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

Bold Names

The Wall Street Journal

Technology

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Condoleezza Rice’s experience navigating geopolitical tensions and uncertainty gives her a background few people have. The former secretary of state currently leads the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and is a founding partner at Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, a strategic consulting firm. On this week’s episode of Bold Names, she speaks to WSJ’s Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins about why she says the U.S. needs to “run hard and run fast” and win the tech race with China. She also explains why executives can no longer afford to think of foreign policy as separate from strategy. To watch the video version of this episode, visit our WSJ Podcasts YouTube channel or the video page of WSJ.com. Check Out Past Episodes: This CEO Says Global Trade Is Broken. What Comes Next? What This Former USAID Head Had to Say About Elon Musk and DOGE ‘Businesses Don’t Like Uncertainty’: How Cisco Is Navigating AI and Trump 2.0 Why This Tesla Pioneer Says the Cheap EV Market 'Sucks' Let us know what you think of the show. Email us at [email protected]. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Read Christopher Mims’s Keywords column.Read Tim Higgins’s column. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	As companies seek to close growing gaps in skills and talent,
0:04.0	Deloitte US CEO Jason Garzatus believes it's important for organizations to understand their baseline of skills.
0:10.0	There's so many organizations that can't ask and answer the fundamental questions about how much computer science or data management skills do I have or AI development skills in a given domain? By performing a
0:21.6	skills inventory, leaders can truly understand where their efforts should be focused. Being blind
0:26.3	to those gaps is the real miss. Visit Deloitte.com to learn how your enterprise can help successfully
0:31.8	cultivate talent. We're at this critical inflection point, it seems, a dangerous era potentially for geopolitics.
0:41.1	The U.S., China, racing for AI.
0:45.1	What is your nightmare scenario here?
0:47.4	Yeah.
0:48.5	Well, H.E.I, it's, you know, the general intelligence so that the model is able to think on its own is maybe 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 Sierra Connor. I was told that she's here. Could I see her, please?
1:11.8	You don't want The Terminator, but Chinese. Exactly. I'd rather, if there's going to be a
1:16.9	terminated, let him be American. I'll be back. Today, I'm bold names. Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S. Secretary of State and current head of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
1:34.9	A big name in Foreign Affairs.
1:37.0	She also has a strategic consulting firm that she founded with some other big names in that world.
1:42.5	Yeah, she is helping companies navigate what is our dangerous current world.
1:49.0	And one of her big sort of hobby horses now is making sure that the future is not filled with
1:55.8	Terminators and especially that we don't end up in a situation where China's building Terminators and nobody else is.
2:03.0	I don't know about you, Tim. I think about all of these things a lot. I have kids. I really do not want
2:08.2	one of them to have to become John Connor and save us from that future. Yeah, absolutely. I want to
2:13.3	avoid that. Terminator 1, Terminator 2, definitely not the future I want. Maybe Terminator 3 I could
2:17.9	kind of live with, maybe. But in the meantime, let's get to this interview with Condoleezza Rice.
2:25.5	From the Wall Street Journal, I'm Christopher Mems. And I'm Tim Higgins. This is Bold Names,
	...

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