1567: Hub & Spoke Office Model, Rick Sanchez, RT America, Let's Do Real News

Yeah, I still feel like I'm on the path for sure and there's a lot more wealth that I want to grow and things I want to do. But I'll tell you, it's when I think back to where we were and what both of us, my wife and I both have done to be where we are today, it almost like if you'd have told me this is where we were headed 10 years ago or what I would have told you you were nuts. Because I could not, I couldn't have imagined we'd ever be able to buy real estate again or that I'd ever want to, you know, here we are with several properties later and we're still chugging along.

Welcome to the cre. Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Hey everybody.

Welcome to episode number 1567. For those of you watching the live stream, I'm just doing the intro portion of for our guest today, who will be none other than Rick Sanchez from RT America News. His slogan is let's do news. And he really does live by that. It is so rare nowadays, sadly so rare to see journalism. I mean, everything has become an agenda.

Everything has become an opinion piece.

Absolutely refreshing to see some real news out there. So just thought I'd share this intro portion of the podcast with you. If you're watching the live stream. If you're watching the podcast, hey, it's pretty normal, but I have a few visuals to show you and these visuals will be on the video on our YouTube channel with Rick Sanchez.

So let's go ahead and dive in.

I got some staggering numbers here. Are you ready to have your mind blown? Post any comments or questions below. We will try and get to those for you, but let us know where you're located and where you're watching or listening from. Okay, so Rick Sanchez will be up in a few minutes, but here are some mind boggling numbers for you. So the first one, these are all from the Wall Street Journal, by the way. Wall Street Journal, excellent publication. I'm a big fan.

They do a great job.

So $3.87 billion. That is $3.87 billion. Almost 4 billion with a B dollars. That is the value of the securitized commercial real estate loans in foreclosure last month. Did you really let that sink in for a moment? Many real estate investors and analysts expect this number to grow soon.

Duh.

Yes, it's going to grow a lot. The commercial real estate market. Now of course, that depends what type of commercial real estate you're talking about. But sadly we are going to see this get a lot worse. It is going to get a lot worse. Office properties.

And we'll get to that in a.

Moment with another staggering number below Office properties, hotel properties, retail properties, of course, those are all very, very hard hit. But others as well, in different ways, to different extents. But the industrial and the multifamily housing, you know, that's why I like housing. It's all about housing.

If you ask me.

I love housing. That's my favorite asset class. In the real estate world, or in any world for that matter, it's all about housing. That holds up really, really well. Because at the end of the day, everybody needs a place to live. They can outsource the office jobs to home, which is what we've been doing the last many years, really a couple of decades, but certainly the last several months. And they can outsource them to India, China and the Philippines to a large extent, those office jobs, certainly they outsource the industrial jobs to China and other Asian countries quite a bit. And then these call center jobs with office properties and outsourcing retail to the Internet, so lessening the need for all of that type of commercial real estate while at the same time the population is growing and there is a huge housing shortage in the country. So be a housing investor. That's where the action is. Okay, look at this next stat from the Wall street journal again, 100,000. This is the square footage of office to sublet or sublease that Twitter is now putting on the market. Citing Twitter saying what are they citing? Decentralization? Yes, they've told people to work out of the house. And the interesting thing that's happening in the office property market is that a lot of large companies are going to this. And you've heard it in the airline industry. You've heard this phrase before, hub and spoke the Hub and spoke model where they're going to do these small suburban. Because that's where everybody's moving to suburbia, right? These small suburban office spaces that are just little centers where their home based employees, newly home based employees can go and maybe if they just need to get out of the house, maybe the kids are making a lot of noise and they can't concentrate. They can go and work there doing what they call office hoteling where they just use a desk and these are hot swap desk. Right. Or they can go and use a conference room and have a meeting and an interesting concept, by the way. I don't know if you've noticed this. Unfortunately this is not a big enough thing. I hope it becomes bigger. But Capital One. Yes, the bank, credit card company, right, Capital One, they have these coffee shops in different cities and they're really cool. I mean they're so much better than Starbucks. Starbucks sucks.

