because there's a profit motive on the other end of that model. And so there's, it's really a question of, is it that model, or is it the one where they're all innovated? Innovating together? I think the other thing I would add to your answer Todd, which was quite eloquent, is it what it's driving in China? Because there isn't any any intellectual IP advantage to to your coding or your programming, or your algorithms, it's driving a lot of the innovation into physical AI, things like humanoid robots, quadrupods, some of the ASRS systems that we saw. And so they are innovating like crazy. We're going to talk about humanoids a little bit later in the episode, but innovating like crazy on the physical AI front. And so that's been really, really fascinating, really, really fascinating to watch. So we're on to question number two, and I'm watching our time closely. I have to manage all this into 60 minutes, and I promise. Us that we will do that. But Todd's question to me, this is his second question is, how has China reformed their educational system to meet the needs of industry and foster innovation? And I would say, I would start with kind of where we started with that first question, which is the whole idea of centralized planning. There is a very centralized approach to education in China, and Todd and I are both manufacturing guys. In fact, the first time he was on the podcast, we talked all about manufacturing standardization, doing things in one plant same way you do things at another plant. There's some disadvantages to that in education, but lots of advantages in terms of your ability to scale and your ability to innovate once and then spread that across an entire country. So part of just the central planning side of things is a huge contrast, and they've reformed that way. They're very highly competitive. The students there are all for those that are college bound, are all competing to perform on a really, really high stakes college entrance exam. And so what that's driven is a lot of understanding of standardized education, standards based education, teaching students in a way that they will excel when they get to that entrance exam. Really, really important. So those are some things that are interesting. I know we're going to talk in a while about K 12. Ai, education being mandatory in K 12, which I think is something that we have to move toward here in the in the United States. And then back to this whole idea of engineers. You know, 140,000 engineers a year here in the United States, 1.5 million in China, 50,000 graduate degrees in engineering here, and 400,000 in China. And so many of these engineers are graduating in areas like AI and semiconductors and medical devices, and we'll talk about metallurgical engineering in a little bit. So they've got this whole, you know, Todd talks about the five year plan. They decide, what are we going to accomplish in the next five years? What kind of talent do we need for that? And then how do we align our education system from one end of the country to the other to create the talent that we're going to need to be successful? So in a lot of ways, that's quite a bit different than what we what we do in here in the United States, so, so agree or disagree on that one?

Todd Wanek: 12:03

Tot I totally agree. I think that their top down educational system is absolutely working well for them. You know, I've heard this argument over time, and I know you have two about the creativity and the fact that their their system stymies the creativity of the human being, and I'm just not seeing that. You know, everybody talks about that as one of the big issues. There's no question, to a certain degree, it probably is because of free speech and other things that may impact them over time, especially when you start talking about AI. But overall, I believe their educational approach is is absolutely massive, and going to, going to lead them to the next phase, because they're all about science, technology, you know, engineering and mathematics, and they're really getting deep into that, and really getting deep into that whole concept around how do we develop the next generation of engineers within our economy? And I

Matt Kirchner: 12:50

think a lot of that is driven by, you know, Xi surrounding himself. So he's an engineer, he's a chemical engineer. He's surrounded by engineers. I think, at one point in the last few years, all nine members of the Politburo, so his like senior advisors, were all engineers, so they've created this engineering environment and huge believers in engineering and the ability to build and driving that into STEM education. You know, the other thing that just an observation I made on a recent podcast Todd, just the incredible, you know, the speed of innovation, which you've already mentioned, but the enthusiasm on the part of the people working in those companies. I mean, we walked into one AI company in Shenzhen and humanoid robot company together at 730 at night, and it was as busy as you would see an American engineering company at two in the afternoon. I mean, it was just, you know, these people are working 24/7 working to to innovate, and a lot of that is because they've trained the engineers that are that are able to do that.

Todd Wanek: 13:42

There's also an integration of education with business, and we saw that at the university level, where they're integrating together and they're working together. The universities are working with businesses on their problems and trying to solve problems. I think that's also another key element,

Matt Kirchner: 13:56

absolutely, and in fact, one of the thing, every single company that we visited had an education strategy, right? So here in the US, I mean, Ashley Furniture is our audience well, knows has been incredibly supportive of STEM STEM education but, but we don't see that in every company here in the US, and every single company in China had an education strategy. So another really important distinction, and I think good advice for for manufacturers and individuals across the private economy here in the United States, you ready for question number two from me? All right, so we had a big conversation about the cost of automating, and I'll if you don't tell the story, I'll tell it in my response. But, but, but a couple of meetings where we were talking with some of these automation companies, and for our audience's benefit, part of the visit was to see what we call ASRS companies are automated storage and retrieval systems, so big inventory management systems like you might see it like an Amazon here in the United States, but automated systems for manufacturing inventory, for monitoring and for controlling inventory and for managing inventory. Met with a lot of those folks and a lot of other automation companies when we talked to some of the. Companies, Todd, they drew a distinction between what it cost to automate in China and what it would cost us to use the same automation coming from China here in the United States. So we'd love for you to reflect on what we learned there. Yeah.

Todd Wanek: 15:13

Well, number one, you know, a lot of people, I just brought this last group of 35 people with me in earlier the month, and one of the things that they thought I was doing was doing was bringing over to understand cheap technology. How do you get cheap technology and reduce the cost of automation? And once, the last day, I was summarized with them, they said, we thought this is what cheap technology. We realized that this is more innovative than anything we have in the United States, or as innovative. So it wasn't just about inexpensive it was about the quality of product that was there. And I want to make sure that's understood, that this isn't like just cheap robotic arms. This is about a good quality product that's durable, well made and very well done overall. And it's a fraction of the cost of United States, as a matter of fact, we sell robotic arms, or 20 to 30% of the cost of what it costs the United States to do. And when we when you and I were in that fact, in that meeting, we're pushing that individual and saying, why is that price at price? And he said, well, in the US, your cost of Labor's so much higher, so you can justify our higher expense of equipment. And you and I looked at each other, it's like you got to be kidding me. So if I buy a piece of equipment for Vietnam, it'll be cheaper than what it is in China, and China is cheaper than the US. He goes, Yeah, that's the way it works, because you could justify something in a year or two years, and your cost of labor is $50,000 let's say, per person. So you can afford to pay $100,000 for robotic arm. In Vietnam, you only pay $5,000 a person, so you can only pay$10,000 for robotic arm. I'm like that, just that doesn't make sense, right? But my big fear with this whole process is, number one, the technology is probably not probably it is world class, whether it's robotic arms, whether humanoid robots, whether it's ASRS systems, all those things are what I'd call world class technology. My big fear is, if we end up overpaying in the United States, that makes us less competitive, right? And, you know, I believe that China is such a manufacturing powerhouse right now, they're going to control a big part of the global market. And to compete in United States, we have to get inexpensive automation to be able to compete.

