Condoleezza Rice on Beating China in the Tech Race: 'Run Hard and Run Fast'

0:00How are the U.S. businesses of Philip Morris International invested in America? We're invested in advancing science, giving adults who smoke better options. We're invested in American manufacturing, helping local economies thrive. We're invested in community, supporting military veterans and their families, disaster relief, and economic empowerment. Because we're proud to be invested in America. See how at USPMI.com. We're at this critical inflection point, it seems. A dangerous era, potentially, for geopolitics. The U.S., China, racing for AI. What is your nightmare scenario here? Yeah. Well, AGI, it's, you know, the general intelligence so that the model is able to think on its own.

0:54Maybe it's going to happen, maybe it isn't going to happen. Well, if it's going to happen, I sure want it to happen in the United States, not in China. I don't want to wake up one day and find out that they have a general intelligence robot. I'm a friend of Sarah Connor. I was told that she's here. Could I see her, please? You don't want the Terminator, but Chinese. Exactly. I'd rather, if there's going to be a Terminator, let him be American. I'll be back.

1:22Today on Bold Names, Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S. Secretary of State and current head of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A big name in foreign affairs, she also has a strategic consulting firm that she founded with some other big names in that world. Yeah, she is helping companies navigate what is our dangerous current world. And one of her big sort of hobby horses now is making sure that the future is not filled with terminators and especially that we don't end up in a situation where China's building Terminators and nobody else is. I don't know about you, Tim. I think about all of these things a lot.

2:03I have kids. I really do not want one of them to have to become John Connor and save us from that future. Yeah, absolutely. I want to avoid that. Terminator 1, Terminator 2, definitely not the future I want. Maybe Terminator 3 I could kind of live with. Maybe. But in the meantime, let's get to this interview with Condoleezza Rice. From the Wall Street Journal, I'm Christopher Mims. And I'm Tim Higgins. This is Bold Names, where you'll hear from the leaders of the Bold Name Companies, featured in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Today we ask, how are companies navigating international uncertainty and geopolitical tensions without falling behind?

2:49Welcome. Thanks for making time today. Thanks. It's a pleasure to be with you. We want to talk a lot about business in the international world today, but first, maybe let's set the scene, what's going on out there. It's a challenging international environment. Business leaders, for a long time, I think, probably took for granted the idea that there was going to be some stability in the global order. and now maybe not so. It makes it challenging for making those business investments. What do you see out there? Is it more competitive than ever? Is it a new era of competition? Well, certainly I think it is a more uncertain international environment.

3:29The way that I put it is we've become quite accustomed in the business community to thanks to the kind of integration of the international economy. You could put your supply chains where it was most efficient. You could invest where the ROI was greatest. You could do your manufacturing and assembly where the labor conditions were best. And I think business is painted on a kind of broad canvas that was almost borderless in the way that people thought about it. And I think what's happened is in part because of the way that China has dealt with its integration into the international system, but also the kind of technological arms race that's come out of that.

4:07And then some disappointment in parts of these countries, and not just the United States, but several democracies, with the effects of globalization on some elements, some parts of the voting public. That is breaking down. We're getting more nationalistic policies. We're getting a sense that supply chains that are wholly dependent on China are not secure. And so, yes, I do think that the system, as we've known it, is more uncertain. But the one thing that I'd be very clear on is this is not because of a change in administration. This has been happening underneath for some time, and it's likely to survive into the next administration, whoever that is.

4:52And so I think it's important for businesses to recognize this as a fairly permanent set of secular changes. I think what you're trying to say there diplomatically is this is not a Trump administration issue. Those trend lines had been building for several years now. I think some people would like to label it as a new Cold War, right? I think I've heard you talk about how that's perhaps an imperfect term for that, and I'm curious why you think that. Whenever you use a term that is analogous to some other period in history, you realize people like analogies. But is it getting in the way of our understanding of what's actually going on?