Yeah, boo.

For so many reasons. Starbucks just sucks. Anyway, Capital One has opened up these kind of conference center coffee shops with really nice facilities and you don't have to have a Capital One account to use them, but if you do, you get all your coffee and pastries at half price. They're really cool. I hope that expands. I hope we see a lot more of that because I think that's, that's a great thing. Much better than the scam known as we work. Right? It's nothing like that. So Capital One. Yay Capital One. Good job on that. Boo on Starbucks and boo on we work and boo on big office properties. Okay, I'll stop with the sound effects now. So look at this next stat. 50%. This is the estimated percentage of non office employees in Times Square, New York who have not been brought back to work since the pandemic began. So some pretty mind blowing numbers there for you. Okay, next thing. And these are mind blowing numbers in a very positive way. It's all about housing. Remember what I always say. Home is the center of the universe. Be a housing investor. Housing, housing, housing. At the end of the day, everybody needs a place to live. They do not need an office. They do not need to go to a shopping center, but they need a home. And this is interestingly so regional, right? This is from the national association of Realtors, otherwise known as nar. This is the largest trade lobbying organization on planet earth last time I checked.

By the way, if I'm wrong on.

That, reach out, go to Jason hartman.com, ask and give some feedback and tell me if I'm wrong or if I'm Right. Or ask me a question or whatever you want. Jason hartman.com ask. So regionally, you look at the growth in the housing market, which is nothing short of phenomenal. This is the pending home sales index for August. It is up on a month over month number of 8.8%. But in the Midwest, it's up pretty darn good there, 8.6% in the west, 13.1% in the south, 8.6%. And in the Northeast, the hardest hit of all of these markets, it's up because a lot of the New Yorkers from the city and Washington D.C. and Boston and any high density area moving to lower density markets. So that has sustained that one maybe better than you might think. It's still up, but it's only up 4.3%. The worst of all of the regions. Now everything has become this really pathetic political football nowadays. And the political football, we can't even decide if we believe in vaccines together. If we believe the economy is getting worse or better. It's all down party lines. You know, if, if you tell me, do you like Fauci? I can tell you how you're going to vote, right? Do you think the economy is recovering or worsening? I can tell you how you're going to vote. So you can do this too. It's no special talent, you know, when the vaccine comes, if it ever comes. And remember, this is, this is a different kind of vaccine because it's an RNA vaccine, a much more difficult thing. So if it comes, when it comes, will you take it? Well, by answering that question, we can tell how somebody's going to vote, right? So here we are, the economy. The majority of Americans say the economy is recovering.

That's good news.

But let's look at how that stacks up along party lines. So 52% overall say the economy's recovering, 33% say it's getting worse, 10% say it's just about the same, and 5% they don't have an opinion. Okay, so fine. But when you look at party lines and you look at Democrats, only 34% say things are getting better versus Republicans, 76% say things are getting better.

Wow.

That is a mind boggling difference. A mind boggling difference. How do you move from 34% of Democrats who say, okay, things are getting better to the Republicans who say 76% of them, things are getting better. Now, how about things are getting worse? Well, Democrats, 48% of them say it's getting worse, things are not looking good. But Republicans, only 14% say things are getting Worse. So do the Democrats just look at the glass as half empty and the Republicans look at the glass as half full? Are Democrats naturally more pessimistic and Republicans naturally more optimistic, or does it depend who the current administration is? I don't know. What do you think? Post your comments below. Okay. And let me know what you think about that. This gap is absolutely mind boggling. It's just amazing that people could be so different in their views. They're in the same economy. Well, not exactly. They're actually not in the same economy because depending on where you are on the socioeconomic ladder, depending on what type of job you have or what type of business you have, that will obviously make a difference. So, yes, we're in the same macro economy, but we all have our own micro economy, so little distinction there. Okay, so let's get to our guest, Rick Sanchez. Remember, we've got our Pandemic Investing event coming up. Go to pandemicinvesting.com and register for that virtual event. It's on Zoom, so it's super easy to attend. And we've got early bird pricing. And we are really going to help you understand what is going on and how uneven this recovery, if there is a recovery, how uneven it is and what to do about it, how to manage your portfolio, how to make investment decisions in these absolutely crazy times in which we live. So without further ado, let's get to our guest, Rick Sanchez.