Matt Kirchner: 17:13

And that was the, you know, the first reflection that I had on that question, Todd, it was exactly yours. It like had no relation to the direct cost or even the burden cost of manufacturing the product. It was all about, what is the cost of the next best alternative, which seemed I get it right. I mean, you charge as much as you can if somebody's willing to pay for your product. But that surprised me a little bit. I won't say which company, but we were meeting with one of those companies, and we were talking about automating, what it cost to automate in China with an ASRS system. And we said, what about the United States. And literally, the guy that was the senior leader of the company, like, laughed at us, like he was like, Oh, we wouldn't sell this in the US. And I was like, Why? Why not? And he said, Well, number one, you know, the cost of steel in the US is way, way higher. And then on, you know, on top of that, you've got the tariffs that are layered on top of that. And I've got mixed feelings, as you know, about tariff strategy, and I think they make sense in certain circumstances. Certain circumstances and not in others. But one of the meetings that I've had at the highest levels of the US government is exactly around that, which is, look, we can't burden and tie the hands of our manufacturers here in the United States with automation technology that costs, in this case, four times more to do it here in the US than it would cost to do it in Asia, we've got to find ways to get low cost, or at least reasonably cost, automation technology in front of our manufacturers here. And I know those last two are things that surprised you as well.

Todd Wanek: 18:31

Yeah, and on on my last trip, I went to BYD and went to byds Auto factory, and I was the most automated facility I've ever seen in my life. EMRs and moving materials around. The assembly lines are fully automated. It was absolutely fantastic to see that. It was it was all well orchestrated. But you know, just the cost of doing that there versus here, you're probably talking about five times more to do it the United States. And it's very hard to justify automating the factory or distribution center with that kind of expense. So my big concern is, you talked about tariffs, we got to be very, very tariff friendly as far as manufacturing, and bring things in that we can't make here and make it affordable so we could automate our companies and automate our businesses.

Matt Kirchner: 19:16

Absolutely, that's the future of manufacturing without that technology. And I see it firsthand, right? I mean, it's not a question of replacing labor with robots. It's a question of being able to produce it all, because we can't find, in many cases, the people that we need to do things cost effectively here on the manufacturing side. So anything we do from a national policy standpoint that sets our manufacturers back, those are things that we as a country have to look at really, really closely and make sure that we're making good decisions. I'm all about bringing manufacturing back to the United States. I'm a huge believer in US manufacturing, but the only way we do that is that we allow our manufacturers here in the US to have access to the tools they need to to automate their processes and continue to drive into the age of what we used to call industry 4.0 and I think we're, we're now even, even beyond that, okay, we are now. To question number three, yes, question number three, which is my third question, or Todd's third question for me, I should say, and then he'll respond to it. What is their approach to clusters as they relate to automation, AI, E, commerce and educational clusters? And why are clusters important? So let me put this into perspective. And this was one of the most just seminal moments of this entire trip we visited. There's a e commerce cluster, what they call an E commerce cluster in Shenzhen. It was, I'm gonna get it really close to perfect, maybe not perfect. Perfect. Three buildings, by my recollection. Every one of those buildings was at least 70 stories tall. So I mean three huge buildings in Shenzhen, China, and just this is one of 20 5e commerce clusters. So think about that, 370 story buildings. That is just one of 25 clusters like it. And when we say clusters, these were filled with E commerce companies, over 1000 companies in those buildings, they said 100,000 people working in those buildings. That's that seemed like a lot, but easily, 10s and 10s and 10s of 1000s of people working there, 100,000 square feet of office space. So think about that, and they are full of people, and they are absolutely, I'll just say it, they're absolutely gaming, literally and figuratively, the E commerce market here in the United States, and the way that they are managing what shows up, whether you're on Amazon, temu, Alibaba, Wayfair, whatever marketplace you're on, they've got this dialed into an absolute science to when you go on to Amazon and order whatever it is, new, you know, new furniture, a new pair of socks, whatever there is somebody on the other side of that that knew exactly that you were looking for that and knew exactly How to get you to their specific product. So that's what's happening in these e commerce clusters. Now, I asked a question of one of the gentlemen that was running one of the companies. I said, How do you train all these people, all these merchandise managers and and to kind of tee up the answer. You know, inside these clusters, there's all kinds of companies, beauty products companies, there's there's furniture companies, there's fashion companies, apparel companies, appliances, toys, anything that you can think of. They're selling all these products into the US marketplaces and elsewhere. And a lot of these companies are competitive, right? You could have, you know, dozens of furniture companies or dozens of apparel companies in those in that E commerce cluster, they all use the same people to train. They have a centralized training function at the E commerce cluster, all of their photography can be centralized. All their marketing is centralized. Their access to capital, in a lot of cases, is centralized. There's their access to meeting spaces for large and important meetings. All that is centralized even among competing companies. So you start to think about how these companies have, through these clusters, driven out all the excess cost of having all of that as one company, all those shared services and then and then really focusing themselves on whatever their highest and best use is. It's a really, really fascinating model, just across e commerce and leveraging AI like crazy. I mean, there was one case where we had saw one of the companies that was literally using an AI agent to go to their competitors marketplaces and scrape all the data from their competitors marketplaces. At the exact same time they were scraping that data, they were using that to help inform how they were going to present their products as for price or as to how they would present them on the on the marketplaces, and simultaneously burning their competitors ad spend because they were visiting their marketplaces and lowering their conversion rate. Fewer people were buying the products because it was just a bot that was going out to do this. So, I mean, Todd, that was absolutely fascinating to me. That's the approach to clusters that I saw in the in China. What would you add?

