• If you open your PC or laptop, chances are you will find my guest's fingerprints all over it. For 30 years Craig Barrett has helped Intel build its worldwide chip-building network -- from being a manager to vice-president to president to CEO to chairman. Craig Barrett, one of the most iconic CEOs of our time, of any time, welcome to Walk the Talk.

It's a pleasure to be here.

• You are a travelling chairman, you go around the world. But this is unusual even by your standards -- to do Tindivanam in Tamil Nadu, and then Bangaldesh, and again Delhi.

Well, we usually go one country per day, but this time we are oscillating between Bangladesh and India. And India is a big country. I think it deserves at least a couple of days.

• So what were you doing in Tindivanam? You were working on a scheme for school healthcare?

We were working on both education and school healthcare. Also on how to use information technology to deliver better medical care to people in rural environments.

• But what is the larger purpose behind Intel doing it? Last year, I think Intel signed an agreement with the Tamil Nadu government to help 2,000 schools in the state use information technology. What is Intel doing? What's a chipmaker doing in education?

Education has been the sidelight for Intel for several decades. It's an extracurricular activity; it's something we do beside our normal business. The founders -- Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Andy Grove -- were very interested in education. I have tried to carry that along.

• But you always talk about the young. I have heard you in Davos and elsewhere. You always talk about the generation that types with its thumbs.

Yes, yes.

• And you say you may have a tough time persuading a middle-aged man or woman to buy new technology but you never have trouble with this generation that types with its thumbs. Is that what you are building on when you are investing in education?

I think it is different from that. Obviously, the younger generation likes new technology; they never tire of it. But the younger generation is also the future, and if your country, or any other country, wants to be successful and go forward, you have to have a younger generation with a good education, and that is the message that we give. Spend time with the younger generation, get the best-educated work-force you can, and the rest takes care of itself.

• Sir, technology is now being used by the young all over the world. I think you said somewhere that the largest concentration of cyber cafes on a street is in Amman, Jordan. So even the Middle East is not immune.

No one is immune from technology. One country tried to outlaw the Internet for a while, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and that did not work particularly well. Everyone else has adapted to it, the Chinese have adapted to it.

• And the Chinese play with it a little bit.

They do more than play with it. I think they are the second-largest computer market in the world, the largest cellphone market in the world. So they are doing much more than play with it.

• No, but they do keep playing with the Internet, Internet freedom at least.

Well, they try to. But the Internet continues to grow by leaps and bounds in China. It is not being stymied by the government.

• Right. You see Latin America and the Middle East as your emerging markets. Do you travel a lot in those regions?

Yes. The emerging markets are the fastest-growing markets for computer technology.

• But the interesting thing is that these are also the societies and countries where there is growing anti-Americanism post-9/11. Have you much explaining to do?

I do not have any issue with any anti-Americanism. I think people look at technology as a requirement for the future and they don't see technology as being American per se. They see technology as being necessary.

• But when you go as a big iconic American CEO, questions are raised. Has 9/11 changed your life a little bit? Have you had to answer some more questions?

The biggest way 9/11 has changed my life is in fact what happens at airports, the security checks. And it has changed American life to some degree because of immigration restrictions that make it more difficult for young people to come to America. One of the strengths of our country has been that it was a Mecca for people to come and get the best education possible. When we make it difficult for people to come, we suffer as a country, and I think some of the young people around the world suffer.

• Is it one thing about which you have an argument with President George W. Bush? I know that you are friends with him.

I have an argument with Washington DC on this topic, not President Bush per se. When you have politicians one-on-one, they understand what they should be doing (laughs). Unfortunately, as a group they do the wrong thing.

• (Laughs) I could say that about our politicians as well. One-on-one they are perfectly sensible, reasonable, understandable.

But together they are like a bunch of children. Sometimes they do the wrong things.

• Who need some kind of an adult hand?

Well, they need someone every once in a while to rap their fingers and tell them what to do.

• About your friendship with George Bush. He's a very unusual president.

I think (so).

• Tell us a bit about him.

I think President Bush is a bit misunderstood. He has an image around the world that is not particularly exciting, but if you meet him one-on-one, he is very articulate. He's very intelligent, very principled, and I don't find anything wrong with someone who has strong principles and stands behind them. In fact I admire that in a politician.