So it's a great pleasure to bring.

To you someone who is usually interviewing other people.

And he kind of softly promised he wouldn't be interviewing me today because I'm interviewing him. That is none other than the great Rick Sanchez. You know who he is.

You've seen him on RT News.

What I love about Rick's segments and his philosophy toward media, which we'll explore today a little bit. But I think this is his philosophy. Maybe I'm speaking for him, but he, he's a bit of a maverick.

You know, he really believes in something called news.

I know that may sound like an outrageous thing in today's world because it's so agenda driven and everything's so politicized. Where have all the journalists gone? I mean, it is especially the investigative journalist. So it' it's really great to have him on the show today. Rick, welcome. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. You know, it's funny, I should probably let our audience know if they're not familiar with the fact that I've had you on my show a couple of times because I see you kind of as the consummate expert economically, but specifically in real estate, and not just theory of real estate, but actually working it with your own hands from the ground up. And that's what I think is so cool. That's why I'm just wondering, I don't know if we've tackled this question when we've been on the air, on the the news with Rick Sanchez, where we're now getting upwards of millions of people tuning in because it is very different from anything offered here in the United States.

And we're going to go into that. I got to ask you all about that.

It really is a fascinating concept, what's happening with news nowadays. But let me ask you something that's dear and near to your heart, and that is this uptick, this surprising revelation of people buying homes up the wazoo. And if they're doing it in such a way that's not going to cause a huge backlash down the road, I'm thinking people worry about delinquencies in the car business and in other kinds of businesses where people have to take out loans. What's going to happen when people don't have money in their pockets? What's going to happen if the unemployment doesn't come down? Are you worried about that?

Should we be a little bit now? You promised you wouldn't interview me and you're already doing it. It's a habit. I could tell. But you know, definitely a little bit. And like I've probably conveyed on your show, Rick, and I've done on the podcast before, I know you listen to the podcast, but. And thank you for listening. You know, it depends where and in what price range. I think this necessity housing is going to be fine through all this. But let me tell you, I think all of us, three months ago, we thought the world was ending. You know, I mean, nobody knew what to expect. Three months ago I, I said on my podcast and people couldn't believe I said it. I said, if you are a new investor who's just saved up the money to buy your first two or three properties, we don't want your money. Just wait. If you wait two or three months to see how this thing pans out a little bit, it'll be ok. Just don't do anything because we were very unsure. And what I think this is proving, this artificial boom in the economy and the stock market, number one, it's a very uneven situation. Some people are really struggling, others aren't. Others are doing very well. It's a very mixed kind of Thing, but also just that the whole economy, not only of the US of the entire world, is built on a house of cards. It is fake. Okay. I think we're all getting the sense now that no matter what happens, I mean, we got this sense during the Great Recession, the government and the Fed is going to come in and just fix it all, which is probably a dangerous idea.

I'm thinking, though, and I'm nowhere near as smart as you on this, you underestimate yourself. There are some other things where I may be pretty smart, but it's not on this. But I was talking to my wife about this the other day. Even if the average person out there is investing in real estate, I think what happens if there is a downturn is there will always still be people who need housing. So whether there are fewer people who can hold onto their properties, that does not mean.

Rick has just came off set and so he's. You're at the station, right? In Washington, D.C. yeah.

Isn't that amazing?

And then you go back on the air here in a little while, right?

It's right behind me. In fact, I'm going back on the air in a little while to finish. Because of the COVID situation, what many newsrooms are forced to do right now is they have teams of journalists working at one time. So normally I would come in and I would do a couple of shows, the primetime shows, 7 o' clock and 8 o'.

Clock.

