Rob:  And that from a man who made his fortune from the oil patch.  I sat down with Boone Pickens in his corporate office, where we talked about America’s energy future, one that he believes should be inextricably tied to any federal infrastructure investment plan.
Pickens:  Rob, in the last 40 years, never have we Americans been tasked to figure out your energy problem.  We haven't.  You know why?  Cheap oil.  We've had cheap oil.  And we've said, send us the oil, never mind the price.  Then one day, it went to 100 dollars a barrell.  Everybody said, wait a minute, I didn't sign up for this.  But, you know, if you want to get into kind of a whether this could be a conspiracy, I'm not a conspiracy nut, and you know you can come up with a conspiracy for anything, given enough time where you can manipulate what you think you know and given enough facts, and come up with a pretty good answer.  But here, we have been given foreign oil for so long, and we've gotten up to 70 percent, about 70 percent, foreign oil, that if you want to think conspiracy, they have been very, very clever to get us addicted to their oil.  And of the oil we import, I like the Canadian oil, and I like the oil from Mexico.  I like the oil from the western hemisphere.  I'm not too big on Mideast oil, and African oil, unstable places, and not too friendly.  So, but out of the oil that we're now importing, the 12 million barrells a day, about 57 percent of the 12 million come from unfriendly areas, 57 percent of the imports, that's not good.  Now, let's just say that we don't do anything.  We now have cheap oil again, and cheap gasoline, and whew, we're over the hump, everything's fine.  Okay, let's say that's the way we've handled it in the past.  Every time the price ran up, and we talked about alternatives, then the price went down.  Do you think that was coincidence?  Or do you think they wanted us not to focus on using alternatives and our own resources?  
Rob:  So how will this time be different than, say, the 1970s oil crisis?
Pickens:  I think that my campaign has something to do with that.  I'm in touch with, now, a million and a half people; not quite, a million-four, have signed up with me; me and my so-called Pickens' Plan Army.  And we can call on those people.  We are going to, we're coming with a strong initiative that will be out in the next two weeks.  And we're going to be right back at the workbench.  We are going to keep this alive, because it has to be.  Let's just say we don't do anything, say, okay, everything's okay.  Do you know where we'll be in ten years?  
Rob:  Probably worse off than we are right now.
Pickens:  You have to be.  So it means that foreign oil will be deeper into us; we will now be importing 75 percent of our oil in ten years; and we'll be paying two to three-hundred dollars a barrell.  A sad part of it is, you don't have to worry about education, you don't have to worry about healthcare, or social security reform, because you won't have the money to do it.  You will now be paying so much for your oil, that you don't have anything, and you've been brought to your knees.  That can't happen.  We cannot let that happen.  And everybody has to get on board with this plan.  And the reason they have to get on board with it is because it takes all of us to solve the problem.  And I talk to the media and I say, look, this isn't about me.  It's about us; it's about all of us.  Keep these politicians with the pressure on them.  Do you have an energy plan, is the question?  Well, I think everything's going along fine.  Then you don't have any energy plan?  If that's the answer, you don't have an energy plan.  If you don't have an energy plan, your plan is foreign oil.  That's it.  There's either this plan, or it's foreign oil, one or the other.  You're going to either get on our resources, keep the money at home, create the jobs here, and get independent, or you're for foreign oil; one or the other.  And I think with these politicians, when you put the pressure on them in that way, and they think about it, it's that clear cut, it's that clear cut, that you've either got a plan, or you're for foreign oil is what you have.
Rob:  How closely tied is the financial problems that we've experienced in the past three months to the energy problems we've experienced in the past, we've just noticed it say, in the past year it's really hit us hard?  How closely tied are those two?
Pickens:  Well, I can tell you that the credibility of America has suffered in the last year, dramatically suffered.  And a big part of that is our dependency on foreign oil.  The rest of the world knows it, and now, we're finding out about it, is what the deal is.  They cannot believe that we have imported to the level of almost 70 percent of our oil.  I mean it is so out of the question, when we have resources at home to use to solve, and let me tell you, you can solve the economy problem, the economic problem in America, by solving your energy problem.  They'll go hand-in-hand.  And it can be done.