• So you think all this Bush-phobia around the world right now is a bit unnecessary. Or do you think there's some justification for that?

I think that the US has been, to a degree, somewhat polarising. The Iraqi situation is somewhat polarising. And the press always likes bad news, not good news.

• No, I'm not talking about America. I'm now talking of your emerging markets. Does that affect your business?

No, no. I haven't seen any impact so far of America's foreign policy on Intel's business.

• You missed by a day the great protest our communist leaders carried out on our eastern coast against joint exercises between India, America, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. Does the anti-Americanism bother you?

Of course it bothers me.

• Because you are an all-American brand, enterprise, idea, business.

It bothers me as an American citizen because no one likes to be disliked or looked down upon by anyone else. It has not affected our business per se, so from that point it doesn't bother me. But as an American citizen, I'd rather people respect our country and the principles and ideals we represent.

• And its president.

And its president. The U.S. is a democracy, India is a democracy. And we know what democracy means. It means fractious interaction between politicians, and people taking shots at each other.

• Your ambassador in New Delhi came to our office the other day and one of our young reporters asked him, 'Isn't it difficult to represent a country whose president is disliked around the world?' And he said, 'Well, his ratings in India are twice as high as his ratings in America.'

(Laughs) If you look at the press in America, it's as widely divergent in its opinions as political parties are. The Washington Post, The New York Times are on the left side, the Wall Street Journal is on the right side. You always have to read the press and go somewhere in the middle. You don't take the press literally for what it says.

• And public opinion varies from coast to coast.

Between the red states and the blue states; (between) the coasts and the heartland.

• We do know for sure that you are a true blue Republican.

Mostly, I'm a Republican, but I am more for people with principles than I am for any one party.

• Is that a reflection on the Democrats as you see them?

No, no, no. It's a reflection that it is easy to criticise people. It's more difficult to have coherent policies and answers to questions. I don't have much patience with people who just criticise. I'd rather they have ideas and solutions to problems. And so far, I feel, President Bush's detractors have mostly been complaining as opposed to suggesting new courses of action.

• In terms of how they'd have handled a post 9/11 situation?

Well, if you look at the post 9/11 situation, America has not been attacked. We've had no other disasters after 9/11, so in a degree it has been a successful policy. But that gets lost, I think, in the Iraqi war.

• Many American lives have been lost in Iraq. I mean, apart from Iraqi lives.

Many Iraqi citizens have lost their lives as well, and that's a disaster no one is happy about. But no one was happy about 9/11, no one is happy with the terrorist acts either. No one has been happy with other terrorist acts in other countries.

• When you and Mr Bush sit and talk, what do you argue about? Tell me two or three harmless things about which you have arguments.

(Laughs) I have been a great proponent of improving the education system. And it's not clear to me that the government has worked as hard and been as vocal about increasing the expectations of our education system. I have been a critic for many years of the fact that we don't invest enough in research and development in the U.S. That's the key to our future. I've been a critic of our immigration policy. Both Republicans and Democrats have made a mess of our immigration policy.

• That will make you a very popular Indian. You want to increase H1B visas by 10 times, 15 times . . .

You know, I was perhaps the first person in the U.S. to say that anyone who wants to come to the U.S. and has an advanced degree in engineering or computer sciences, we ought to just staple a green card on their diploma and let them come. Immigrants have been the fuel behind U.S. innovation for years and years.

• But sometimes even your system can be cussed. It took so long giving a green card to Ivan Lendl.

You know we occasionally do some very, very dumb things. Unfortunately, governments also do that; they don't always do the right thing, the pragmatic thing, and get caught up in politics and personalities.

• Also local politics. For instance, job losses in a county, state, or precinct -- what we call constituencies in India.

Yes, it's easy to blame job losses, problems, on something bigger, as opposed to worrying about what you need to do locally to be competitive. But you know Toyota comes to the U.S. and hires people who have lost jobs in Detroit. So U.S. companies haven't always done the best job. They've not always chosen to compete the way they should.

• That brings me to a question I know you'll be asked many times: what happened to Intel's plan of creating more jobs in India? What happened to your chip-making plant? You know, our decision-making has been slow on semiconductor policy.