Todd Wanek: 23:31

Yeah, I would add. It was very effective. Clusters are one of the things that build economies. You know, I've been part of clusters in the United States, in Mississippi, for example, North Carolina for furniture clusters where you have everything around it. You have raw materials, you have cardboard, you have particle board, you have suppliers that are supporting you. In case of upholstery, you have foam. So clusters are probably one of the most effective things that a lot of people strive for. China was a big manufacturing cluster for years for furniture as well as other products, and they still are. But I would say that the E commerce cluster is probably one of the most effective things I've seen because of the collaboration that's happening. And they're collaborating, they're finding ways to get better. And when somebody finds one way to get better, they teach everybody else. And that's kind of that whole concept that we talked about earlier, the collective raises, and then they all get better and faster and better and faster, and they are definitely gaining a major advantage of the marketplace by being able to do that, because we're nowhere in the US. Have I ever seen what I'll call an E commerce cluster like that? And they're doing about 70% of the business on amazon marketplace. The Chinese resellers are. And it doesn't mean it's product just from China. It could be product in the United States. It could be product from Vietnam or other parts of the world, and they're just super effective in how they approach it.

Matt Kirchner: 24:44

And they were there. They have DCS distribution centers located here in the United States. And just, you know, this is probably going to be a lot of questions, you know, where's the, where's the product coming from? Some of these e commerce companies own, their own manufacturing. Some of them don't, and they're, they're outsourcing that, and not. All those manufacturers are from China, either, right? I mean, they, they literally have the ability. In fact, one of the questions that we asked is, How are you responding to us tariff policy? And and their answer was, well, if a tariff lands on one of the countries where we're producing this product, we'll just move the production to a country that has different, you know, different tariff relationship with the US. I mean, they're literally moving production around based upon what we're doing with our with our tariff policy, which I thought was, was really, really fascinating as well.

Todd Wanek: 25:25

Agree, yeah, and I would say that it's probably one of the most capitalistic environments I've ever seen totally. And, you know, we talk about communism versus capitalism, that was as capitalistic as I've ever seen, you know, going around, because you and I went to several companies within those three buildings, and we visited, and was like, Oh my gosh, they're all learning, they're all competing. They're working very, very hard. You know, they still operate basically on a 996, schedule, 9am to 9pm six days a week. So we just saw the pace of energy and the pace of work within those companies be super high and very effective,

Matt Kirchner: 25:58

9am to 9pm six days a week. And I think another example that I shared on an earlier podcast, we were it was actually, well, so it's 230 in the afternoon. I'll start with that. It was 230 in the afternoon, and we were at a company that bills itself as the chat GPT of China, and we were spending some time with their with their AI engineers and some of the other folks there. And then had occasion to kind of walk back through where all of their AI scientists, their data scientists, their programmers, their coders, were all working, and there were cots lining the wall. So the first sign is, oh, my goodness. I mean, these people are sleeping at work when they have to. I mean, how many people sleep at work in the US anymore? And by the way, it was 230 in the afternoon on a Saturday, so it was like, you know, when there's look, I've worked around manufacturing technology, technology in general. Here in the United States, I know there's places like Silicon Valley and Research Triangle in Austin, where you've got these really high driving, hard driving tech companies where people are working at 230 in the afternoon of Saturday. I don't see that very often. And then the other thing I'll throw in there is just you mentioned the whole spirit of capitalism, the cap tables of some of these companies and and they were, a lot of them were really open to it with us about how they capitalize their businesses. And I honestly, I figured that, you know, the answer would be, they're 90% owned by the, you know, the Communist Party, and maybe the entrepreneur owns 10% I mean, those, their capital models are really similar to the ones we see in us, I mean, venture capital, they've got, they've got private venture capital that's coming into these businesses. They have public venture capital, so Chinese venture capital that's coming into these businesses. And actually, it surprised me, a lot of cases American venture capital that is coming into those businesses, which I'm like, wow, that that really, really shocked me. And then asked a couple questions about, you know, at least in my brain. And there were so many paradigms that were blown up over the course of that trip in my head. But, you know, I was like, Okay, so the you got this entrepreneur, and, you know this, this individual owns 5% of this company, or whatever. I mean, you know, the Chinese government is taking most of this, and they're probably just, you know, working their, their their hands to the bones in these small companies, and never getting anywhere. A lot of these people are worth 10s of millions of dollars. I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars that, you know, is same as in the US. That just shocked me is that, is that a fair assessment?

Todd Wanek: 28:11

It's fair assessment, very capitalistic, driven, and most of those companies are looking to go public over time, very similar to the US. And if they're trying to figure out how they capitalize your company, the other thing I would say that that's really interesting is they were never they didn't have limited beliefs around what they sell. You know, we talked a lot about that. They just looked at total addressable market. What's the size total addressable market? Okay, I need to get into kids toy cars. I need to get into trash cans or whatever it was. They didn't have limited beliefs on what they sell. And they sell. And they were open up third party logistics in the United States. They pop that product into a US warehouse. They sold on an Amazon they shipped directly to the store.