5:33With the Soviet Union, we had an adversary that was a military giant, but it was an economic and technological midget. At no time was more than 4 % of Soviet GDP determined by international trade. It wasn't integrated into the international system. One of the difficulties in dealing with China is that after 20 plus years of integration, you're finding that it's actually pretty hard to do something about rare earth minerals because they own the supply chain and they can withhold very important magnets. So the Soviet Union would never have been able to do that. So I don't like the analogy because I think we like the analogy because we won the Cold War.

6:18But I don't like it because I think it really does obfuscate this very real difference in what the challenge from China looks like. There is a military element, but there's a huge economic and technological element as well. You've described China as a technological peer to the U.S. Ed, love some specifics here. Obviously, AI leaps to mind. What other areas of technology are you concerned about where China can match or exceed the U.S. and then, of course, use that not just economically but militarily? Well, one advantage that I have is I am the director of the Hoover Institution, but I sit at Stanford University.

6:57And so I can walk 15 minutes from here and talk to the best computer scientists and the best bioengineers and the best roboticist. And they will tell you that not just in AI, but in robotics, particularly usable robots. Ask a lot of scientists where they're buying their robots and they'll tell you China. We all know about the battery technology story for EVs and synthetic biology, which is something I don't think people pay enough attention to. And synthetic biology, if you could briefly define that. Yeah, so you're really talking about using, engineering the cell as opposed to doing a kind of natural process for it.

7:38And I'll just give you a very vivid view. When DeepSeek came out, there was not a single national security person who wasn't stunned by that. There was not a single computer scientist who didn't see it coming. And so what is going on in the private sector, in the scientific and technological sector, that is sometimes almost invisible to people who study national security is something that we have to watch. Those worlds need to link up much more effectively. After the break, Secretary Rice tells us how she's advising businesses now and why she says it's important to separate what she calls the signal from noise.

8:29There's an awful lot of hopping up and down out there, and it's not going to settle down for a while. You want to try to have some sense of what is enduring in your company, what needs to change, what might be modified, rather than just every headline leads you to think that it's in crisis. Stay with us. Find your perfect home on Realtor.com. The perfect home in the perfect neighborhood, in the perfect school district, perfectly close to work, but perfectly far enough away to escape to. With over half a million new listings every month on Realtor.com, you won't miss out on your perfectly perfect home.

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9:32Okay, so you wear quite a few hats in your professional life these days. And one of the things that you do is you're the founding partner of an international strategic consulting firm. And let me get the name right, Rice, Hadley, Gates, and Manuel. And you are consulting with businesses out there who are trying to get their minds around all of this international uncertainty. I'm curious, love to know the names, but more importantly, what industries are you helping out there? Yeah, we have industries really across. We have tech companies. We have energy companies. We have companies that are in the financial sector.

10:13So we try to help companies to understand what's going on in the kind of ecosystem in the international system. And it goes back to the first comment that I made, you know, kind of accept that the days when supply chains were just kind of wherever you thought they were most efficient, those days are gone. So how do you begin to adjust without over adjusting? One of the hard things about right now is to tell signal from noise. There's an awful lot of hopping up and down out there, and it's not going to settle down for a while. So you don't want to be the, you know, the children's soccer game where everybody's running to the where the ball is, You want to try to have some sense of what is enduring in your company, what needs to change, what might be modified.

11:00Do you have the right skill sets? Rather than just every headline leads you to think that it's in crisis. I'd love a concrete example of where long-term thinking beats reacting to every headline. Because surely there's something around tariffs or tech transfer. I don't know. But I just love, obviously not talking about specific companies, but if you can give us an example of a trend. Going back for a while on supply chains, for instance, we had talked to companies about diversifying supply chains because it was pretty clear that a combination of Chinese policy, which made some elements difficult, and the fact that you were starting to get backlash in the United States.