In fact we have created a lot of engineering jobs. And we continue to do that, but that seems to get lost in all the discussion about an assembly test plant in India. And frankly the government was a bit slow in coming up with a policy to try to attract companies like Intel. By the time the policy was formulated, Intel had already decided to go elsewhere. We now have to wait for the next cycle.

• So we have lost that opportunity for now?

You lost an opportunity from a timing standpoint. In the greater scheme of things, it's a few years' delay.

• When the debate on FDI started in the first flush of economic reforms in India, the slogan of anti-reform walas was, 'Yes to computer chips, no to potato chips.' That's because Pepsi was coming in first. And you know Pepsi has been around a long time and Intel isn't here still.

That reminds me of a presidential adviser in Washington DC -- one of the president's advisers, not President Bush's adviser. He once said, 'What's the difference between a potato chip and a computer chip? They are all the same!' So we have the same sort of discussions on that topic as well. But you know the future is really associated with technology, and the future of any economy depends on what the infrastructure looks like, the quality of jobs you create. And increasingly, the quality of jobs will be related to how much knowledge goes into them and how much they pay will depend on the skills involved.

• So we've lost the chip plant for now. Hopefully, your next cycle will be faster. You know, as your predecessor Gordon Moore said, 'Computing power doubles itself every two years.'

Opportunities increase every two years.

• I think the cycles will also get shorter. The two big markets are India and China, so tell me, from where you sit, what are the essential differences between the two?

If you look dispassionately, they are two huge markets. China is perhaps 4-5 years ahead of India, so that makes it easy to predict what will happen in India. Mobile phone growth, computer growth, all of those things will happen surely here in India. India has the same issues as the US. It's a democratic government, decisions are taken a little slower, you have to listen to all constituencies. In China, they are more direct. In a democracy you can't ignore the other point of view. You have to listen, (arrive at) some degree of compromise, and move forward. The Chinese have been able to move forward rapidly with their central planning form of capitalism. They make decisions from the top down and no one really questions the decisions in great detail. So they have been able to move forward rapidly. Both countries have good education systems; you have, of course, very good technical institutes, good at educating engineers and computer scientists. This the Chinese do as well. Both countries should be investing very, very heavily in education. That's one of the messages I give in China and India.

• One thing we worry about in India is that perhaps we are not doing enough there -- that soon there will be a shortage of skilled manpower.

Well, that's true in just about any country. That's true in the U.S., too, where we have to import technical talent. India, as it becomes more successful, will have the capacity to develop more and more resources to feed that part of the industry and economy.

• But China and India can't import, because if they do, then the basic competitive advantage, which is cheap manpower, is lost.

Well, the basic competitive advantage of any society is always the quality and productivity of its workforce. When you produce highly educated people and have to pay them relatively low salaries, it's a competitive advantage.

• Of the two systems you deal with -- India and China -- which is less exasperating?

Frankly both can be exasperating at times. We've talked about the slowness of decision-making in India. In China, sometimes the decisions are made on what I'll call nationalistic grounds -- for example, a few years ago, the Chinese decided to institute their own standards for wireless technology, and that can be a problem, for they can favour their own industries as opposed to international standards. I think one of the things India has done well in recent times is that it has tended to privatise more.

• I think the other truth is that India has done very poorly in hardware.

Well, one of the challenges you have had with hardware is that, historically, your challenge has been in infrastructure. Electricity goes out, you don't have water, you don't have transportation. It's much more difficult to deal with the hardware side.

• And higher taxes and duties.

High taxes and duties and tariffs are death to that part of industry. The advantages India has are obviously its good education system in software and its being able to provide software exports to the world.

• Technology is the engine that powered globalisation. Thomas Friedman has this theory that no two countries have gone to war since they became part the Dell supply chain.

The alternative to that is that if two countries have McDonald's they don't go to war.

• Do you have an Intel theory of globalisation?

Well, countries become interdependent. If your economy is dependent on another country, you're not going to do something to hurt your economy. People tend to go to war for strictly political reasons but when there are economic overtones, you try to limit anyone's idea of going to war. That's the Dell theory of Friedman. When you look at Taiwan and China, you see the threats going back and forth, but as the economy of mainland China becomes more and more intertwined with the economy of Taiwan, it seems pretty obvious that there is a mutual dependence.