Matt Kirchner: 28:47

And, you know, to add to that, the way that I think about even in some of our businesses, if somebody starts creeping into your space, right, with a product, and it's similar to the product that you have, like that, that to us is like, at least to me, is a huge competitive threat. Like, okay, that's, you know, the you got to take that personally. I mean, they were just like, if somebody came up with a product similar to one that they were come, they would just then, three months, innovate into some new space. And they didn't even, you know, nobody got upset about it. Nobody got angry about it. It's just like, Okay, well, then, you know, they changed. No, we have to change. And it was just kind of the conversation, I know, you remember, we're at the top floor of one of those buildings having a conversation with one of those e commerce companies, and I was just like, oh my goodness, they just, they don't even worry about it. They just move on to the next thing, kind of on the same topic of E commerce, Todd. We were at this company that has really figured out how to get into the social media feeds of US consumers. And when I say that, I'm talking about tick tock, I'm talking about YouTube shorts. And you know, I spend less time on tick than I used to. I kind of got off of it about a year, but I'm on YouTube shorts, which works the same way. You flip through video after video, and I'm like, I know there's an algorithm running in the background that's kind of showing me a product. Every once in a while, I kind of figured that was random. Meanwhile, there's this company in China that's, like, totally hacked into the open source, not even hacked in, but open. Source code on Tiktok totally understands how to put whatever product they want to in front of us based upon our activity on that social media platform, which is equal parts fascinating and scary. Talk a little bit about that. I mean, that was a huge eye opener. And as you know, we've actually changed course in a few businesses as a result of what of what I learned on that part of the trip.

Todd Wanek: 30:21

I think traditional market, as we know it is dead, and not dead yet, but it's dying, and we're going to see it die fairly quick. I mean, we obviously saw television die. Newspapers died, not saying they're completely gone, but they're definitely they don't have the same level of impact they had at one point in time. We're now moving towards an interspace economy and lot of conversation on what's an interest based economy? Well, that's getting into your social feeds to market. You're no longer gonna be able to market somebody the traditional way, where they go to your website, you know, and you're doing Google, for example, because people are gonna have agentic AI over the next couple of years as they get a genetic obviously, the agents gonna be serving a lot of their a lot of content to them, they're no longer going to be searching the way they have traditionally searched, so you've got to figure out where the customer is and go to them and market to them in their social feeds. And this company that we visited had an absolutely amazing approach and how they're doing it. They could create a video in seconds and launch it as a matter of fact, one company that they represented created 19,000 videos a month, and did $15 million of revenue off those 19,000 videos. Now imagine that that's an amazing amount of content that you put out there, and they did it through Tiktok, because Tiktok is the number one channel there. They do about$300 billion of business in China, in the US, they do about 10 billion. So just just unbelievable capability that's being put in place, you know, and the ability to just basically get in the airwaves, and it's not the same video being served over and over again. Once the content is generating, create more content off the content, and they look at who's clicking in how many clicks they get, then they regenerate again and regenerate again, and they're learning along the way. So, just unbelievable how those interest based economies are going to evolve, and how marketing is going to evolve.

Matt Kirchner: 32:03

It was all in real time. I mean, to your point, I mean, one of the things I think they they shared, was that, you know, you could take, you could take 10 videos. So, like, if I had our, you know, biz dev team and one of our companies make 10 different personalized videos, and they could chop that up into 1000 different videos that the social media platforms would not recognize as the same content because it was in a different order with their, you know, different aspects of what it was they were showing. And it just, I mean, it's just absolutely fascinated me. The other conversation we had, you mentioned agentic AI. And, you know, our audience knows our definition for that is just a virtual or a digital employee, but we're going to get to a point where, you know, if I'm using my AI agent, or I'm, you know, I'm in chat GPT or perplexity, or cloud or meta, or, you know, whatever platform I'm using, and there's people that are already doing this, you can have that platform go and do your shopping for you, right? And then you've got the company on the other side of it. So a consumer goods company, for example, that is marketing using agentic AI and the kind of, you know, platforms that we're talking about here and more, it isn't going to be long before we literally have, we're going to be making purchasing decisions based upon my AI agent, talking to your AI agent and figuring out what's best for me, taking the consumer decision almost all the way out of the mix, which is just and that. I mean, that's not like 20 years from now. I think that's two or three years from now, maybe even, maybe even sooner than that, we

Todd Wanek: 33:21

just launched on perplexity and on chat GPT, chat GPT in the next 30 days. So we're pretty excited about that. You know, we'll see how it goes. It's going to be a learning process for us to try to feel, feel our way around, and feel the walls. But ultimately, our team's super engaged, and we're excited about those platforms.

Matt Kirchner: 33:38

I feel a fourth episode of the podcast coming up a year from now, to talk about, you know, what we've learned about agent agents, selling to agents? Because I think that's going to be really fascinating to watch. We're doing a little bit of that kind of work is in our in our businesses as well. So super, super exciting. Moving on to our fourth questions. So Todd's question for Matt, what is China's attitude towards us? Reliance on China and exports to non US companies, and I would say, and this all kind of goes back to their five year plans. You know, to summarize it in a sentence, they want to make us more and more reliant on them. They want to be less and less reliant on us. There are a number of different strategies that they're that they're utilizing to do that. We'll talk about rare earth minerals here in a little bit, but certainly in that space, I mean, you look at their ability to mine and refine and process rare earth minerals, we're in a lot of ways, really dependent on China for our rare earth minerals to the point where we can't support our needs for coming to work close at this point in time here in the United States. And so what they're doing is they're building into their own economy. They want to be as self reliant as possible. So whether it's chips, whether it's rare earths, whether it's technology, manufacturing, technological know how engineering talent, I mean, they are building all of that inside of their country, and they're doing that for a number of reasons. Part of its economic and trade, a lot of it, is to be able to control technology and advance technology, and then decide who gets access to what technology. Yes, and a lot of it is just surviving economic and geopolitical threats. So, you know, the less reliant they are in the rest of the world, the more that they can survive an economic threat, and certainly, the more that they can defend themselves, if they ever need to, you know, from a national defense standpoint. So there's a lot of logic that's going on to that. To the question about, you know, non US companies, they're building incredible partnerships with Southeast Asian, Asian nations, Africa, the European Union, Latin America, in doing all kinds of things in terms of creating options for their economy, so that they're less reliant on us as a consumer, so that, if for whatever reason, we've got federal trade policy that is discouraging the acquisition of Chinese products, they're creating other markets for their products so that they can continue to enjoy the benefits of those exports. So it's a it's not happening by accident. It's all centrally planned. It's all very, very intentional. But they would, they don't. They don't want to cut off trade with the United States, but they want to put themselves in a position where they're not reliant in any other country in terms of their own national security and their economic prosperity.