11:44And we used to always say, when you think about risk, don't leave it to the risk officer because it's not going to be the risk officer who's testifying before Congress. It's going to be your CEO. So bring this into your boardroom. Do some simulation with it. And think about contingency planning at this point. If this goes this way, what would we do? We encourage companies to have what we call indicators. We do this all the time in the national security world. What are the five things that they would begin to happen that you would be concerned about? One of the really interesting things that happened when the Russians invaded Ukraine was that that was a real kind of shock to the system, because it was, even though there was some smoke around what the Russians were doing, that they would do it in a way that basically took them out of the international economy was not really on the table.

12:40And so we did have to help companies with really pretty fast adjustments in that case for what happens to your workforce. What do you do about Russians who are working for you? So sometimes you do have to do crisis management. But if you can do it over, if you can have some sense of the things that might happen, start to use simulation, actually exercise those, then you will be better prepared. I just want to make one other point. We always ask companies to do something that I did in a political risk book that I wrote a while ago with my colleague, Amy Siegert. There's industry risk. So industry risk means that if you are, let's say, an oil company, you are driven by geology.

13:28You can't just go wherever you'd like to be. So you're going to have to take some industry risk. But there's also the matter of enterprise risk. Within the industry, where does your enterprise sit? If you are a wildcatter, you'll look at that world differently than if you are a super major. And so we try to get companies to analyze the industry risk and then analyze the enterprise risk. And that begins to narrow the questions that you're asking. I remember very well when the NBA was kicked out of China because of something that the Houston Rockets general manager said. The Rockets general manager under fire after comments he made about the ongoing violence in Hong Kong.

14:15A tweet backing pro-democracy demonstrations right here in Hong Kong. You know, the tweet itself, you know, you never know the ramifications that can happen. And I was talking to NBA folks and I said, look, they're not going to kick you out of China because those young princelings are not going to watch the Kazakh national team play the Chinese national team. That was exciting. Yeah, it's not much fun. They're going to want to see LeBron and they want to see Steph. So you have to know where on that continuum you are. But if you're in the technology space, then you are going to decouple from China.

14:51I mean, just watching things right now, to see some of these companies essentially become, I don't know, pawns in the global negotiations. I mean, you look at NVIDIA these days, really having a tough time with China. Just recently, the government there seemingly blacklisting its newest AI chip among Chinese tech companies, which is a challenge for them. And if you were advising them right now, what do you even say to a company like that? Yeah, well, I know, as you might imagine, the NVIDIA pretty well. They're going to work their way through this. But the first thing is, I'd ask the Chinese, what are you doing?

15:35You say you want foreign direct investment, and then you blacklist the biggest American company on which everybody knows you've been dependent on ships. Are you trying to get some kind of bargain where you get the higher-end chips? What's the purpose here? What in the world are you doing if you want to keep something of an integrated economy? But NVIDIA is such a huge presence. And the one thing that they've really shown that I really admire is their ability to continually reinvent themselves. And I think that's what's going to serve them best. It's interesting. We talk to a lot of CEOs. I talk to a lot of CEOs, and they always seem to think that they are facing unprecedented challenges, and especially in this kind of global space.

16:21And I'm curious your perspective on kind of the long arc of time, if you will. Clearly, the situation is different than this perhaps last generation where free trade was kind of a given, if you will. Is there another period in history that you kind of see some similarities to, and companies need to be thinking about it that way? Well, I like to quote my colleague, historian Steve Kotkin, who says that everything's unprecedented if you don't know history. And we do jump to the idea of unprecedented pretty quickly. I suspect that some of the issues that what passed for international business in the 30s was pretty tough.

17:02If you were a financier, how did you think about this world that was clearly falling apart, militarizing, people moving to their corners? How did you think about access to resources at a time when those issues were starting to fuel the possibility of war? This isn't the first time that we've had tariffs in major ways. But I do think there are a couple of things that are really very different. And one is that the Industrial Revolution, everybody says, you know, well, it changed everything. But the technology is moving so fast in so many different areas. And it has no, it's basically a private sector business.