Right now I'm doing the 2 o', clock, the 3 o', clock, the 5 o' clock and the 7 o'.

Clock. So.

And the reason we do that it makes sense is if somebody goes down in one team, it doesn't knock out the entire operation. You could always bring in the other team. So that's kind of what we're going through right now. So it is. It is a little bit crazy in that there are long days and long schedules and then you kind of get a week off. But not in my case, because the other team likes to have me on to do analysis the way I like to have you on to do analysis. Speaking of analysis, back to the final question. Then I'll let you interview me.

Sure, yeah.

If in the end we do have a downturn, does it really matter to the average real estate investor as long as he has butts in seats, as they like to say, as long as there are still people who want to be, who need to be living in homes and they need to rent anyway?

I think you're right. Look at in the type of housing that we invest in. You catch people moving up or down the economic ladder or just staying in one place. Right? We may well see, and we saw this during the Great recession, Rick, where 2008 to 2010, 11 period, we saw people that had been foreclosed on, they used to live in a bigger house, they used to live in a nicer neighborhood, they used to send their kids to private school. Now they're renting a basic house for $1,400 a month. You know, they're sending their kids to public school. Okay, so things change. But the nice thing is in this basic necessity housing, you're going to catch people moving down the ladder or moving up. Either way, you're good in the high end. That's a different story in the very low end, like those D class properties. I don't know, I guess you'll always have a poor class, sadly. But when times are good, you know, the rising tide does float a lot of boats. I can't say it floats all, but some of those people move up and some of those areas even become more blighted. I think the area that the kind of part of the market we're in is pretty safe.

So the answer is if there is a situation where the money, the well, runs dry, so to speak, there will still be people out there who are going to need housing. And most of them, the trajectory of buyers vis a vis renters might change. In a down economy, there may be more renters than buyers, but that doesn't really affect the real estate investor, does it?

Well, it doesn't affect the investor who is truly an investor. And for those of you just listening to audio, I'm doing quotes with my fingers. Because an investor invests for yield, they invest for cash flow, whereas a speculator invest. Well, they don't invest, they speculate, they gamble for appreciation. And I teach one concept I call the three dimensions of real estate. And what you find is that in a so called boom cycle, and most people consider a good quote real estate market to be a seller's market, meaning it's easy to sell properties, you put them on the market, you've got 10 buyers knocking down your door to buy the property. That's what most people call a good market. Okay, but is that really true? It depends what your perspective is. Right? Maybe a buyer's market is better.

Right?

Maybe seller's market is better. Maybe the in between market that I like to call a broker's market is better because I find it very hard to operate in a really hot market like we have now. And we've had that for quite a few years because there's very little inventory and it's very hard to please buyers right now. Okay, but what happens that you basically were stating is that the amount of people in the renter pool stay there. They can't move into the buyer pool because they can't qualify for a loan. Maybe interest rates are too high, housing affordability is too low, or they have bad credit. And so whatever this is, they can't buy. So that puts upward pressure on rents. And investors who already have a portfolio they like, that's a good market for a landlord. So that would be another type of market, a landlord's market.

Right.

And actually usually very low interest rates like we have now spur a seller's market, which is also what we have. So low interest rates make it easier for renters to become buyers. And that's not as good for landlords. If you already own your portfolio and say you have 50 units or 100 units or whatever, and you're going to welcome higher interest rates, you've got super low interest rate loans that can't be duplicated. And renters are not buying because it's too hard to qualify for a high interest rate loan. So that puts you in a pretty darn good position where your rents are going up and you just sit tight and collect the rents.

That's fascinating. And that's what happens when you put years into something like this, like you have, and you come up with a pro forma that's formulaic and it doesn't matter what the situation is. In the final analysis, the program works. You just have to plug it in a little different way, perhaps.

Right, right. You have to adapt your strategy. Sometimes you're in a strategy where things are going up, up, up, and that's like a capital gains market. Sometimes you're in a dividend market, meaning a cash flow market mostly where you're just collecting your cash flow. And that's great.