Todd Wanek: 35:58

And I'm Washington, export to the world, you know, I go, I have a chance to travel all over the world. I'm in the Middle East, some South America, Central America, and I just see the product showing up in droves. I don't see American made cars in Central America and South America as much I did before. The dominance is down. Same thing in the Middle East. You start looking at what's happening the Middle East, whether it's BYD vehicles and other products coming from from China. They're world class, and that they're going after it very hard, and they're building a complete supply chain to support it. I think the risks that we have in the United States, if we don't figure out how to get more manufacturing here, more automation, affordable automation, is we're not going to be exporting anything. We are already export little out of the country compared to what we consume. But if we don't have a good, solid export engine, that makes us vulnerable over time. And I see China taking over a lot of the global economies, and nothing wrong with that. They've had a strategy to be able to do it, but the US needs to get in a position where we can, we can compete against them, and we can export our products throughout the world as well.

Matt Kirchner: 36:57

Yeah, you've mentioned BYD a couple times that's build your dream. So it's the, you know, Chinese automotive company. Turn the clock back to 1990 there were a half a million automobiles in all of China. So 1990 I was just, just about ready to graduate from college, half a million automobiles. Today, there are 435 million cars in China. I mean, think about that growth over that period of time. And, you know, you and I remember being in a shopping center after lunch, and their, you know, their auto dealerships are right in their shopping centers, right? So you can go, you can have lunch at, you know, Ma's, or their version of it, and then walk across the hall, and there's a there's the automotive dealership, and just marveling at, you know, the the technology. I mean, these, these cars were as nice as any mid level, Lexus, Mercedes Benz. I mean, really, really nice Tesla, but the prices, I mean, $35,000 car and so you to your point. I mean, if we're going to compete from an export standpoint, there's no way that we can do that unless we find every way possible to lower the cost of manufacturing here in the United States of America, to continue to enjoy that, that export market. I don't blame China, either for trying to, trying to do what they're doing, but, but lots and lots of opportunity for us to, I don't want to say mirror that, but at least to build on the leverage that we have and in those areas, whether whether it's technology or other areas where we still have a competitive edge to be able to manufacture and export here from the United States.

Todd Wanek: 38:18

Yeah, and I want to go back to that cluster conversation, because we've lost the clusters in the United States, and what President Trump is trying to do is rebuild it, rebuild some of this technology and capability, silicon chips, whatever it happens to be. How do you rebuild manufacturing prowess? Because if we don't have the cluster established, in other words, all the raw materials and components that go into building a product, it gets very hard to be competitive, and that's what we have to rebuild the United States right now, is get ourselves in a position to be able to do it. And if we could do that, stand up a base and bring the cost of automation down inside of companies, we can then turn back into an export engine, I believe. And I think you and I have talked about this before, I believe we've lost a battle on exports, but we got to win the war, and to win the war, we got to reinvest back in the United States, reinvest back in our capability, but do it very smart, and do it in a way where, where we're keeping our companies competitive, we're not raising their costs so they're uncompetitive.

Matt Kirchner: 39:12

Exactly this is exactly what we need to do. And it's and there's all there's so many different ways, whether it's automation, whether it's lean, driving cost out of manufacturing operations, standardization, you know, collaborating on creating talent. I mean, if you know that's a rising tide, lifts all ships, you know, all those kind of things that we can be doing collaboratively as clusters in different market spaces. I think, really, really important. I know Ashley, in a lot of ways, is leading the charge on that, but excited to see what the next several years bring there. You know, you think about some of these technologies. We talked about, US manufacturing from the technology side, US manufacturing from the durable goods side. Same things happening in China. The thing that I see happening in China, that I've seen a lot less of in the United States, is just some of these really crazy, quickly innovating tech companies. And I want to talk a little bit. About humanoid robots, because, I mean, we visited probably seven or eight companies that had some form of humanoid robot technology applications across the board, everything from something that would greet you at a store and welcome you into the store, to robots that were making coffee to robots that were built for manufacturing and distribution centers. There's a lot of stuff going on in that realm. I want to hear a little bit about what you've seen in the innovation just since we were there to now. But talk about humanoid robots. Are we that far away from having humanoid robots actually working in manufacturing operations here in the United States?

Todd Wanek: 40:35

No, we're not that far away. You know, humanoid robot technology is really evolving pretty quick. And you know, again, for my last trip, a three month period of time, we saw a dramatic shift and change in the capability of these humanoids. They've got dexterity in their hands. And there's can't there's companies just specialize on dexterity in hands, and they're advancing now. You could take a look what Tesla is doing too. Or there's one extra robotics. There's Tesla, there's figure in the United States. There's a lot of people are running after this prize, because the belief is by 2050 we're going to have 50 billion robots the United States. I've heard those numbers, right, wrong, right? That's Elon, yeah, lots of humanoid robots over time. I believe within three to five years, you're going to start to see them show up inside of manufacturing. Right now they're building capability. We've seen them deployed in specific cases, you know, where they're just basically picking and placing. But over time, you know, as they become more intelligent, with open source AI, and the artificial intelligence gets within, within the humanoid, it's going to be able to do tasks. And the one thing about a humanoid that's different is it learns by doing. And if you look what we do today with robotic arms, with spend a lot of time programming to get it set up and make sure it knows a pick and place. As you start getting vision and you start getting artificial intelligence, it can learn by doing, so it's easier to deploy them. And I think that's going to happen within three to five years, we'll begin seeing them and begin seeing them in manufacturing, and then after that, it will obviously explode

Matt Kirchner: 42:02

absolutely and we've got a podcast, I think TechEd, up for the first quarter, with 1x so looking forward to that, what they're doing in the humanoid robot space really, really fascinating. I've showed some videos, and you know, we're now putting the podcast out on YouTube so people can go back and look at that. We'll ask Melissa to link a couple of those up in the show notes. But these humanoid robots, you knock them over, they stand back up. They can sit down in the chair. They can stand up, you know, from a chair. The big question is, in fact, I was having a conversation. I won't, I won't use his name specifically, because I actually disagreed with him in the conversation. But in New York time, number one best selling author and I were having a conversation not too long ago, and he said, Well, yeah, the humanoid robots can't do a backflip. Do you know, the backflip test? And I was having that conversation a day later with a friend of mine who's the CEO of Waukesha County Technical College, rich Barnhouse. And I said, Yeah, you know, so and so said, you know, the technology isn't right there. You know, we can't use them in manufacturing because they can't do a backflip. And Rich said, I can't do a backflip, but I can work in manufacturing.

