Why Cutting Off China's Chips Backfired: Jeff Towson on Huawei, DeepSeek, and Robotics

China graduates 2 million engineers a year. The U.S. graduates 150,000. Jeff Towson has spent 17 years on the ground in China studying what that gap actually produces.In this 90-minute conversation on The Vibe, Jeff breaks down how Huawei rebuilt its supply chain after the 2019 U.S. entity list ban, how open-weight models like DeepSeek V4 and Alibaba's Qwen are pulling Silicon Valley costs down by 90 percent, and why he thinks the U.S. strategy of cutting China off from AI chips is "kind of evil" given that AI is a general-purpose technology like electricity.We also cover:The CloudMatrix and Ascend chip rollout that creates a fully independent Chinese AI stackWhy Unitree went from a basic humanoid to kung-fu-capable robots in 12 months, and how Galbot fits into the pictureElon's vertical integration play across Tesla, xAI, Colossus, and Optimus, and why it doesn't look like a typical investor strategyThe Brockman-Altman lawsuit and what it reveals about who we actually trust to govern informationHard America vs. soft America, and where universal basic income lands in that splitWhy drug discovery may be where the U.S. has its own China-scale advantageInfo-nationalism, the Manus deal, and why AI is political ground that video generation isn'tJeff is the founder of TechMoat Consulting, host of The Tech Strategy Podcast, and author of the Moats and Marathons book series. He was formerly Head of Direct Investments for Middle East North Africa and Asia Pacific for Prince Alwaleed. He has 2.9M+ LinkedIn followers and was the #1 LinkedIn Top Voice for Finance globally in 2017.Jeff's work:The Tech Strategy Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tech-strategy-podcast/id1482008042Website: https://jefftowson.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-towson-%E9%99%B6%E8%BF%85-b77906/Connect with Jason Padgett:Email: [email protected]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-grant-padgett/X: https://x.com/NoCodeCAIODirector of Growth and Partnerships, CitizenAIAGI Podcast Network:Schools Out Saturdays: https://schoolsout.agipodcast.ai/Field Notes newsletter: https://schoolsout.agipodcast.ai/field-notes-issue-1All shows: https://schoolsout.agipodcast.ai/networkTools Jason recommends:MindStudio → https://get.mindstudio.ai/q7n7u5cttkdqRiverside.fm → https://riverside.sjv.io/e1xyBrWispr Flow → https://ref.wisprflow.ai/jason-padgett