17:42The U.S. government doesn't own any of the assets, really, of the innovation revolution that we're going through. The other thing that is very different, as I've said, is that, you know, we're trying to de-link, de-couple, de-risk, whatever you want to call it, from a country that is a dominant force in the international economy. You mean China? China and has suddenly become an adversary. That's, that's pretty different. Is that so different though? Sorry, I have to jump in because I'm reading a book on the naval history of World War one right now. Isn't there another crazy Friday night for MIMS?

18:19Yeah. But seriously though, you're a Russianist. So I know, you know, this history, right? Great Britain and Germany allies, they were doing naval exercises together. They were peer countries. Germany was a little bit ahead. Technologically, they were entwined economically because that was the beginning of globalization. Yeah. And nobody thought they would ever fight. I mean, at that time they didn't think that they would fight. Yeah. Yeah. Franz Ferdinand gets assassinated. And before you know it, Churchill is chasing down German armored cruisers in the Mediterranean. I mean, is there a parallel here where the world seems stable, but you have these peer economies that, you know, turning on, on, on seemingly small events could end up in a conflict pretty rapidly because they're set up for it, right?

19:04Yeah, yeah. No, you're absolutely right that even though history doesn't repeat itself, once it's said that sometimes it rhymes, and there are little elements of that in here. But I wouldn't confuse the integration that was going on in either the end of the 19th century, the kind of beginning of the 20th century. I mean, people talk about the integrated currency, they were all on the gold standard. Well, yeah, of course. But I think, you know, they were all intermarrying. Yes. But I don't think that compares to what you're seeing now in terms of how far the integration went of China. And it's largely because this was not basically the work of governments.

19:41This was basically the work of the private sector. It's Tim Cook and Foxconn and people like that. Everybody, everybody, because, you know, the CEO narrative is, yeah, we've got some IP problem, you know, intellectual property problems there. Yes, there's some segments that are closed, but boy, that's a huge market. You got to be there. And that was the government's view too, which then kind of encouraged the business sector to go do it. I feel a little bad sometimes for elements of the business sector when they're told, how could you be doing that in China? Well, because you kind of said it was a good thing to do that in China at the beginning of the 2000s.

20:20So I think the depth of integration, the impact of the private sector, is just different than at other times. When we come back, we'll hear Secretary Rice's take on the case for funding universities and what she calls the infrastructure of innovation. You won't find anybody who's more a believer in the capitalist system than I am. But I'd like some of the innovation to come because what happens in universities is somebody gets up and says, I wonder why that does that. That's next.

21:04So a company can only do so much, right? Really, this is nation against nation. And in order for the U.S. to stay on top, especially in these fast-moving areas of AI and fusion and robotics and all these interesting kind of spaces that U.S. investors are excited about, U.S. companies are excited about, so is China. What needs to happen in the U.S.? What conditions need to be created in the U.S. to protect the U.S.? Well, the first thing is run hard and run fast, right? Just try not to worry too much about downsides. I know everybody says, oh, there's all these downsides to these innovations. Somebody said the other day, you know, well, there was a downside to fire, too, as an innovation.

21:50So, you know, let's not get caught up in the downsides. I think the opportunities way outweigh the downsides. The second is keep it so that you can innovate in a broad range of places. and then find room in the U.S. government, particularly the U.S. military, for those small companies to find a place in procurement in the Pentagon, where it's still a bit the Death Star, where it's a little hard to approach if you're a small company. So those are some of the elements that have made us strong, and I think we should continue to do. One of the reasons that I emphasize run hard and run fast is that I trust democratic institutions to make corrections if something starts to go really wrong.