Unknown: 43:00

That's that's pretty interesting thing. Yeah,

Matt Kirchner: 43:03

exactly. So where that technology is going, and I think there's all kinds of technologies that are playing into that, bio mimicry, what we're doing in materials, what we're doing with AI, what we're doing with vision systems, what we're doing with telemetry, with battery power. You know, a lot of, a lot of what we're learning in the EV space and the BYD is innovating in these are all things that are kind of colliding and really creating some fascinating developments in the in the whole world of robotics and automation. And so we've got our eyes really, really closely on humanoid robotics. I think there's going to be, you know, there's like 60 companies that are innovating in that space right now. I think you're probably going to see two or three winners. So it's going to be interesting to see who ends up kind of rising to rising to the top there. But it's going to be, it's going to be fascinating time and other technologies as well. We saw quadropods, any of those other technologies that occur to you that we we saw while we were traveling through China that our audience should be aware of.

Todd Wanek: 43:56

No, I would say that those are the big ones, you know. And one of the interesting things is they've got the room service robots that move around hotels, every hotel I'm in overseas now, specifically in China, they have the room service robots where they're IoT into the elevator. They want to floor 14. They go to the door, rings the doorbell. It's absolutely amazing. It's got a little heater inside of it, so when you pull it out, the food's warm, but that's that's being deployed very fast, too, absolutely.

Matt Kirchner: 44:24

In fact, that was one of the funny, funny moments from our trip. I remember getting on the elevator the first night that we were in Shenzhen and and there was a robot on the elevator. When I got on, I was like, Hey, dude. And then, you know, like, ride the elevator with this, with this robot that's taking room service to somebody's room. It was, it was really fascinating. You know, I would throw on to that. Remember, our first day in Shenzhen, walked outside and somebody pointed up, and there were like, 10 drones hovering over the top of us, and they're all just delivering packages around Shenzhen. So they're now, you know, we talk about when, you know, is the day coming when Amazon will deliver it, deliver a package to your front door using a drone. I mean, that's a. Alive and well, certainly in certain cities in China. So that was really, really interesting as well.

Todd Wanek: 45:04

And then the US Walmart is joined in Texas, so you know this coming here as well.

Matt Kirchner: 45:08

Yeah, awesome. Yeah. I mean, think about all the costs that drives out of the supply chain. I mean, we can just drop a product at somebody's front door. So that's that's an exciting one to to to keep our eyes on as well. So now we are through four questions each, and we're moving on to question number five. Todd's question for me, number five was discuss rare earth minerals, why China will retain an advantage in mining over the long term, and the failure of US education to understand this critical need. So let's a great question, by the way, and you know, it is going to be a while if we're ever going to regain dominance in that area. It's going to be a while before it happens. Before it happens, but I'll share a couple of thoughts, and then looking forward to your thoughts as well. Todd, first of all, I've got a good friend in the form of a guy named Tim Sullivan. Tim was the Chief Executive Officer of bus Cyrus, and maybe fewer people know busiris Now it's been a while since they were sold the caterpillar in 2011 but an iconic company in the mining equipment space. Tim was the CEO of that company when they sold the caterpillar for $8.6 billion I think was the number. So this is a, this is a big time company, and a big time guy in the mining space. Tim and I were chatting not too long ago, and I said, you know, this whole rare earth minerals thing, I mean, you know, they're mining those in China. China is going to places like Africa to mine them as well. You know, do we have that in the US? He said, hands down. He said, we absolutely have all the rare earth minerals we need here in the United States. It's just that because of some of the permitting policy and environmental challenges, we haven't been able to mine them. So I think that's the first point to be made. At least, according to the guy that ran the largest mining company in the world. We've got abundance of rare earth minerals here in the United States. It's not just a question of mining them. We also have to refine them and process them and so on. But that's that's the first point to be made. A second point to be made is on the refining side. So it takes five years to build one of these facilities here in the United States. So if we decide today, and there's some going up now, actually, I think it's a great investment opportunity here in the US, as an aside, but if we start today, four to five years before we have the capacity to be able to do the refining of the rare earth minerals, and that assumes that the permitting and some of the environmental requirements go smoothly. If they don't, it can take a lot longer than that. And then the third part is, so it's, it's number one, we have them here. Number two, it is expensive and time consuming and and difficult to get the refining capacity built here in the United States. And then it's all about the talent. So there's a couple interesting things. A couple weeks ago, Todd, as you know, I had occasion to travel to Washington, DC, spent some time with my friend, Secretary, Doug Burgum, who's the Secretary of the Interior, and he has said publicly, if you look at the United States, you know, you know, we graduated, I mentioned this a little bit earlier, 36,000 lawyers here in the United States every single year. And you know how many metallurgical and mining engineers we graduate every year? It's 300 so think about that. 36,000 that, 36,000 lawyers. One of our biggest challenges is rare earth minerals. We're graduating 300 metallurgical and mining engineers every year. And if you look at kind of the this is not Doug Burgum anymore. This is actually Jim Rankin, who was, at the time, was the president of the South Dakota School of Mines. If you look at the four disciplines that are really important there in rare earth minerals mining. So Mining Engineering, metallurgical engineering, geological engineering and geology. There are only four universities in the entire United States of America that teach those four disciplines. And so if we're going to ever lead on this, we've got to figure this out. You know, one of the things that I'm really excited about, and we're spending a lot of time thinking about is, how do we take this idea of getting students excited about manufacturing careers that we've been really, really successful with in a lot of ways, long ways to go, but making a lot of progress, and do the same thing for mining and metallurgy, because without those disciplines here in the United States, we're going to have a really, really hard time When it comes to competing with technology. Your thoughts interesting.