Either way.

You can make money either way. Okay, Are you ready to talk about the media?

Let's do that.

Okay.

I know a little bit about it. Just a little bit.

A little bit. So, first of all, how long have.

You been in the news business?

Oh, my goodness. When I was going to school at the University of Minnesota, where I had, interestingly enough, gotten there, I graduated in Miami Hiley High School. I was a pretty good football player and I got a football scholarship. Poor kid, refugee immigrant from Cuba. My parents barely made $10,000 a year combined income.

When did your Parents leave Cuba. By the way, there's an interesting story right there.

1960.

So a year after Fidel took over.

In 1960, right as Fidel was taking over, they smelled that there was something totalitarian or wrong or communistic.

They got out just in time. I was in Cuba about 15 years ago, maybe. Fascinating place.

Really fascinating.

But, yeah, my parents made the decision. They didn't want their children to grow up there. We ended up leaving the island. I went to Miami, where I was. I grew up as a regular American kid whose mom and dad did not speak English. How could they? They came very late in their lives. Sure, I graduated from high school, got a scholarship to go to Minnesota to play football because I was pretty good, pretty good student, pretty good football player. And then suddenly a professor tapped me on the shoulder and said, you know, you're a pretty smart kid. You look pretty good. And CBS News is offering a scholarship, three in the entire nation. It's probably going to be 10,000 people who apply. But I want to recommend you because I think you got what it takes. So I, my God, lo and behold, I applied and they done picked me. They did.

Fantastic. So you went to work for cbs and you were probably a reporter at first, right in the field.

I started off through the University of Minnesota. Then I graduated from the University of Minnesota. I was just a punk kid trying to learn journalism. But when I graduated, there weren't a lot of people in the United States who spoke perfect Spanish and perfect English. And since I was educated in the Midwest, my English was. It was flat, it was Midwestern. So that worked to my advantage. And in Miami, they were looking for people like me. And I ended up getting a job right out of college, and a pretty good one. And then I just kind of worked my way up. I went from working for NBC in Miami to then working for NBC National. I worked for cnn, I worked for Fox News, I worked for Univision in Spanish. And now I work for RT America, which is a global situation, which is very different. So I've worked or had a show and had some of the highest ratings, thank God, in some of the biggest networks in the United States, including my Show RickSlist at CNN, which was the highest rated show there.

Fantastic. That's excellent. And so when did you start at RT?

2018, October. So that's about two years now.

And they recruited you from CNN?

No. It's funny, CNN had fired me, which happens a lot in our business. You know, in our business, it's a lot like being a manager in baseball you get fired, you go on to the next one. And, you know, the good thing is they usually pay pretty well, so you can make a pretty good salary. But then you get on your fanny from time to time. When CNN had let me go, something interesting happened. And I think people who are watching us, this may be a heuristic experience that we can all learn from because we always wonder, what is our worth, what is our value? And in my situation, Jase, when I got knocked out at cnn, I still had four mouths to feed and I had a wife and the four kids, and I had to figure out what I was going to do in my life. So I went back to Miami and the first thing I did is I said, well, I'm still a broadcaster, so I can do radio, which I did, but it wasn't enough money, so I have to do television. So I did television in Spanish at an independent station, and it still wasn't enough money. Fox News couldn't make me a full fledged anchor or reporter at the time, but they gave me a contributor gig, which still kind of wasn't enough money. But when I combined the money from Fox News and the money from radio and the money from the other gig, I was able to come close to what I was making at cnn. But I was working my ass off.

Right? You were basically working three gigs.