22:39If you have something go wrong, let's say an AI, which it will, you're going to have investigative reporting, probably by some people you work with. You're going to have the congressional hearings. This will not happen in China. We saw the way that they deal with this sort of thing with COVID. They'll lie about it, They'll cover it up. And so I want democratic states to stay ahead in this regard. The other point, I'd like to see our allies more in the game, in innovation. I was just in London and Berlin. And, you know, the British have a lot going on in AI where DeepMind was created. but because of the limitations of financing for small companies and like and venture, people come to the United States, one British, very senior British person who's no longer in government, but he said, how in the world did we let DeepMind get sold to an American company?

23:48And I do think there's something that's going on in Europe that is lamentable, which is right now, the United States is the innovation economy and the Europeans are the regulators. That's bound to bring real tensions in our relationships. I mean, you're really getting at these kind of landmark tech laws that the EU passed a few years ago and they've just started going into implementation. And some of these were really kind of targeting concerns about the dangers of social media, right? Or that some of these U.S. companies had just become too powerful for digital markets, right? And they were concerned about protecting the innovation that could occur.

24:32But you think it sounds like you're saying it's gone too far. So the first I fully understand. We all know the downsides of social media. And not only is it tough. I teach in a university and I worry a lot about these kids who've never known anything but. And it is contributing to our polarization because social media encourages you to go to your tribe. And then you never actually talk to anybody who thinks differently. So when you talk to somebody who thinks differently, you think they're stupid or venal. And it exposes you to the worst opinions from the other side rather than the things you have in common.

25:05Precisely. And you get and to be disagreeable is to get more clicks. Right. And the kind of extreme, extreme of that is you get political violence. So I worry about that. The other, I really think that the Europeans, if innovation is not flowing in Europe, it's more not because U.S. companies are so dominant. They are dominant. But that's because you don't have the innovation ecosystem in Europe to support innovation. There's a very good report that's come out in Europe. Draghi did this report about how you can create a better innovation infrastructure in Europe. And that seems to be a better answer than trying to halt the market for the U.S.

25:51companies. Mario Draghi, the former Italian prime minister. Yes, and wrote a big report on how Europe could innovate. Right. You're talking about the pull in terms of where capital is available for companies like this. But obviously, there's there's a push. There's a genesis. So much of that comes out of, you know, universities. We rely on universities in the U.S. for pioneering research, but also for the talent pipeline. I hear over and over again when I talk to companies, I mean, that is, of course, where their talent comes from. How are we going to maintain this technological lead, which you've described as being so critical for us to run fast and run hard, if university funding and specifically research funding is under threat?

26:38Look, universities have a lot to atone for. I would be the first to say that the behavior after October 7th was irresponsible is a mild way of saying it. I had a colleague who asked his students, from what river to what sea in the, you know, Palestine will be free. And this, of course, in international relations, and almost none of them knew. So we haven't done a very good job of education about some of these issues. It's also true that we were not places where civil dialogue around difference was welcome. There was an orthodoxy. And if you didn't speak to that orthodoxy, which was pretty left wing, then you were held up as an example of fill in the blank, you know, xenophobic or misogynist or whatever.

27:30And so universities have a lot to atone for. I think people are starting to get back to the basics that universities should be neutral and not try to have political positions as institutions. But if the cost for trying to rectify that is that we destroy what basically has been the infrastructure of innovation, which is the government funding universities to do the basic research, to train the PhDs, to bring people into the private sector, to be the basis on which companies are founded even in the United States, then we've really created a great deficit for the things we need to do. We don't have a plan B.

28:11The biggest problem is we don't have a plan B. And while I know that a lot of, you know, if my friends down the road here in Silicon Valley are listening, you'll say, but a lot of innovation is going on in companies. That is absolutely true. And it is also true that on things like AI, universities don't have the compute power that it takes to do some of the large language models that my friends at Google or Meta or Microsoft are doing. But I would ask the following question. Do you really want all of the innovation to be done in the private sector? I'm an incredible capitalist. You won't find anybody who's more a believer in the capitalist system than I am.