Todd Wanek: 49:03

You brought that up because after we left you in Hangzhou, Shanghai area, we took the bullet train down to a factory in the center part of China. And as I got this bullet train, there's a bus, and they picked me up at the bus, because they're taking this factory. They had 13,000 virtual manufacturing facility in this area. And we drove past this beautiful school, and I asked the person I was with, it was actually the mayor of the city. And I said, Tell me, what are they doing that school? It's a mining school. And I said, somebody, well, really? He goes, Yeah. I said, how many kids are in that school? 35,000 kids. I said, 35,000 kids in this mining school. He goes, Yeah. And I said, How many schools like this exist to China? He said, about three so think of it. They got 100,000 kids going through mining schools, getting mine degrees every single year, not every single year, but 25,000 a year, roughly graduated. And then he said, I said, what else they do? They teach them African languages. They teach them, you know, Portuguese for Brazil. They teach them all these language and then they deploy and and they. Send them all over the world to be able to help get the rare earth minerals, because that's the one thing China's after. And I was just blown away. And it's a matter of fact, I was on chat, GPT in the phone, on my phone, as we're driving around. I'm like, how many kids the United States graduate with mining degrees? It was 300 Yep, yeah. Isn't that crazy, but, but is absolutely one of the disadvantages I think we have. So we talked about rare earth minerals, not about refinery, but it's also about the people in the educational system. We got to reform that to be able to get people entering these trades absolutely one.

Matt Kirchner: 50:26

And I'm assuming that chat GPT got that from the TechEd podcast. Actually, that's probably the source of the information. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's absolutely fascinating. And so really, putting a ton of thought here into how we get more young people excited about that, got a few things going behind the scenes, believe it or not, on that. Or not, on that, on that front, so we'll see what kind of fruit that bears. But, but if we are going to be competitive here in the United States, when it comes to technology, we have to get access to these rare earth minerals, and we have them here in the United States, we have to have a strategy around extracting them, doing it environmentally responsibly. I get that part of it, and super, super important. But there's ways of doing that, but, but having access to them and then building the building the infrastructure to be able to process them, and I know that's a huge priority for the current administration.

Todd Wanek: 51:10

And the beauty of what the United States, where we both live, is we are a resource rich country. Exactly. We've got abundant resources in the United States, it's the ability to be able to do something with those resources.

Matt Kirchner: 51:21

Yep, exactly right. Which is all about national policy, and it is a little bit of a contrast between central planning and picking a direction and going and, you know, flipping back and forth every two to four years, which, you know, we could all do a whole podcast about that. But if there's one, one lesson or one message to the folks at the highest levels of the US government, it's like, let's get coordinated on this. Let's recognize that these, these things that we're talking about, whether it's AI, whether it's education, whether it's, you know, rare earth minerals, let's agree where we can agree and get going on our national strategy. And I know there's things in the works already, but super, super important, one of those things I just mentioned was education. Which brings me to my final question for Todd wanick, on our list of a list of five, and that question is, contrast China's strategy to make artificial intelligence education mandatory in schools, versus the approach to the United States being hesitant toward AI adoption or overly focused on chat bots. So you know, the whole we touched on this in education. And I just want to before you answer that question, Todd, to remind members of our audience that maybe aren't as understanding of the incredible work that Ashley Furniture is doing, that the Ashley Furniture Education Foundation is doing, that the Ron and Joyce wonk Foundation are doing to drive this forward, and this is something that your company at the highest levels of leadership recognized A long time ago, and has really had a very focused strategy, which continues to expand on, how do we create that next generation of talent? In many cases, you've created the roadmap for how others can do this. And that's why I wanted to finish on this question is, as we think about AI education being mandatory in China, we think about some of the things you're doing, particularly with our good friend, Mike Bigley, at the White House School District and surrounding districts to get kids excited about these kinds of technologies. You know, talk about their strategy versus versus our strategy and what we should be doing.

Todd Wanek: 53:11

Yeah, well, number one, Mike Bigley was on his trip with us, so we got a lot of insight into AI and education that was absolutely fantastic to him on that trip. He's so insightful and so observant, but China mandated AI in their schools. It's not debated, it's not argued about, it's mandated. So when they say, this is direction we're going to go, they go and everybody gets in line, and they reform the curriculum, and they change their whole educational system. So they mandated it because they know it's where the future is going. And I think that is a massive strategic advantage that they have compared to the United States. You mentioned earlier, the number of AI people that are graduating from school, or engineers are graduating from school, it's, it's, it's unbelievable. Compared to the United States, we're not bringing kids out of school with AI education. There's a couple schools like Whitehall school districts, which doing a great job. Alpha schools the United States are doing a great job, but it's not getting a groundswell of activity yet, and it needs to, because it is a massive disadvantage if we bring the kids through school with the traditional methods of education from the industrial era that we have in the United States, we don't reform our education to be AI based I believe we're going to be at a massive strategic disadvantage. We already are. We've got to catch up, and we've got to reform our school systems. Use these tools, not fight with the tools. I read a lot about, you know, teachers saying that they can't use AI in the classroom. It's like, that's exactly the wrong approach. You've got to embrace it and use it, and the ability to basically customize education for kids through AI is probably the biggest strategic advantage by See, math, yeah,