• Tell me your most exasperating moment in China. Then I'll ask you (to describe) a similar moment in India.

In China, actually it's the amount of green tea I have to drink to get any decision made. Now, green tea has anti-oxidants so it is good for you. But there's a great deal of formality, and ceremony, which can be a bit frustrating.

• And in India?

You know, India has been improving in these things. The most frustrating thing was once, many years ago, I was trying to fly out of Delhi airport and had to show my passport seven times to get on an airplane.

• We have improved now to five times?

Maybe four-five times. Being a manufacturing person, I just wanted to be given control of Delhi airport for a week so I could change it and make it more efficient. The bureaucracy can always be stifling, and one thing about high-tech industries is that you have to make decisions rapidly, move rapidly.

• That's why bureaucracies don't like high-tech.

Well, they do challenge the system, the formality of the system. Governments and societies need to get rid of bureaucracy, pare down the system to basic elements and let them move as fast as possible.

• Tell me something about yourself. I read someplace that what you really wanted to be was a forest ranger.

That's true.

• You get to do some of that on your small ranch of 28,000 acres?

Yes, I do get to be a forest ranger in Montana. We actually had a big forest fire on our ranch in 2000 and maybe 8,000 or 10,000 acres burnt down. We've been cleaning up the damage and replanting trees. It took 34 years in Intel for me to become a forest ranger but it is one of my true loves. I do love the outdoors and Montana in the US is one of the last frontiers, one of the last kind of lowly populated wilderness areas we have.

• That's one passion you share with your friend President George Bush.

There's this very soothing thing about having a ranch and getting a chainsaw and going out and cutting down trees. And I don't know what it is but there's something therapeutic about that.

• Cutting down trees will not make you very popular.

Well, dead trees, not live trees. Dead trees after a fire. The president does that at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. President Reagan used to do that on his ranch in California, and I do it on my ranch in Montana.

• I can't let you go away without coming back to President Bush again, because not many people go around the world saying proudly, 'I'm a friend of George Bush.' Particularly in emerging markets, because of the politics. Tell me something from your private conversations. How does President Bush handle all the jokes about him? He knows they are spreading all over the world.

One of the striking things is that when you sit down and talk to the president, you find he's a voracious reader. Which isn't something suggested by any of the press articles about him. But again, the one thing I like and respect about the president is that he is a strongly principled man.

• So all these Bushisms don't bother him? Does it amuse him, does he laugh over them?

Oh! You know, he publicly makes fun of himself in those areas. So, to a degree, he laughs, but it is hard for me to imagine that any of us enjoy political cartoons about us that suggest you're not . . .

• And in his case it is more than political cartoons, it is a whole folklore. You go to a bookshop in the Harvard area . . .

In a sense, this is what we are talking about: technology has made the world small and flat, as Friedman puts it.

• For $20 you can buy a Chinese-made George Bush countdown clock.

You can do that, and information spreads instantaneously so whatever you do in Washington DC is known around the world in 30 seconds.

• Right. But it does not bother him so much?

I think he has the strength of conviction and I think he has the strength of his principles.

• Does it bother you as his friend and as an American, an iconic American CEO with the globe as his market?

To a degree I think most Americans are bothered by the current outlook of the rest of the world towards America. We would rather be perceived as a leader of sorts. We still lead in economic power. We still lead in research and ideas.

• And tech power.

But most of us would like more than that. Most of us would like the country to have a greater degree of respect and perhaps, in the long term, that respect will come from these actions. We always tend to judge things in the very short cycle, in the very short term. If there is no 15-second solution to something, you tend to criticise and make fun of it. Not many people will be willing to wait five years for the results. So, perhaps, judgment will be somewhat different in the long term.

• Right. Craig Barrett, I know you will make a contribution to that, travelling around the world, not just as Intel chairman, but also as an American diplomat of sorts, as an American spokesman.

Well, we (at Intel) do try to be diplomats, ambassadors for technology. And that is one of my jobs -- to bring technology to emerging markets and show that it can be done and that there's so much excitement in doing so. That it can be done in health care, education, economic development, e-governance.

• All the best, wonderful to have you on Walk the Talk.

My pleasure.