Matt Kirchner: 54:48

there's no question about it. You think about everything that we know about a student. I wouldn't even go through the laundry list, but somebody can make it on their own. You think about what a school district, what a school knows about their students, you know everything about them, and being able. Use that to customize delivery methods to meet that student exactly where they are, make this as efficient as possible. We can do all that with artificial intelligence, certainly teaching the use of generative AI. And you and I agree 100% we shouldn't be prohibiting that. We should find ways to integrate it into education and then allow and encourage our educators to be more creative in terms of what that classroom experience looks like. And if, if we need to morph the experience and be more hands on at school, more project based, reflecting more on what we've learned, rather than just regurgitating as something out of a textbook. And let's, let's innovate. And then the final part of that, and this is, you know, a key area among others, where we're Mike Bigley, who's been a former guest on the podcast, by the way, we'll link that episode up he was on within the last six, eight months, I think, great episode where Mike Bigley has been a leader in others. Is this whole idea of applied AI and physical AI. How much of the artificial intelligence that Todd and I talked about today is related to gender of artificial intelligence algorithms and programming, and how much of it is related to drones and humanoid robots and quadropods and electric vehicles and all these ways that were autonomous vehicles, all these ways that we're deploying artificial intelligence on the edge. That's where it's at. You know, Mike in association with a quick plug for the folks at discover AI, because they've actually created a way to expand that, with Ashley's encouragement, beyond the White House School District into districts all over the country. Now, super, super exciting with that, with that endeavor as well. We'll put that in the show notes, but, but if we don't get this right, and it's really taught at every level, right, I mean, let's start out with, we've got to get kids excited about this in K 12. We have to drive AI learning and applied AI learning all the way through their their K 12 journey. We have to be teaching at our Technical and Community Colleges in terms of how it apply, applies to a wide range of discipline, not just manufacturing, but healthcare, hospitality, you know, public safety, every single aspect of our Technical and Community Colleges at the university level, we talked about the huge disparity in terms of the number of engineers we're graduating versus other parts of the world, especially China. We've got to get that right and then in the workplace, and we've got to get our manufacturers and other companies understanding the value of E commerce, the importance of clusters, the importance of automation, of making automation affordable, of deploying it at scale. I mean, if we get it from one end to the other, we get this right in the United States that, you know, there's still a lot of hope. I haven't given up by any stretch. I think if anything, what I saw in China opened my eyes to what we could be doing here. But we've got to get on our game and drive it forward. I'll give you the last last comments here before we close up shop. Yeah, and

Todd Wanek: 57:29

I think the number one thing that we need, certainly in my business, is I've got to get everybody it got to have to get a groundswell of activity. And I need willingness of the people. Number one, everybody's got to be willing to learn. And you know, we got to foster that within Ashley Furniture, as well as within the educational system and in society in general. We got to get people that are willing to embrace these technologies and these these ideas, and then we got to make it actionable. We've got to take things and we got to make them so you could take action on it. You can actually deploy it, because everybody kind of expects an angel from heaven to come down and help them, right? I you know how it works this, right? This isn't an angel from heaven. This is up to us to learn this and then create an action plan around it within our business so we can deploy it. And then we have to have capacity to be able to do it. You know, capacity within our business, within ourselves and within our time. And I think at no other time in history that I've ever looked at is there such an opportunity, and I'm super excited about it. Now you are too this whole China conversation. You know, they are, they're they're very efficient, and you got to give a lot of credit for what they've done. I've been there since 1989 I lived there for five years. I understand it well, and I've just watched a country come from nothing to an amazing organization, amazing country, within 35 years and the changes, massive changes they've made, how they perform their society, how they've become Engineering Society, is absolutely mind boggling. So lots of credit to China. Obviously, in the United States, we have to catch up, and we've got to make sure that we're burning the ships, so to speak. And we're all getting motivated and get fired up because we can compete, and we must compete. We got to change our shoulds to must, like with education, we can no longer say we should do these things. We must do all. And I think that's an imperative that we all need to agree to.

Matt Kirchner: 59:12

And I agree 100% and to your point, it's on us. So if you're listening to this episode of the protected podcast, it's not about waiting for somebody to do something. It's up to every American to figure this out in every single aspect of our economy. I share your optimism for the future Todd and and I think we, we can lead on these technologies. I think there's a lot, there's a tremendous value and tremendous benefits that we have here in the United States. I wouldn't trade places with anybody in China for anything in the world. I'm not pretending that that I would. But to your point, we can learn from them, and we can innovate here just as quickly, if not more quickly. And it isn't a question of whether we do it. There isn't an option. And I'm really, really proud to be on this journey with you. You're brilliant business person. You're brilliant when it comes to technology, to geopolitics, and most important, how all of these pieces fit together. So I always learned a ton from Todd wanak. You're a great man and a great. Friend. Really appreciate you spending time with us here on the TechEd podcast.

Todd Wanek: 1:00:03

Matt, just one more closing comment, our jobs is see things before others see it. A leader's job to see things before others see it. And you know, to go and see and to study. Breaknecks, a good book that you sent me from Dan Wayne, if anybody wants to learn more, I'd highly encourage him to do it. I just got it a couple of days ago. So here it is, breakneck and great book. I'd highly recommend it. And again, you've got to be curious, and you got to learn, and you got to see things before others see it, and then they take action on it.

Matt Kirchner: 1:00:33

Break neck will be linked up in the in the show notes as well. For the the podcast, great book, and for anybody that wants to get a sense for everything that Todd's talking about how quickly China is innovating, and what it means for the United States and the rest of the world. That's a great book to pick up. Todd. I feel like we could sit and talk about this all night. I know you're a busy gentleman. I've kept you more than an hour, but thank you so much for being with us on this episode of The TechEd podcast. We're going to put all of our show notes at we'll call it TechEd podcast.com/wanick Two. Let's do that, because I know wanick is already taken, so we'll call it W, A, N, E, k2 so that's TechEd podcast.com/wanick Two, and that's where you'll find all of the show notes, all the great things we talked about here on this episode of The TechEd podcast. When you're done, check us out on social media. We know China will we know they're doing that. So we might as well check us out on social media as well. We are on Tiktok. We are on Instagram. You'll find us on LinkedIn. You can find us on Facebook, pretty much. Wherever you're checking out your social media, you will find the TechEd podcast. When you do stop by, say hello, we would love to see you. We would love to hear from you, I should say, and we would love to see you next week, we'll be back next week with another episode of The TechEd podcast. Until then, my name is Matt Kirkner, and thanks for being with us. You.