Three gigs. And that's a lot of work and it's really, really hard. But while I was doing that, what I learned was the principles of advertising. And let me tell you why. So I had a gig on the radio where a radio station said, oh, my God, we have Rick Sanchez. So they would go to advertisements and say, we have Rick Sanchez. How'd you like to have Rick Sanchez do your commercials? You Rick Sanchez's voice. That's the way advertising works. So I noticed that the radio station was doing very well with my product, my name, my brand. The television station was doing very well with my product, my name, my brand. And so was Fox, you know, distributing me the way they were. And I started thinking to myself, you know, it's funny, I'm renting myself out to all these people. What if I owned that brand? You know, where I'm going here? So I knew at the time in Miami, the hottest industry was healthcare. Miami attracts a lot of older people. Health care is a real commodity there. So I realizing that there were doctors that were looking to do advertising because the only way to make money in healthcare is to have a good marketing plan. And I realized that if I got together with some doctors and here's the cool story. I got together with some doctors. I knew there was a lot of money to be made in managed care healthcare where you take care of people who are 65 and need a really good doctor or provider program. I got together with some doctors and I said, look, let's go to an advertiser, a media company and say that we're working together. We'll create a television show for them and we'll take half the inventory of the show. In other words, Jason, for everybody listening at home, if you're getting a half hour show, let's say there's three minutes of commercials on there. We want a minute and a half of them every night where we get.

To put our spot.

So suffice it to say, I traded with them to do that. So we had my brand, I owned a piece of the company that I was negotiating for to go in there and take the show. And then we were able to do a show. I got a salary, but more importantly, I had a piece of the product. And I was able to do that through this wonderful company called Kano Health. Would you believe, Jason, that four years later, that company is now ranked by Inc. Magazine as the number one fastest growing healthcare company in America?

Well, I would believe it because I already found that out because I looked them up after talking to you about it before. But the listeners don't know that. So go ahead.

It's exciting. It's exciting to know that in your life, when you get knocked down and you have to start all over again, if you reach deep inside yourself, you can find the skill level. You just have to apply it in a different arena, that's all. Don't realize that they think all I know how to do is this. No, just because that's what you did doesn't mean that's all you know how to do.

And Rick, maybe the lesson, the lesson for everybody listening is, look, you know, we're going through a very uneven time, obviously in the economy with all that's going on. It's crazy. And things change during these times. Creative destruction happens, people get fired, companies go out of business, changes happen. And being able to adapt to that, and you know, it. I mean, how many stories have we all heard about how someone got fired and it was the best thing that ever happened to them, Although they didn't feel that way at that day. Right. They felt, oh God, the world is over. But then it turns out to be a blessing in disguise. Right?

That's exactly what happens. And you know, I would never have thought that that day when I was fired and I was sitting in my closet at night crying because I didn't want my wife and my kids to see me that way. I never in my wife, in my life imagined that I would go on to start a company that's worth probably over a billion dollars. And that is now, you know, I'm in the. I'm almost in an investor status where I'm a very, very wealthy guy. I'm embarrassed saying it.

Congratulations. That's the American dream from one generation. Poor people leaving Cuba, and here you go. So that's. Right. There is the American dream, folks. Could that have happened in many other countries? It could have happened. Well, certainly not in Cuba, that's for sure. Unless you were with the government and you were on the inside.

Right.

That's the one small group that gets that. That's a great story. Talk to us about the media business and the media landscape. Here's what I'm thinking. First of all, I've been following art news for, I don't know, 12 years now or something, maybe 10 years. And it's kind of weird. You know, here's. You know, the Russian government is actually an investor in this company. Okay? So they exert, I guess, some form of editorial control. But, you know, the news stories are fantastic. I mean, they cover. I. You know, I read their stuff on my. On my. See my dog, on my iPhone, Apple, and there you go. Yeah, we're both showing dog pictures. For those of you who are watching dogs and families, I mean, it's some of the best news stories out there. You know, you don't get this stuff on cnn. This is, like, kind of counterintuitive.

I see where you're going with that, and I understand you're bewildered, as I kind of am in many ways.

Bewildering. That's the right word.

Yeah, it is. You know, I do not trust RT to tell me what's going on in Russia. Just don't trust them. I think somehow they're gonna be influenced.

Right.

Like, in many ways, I don't trust the BBC, who is also, you know, an institution kind of owned by the government as well.

Yeah, right.

And I have a feeling whenever they do a story about Hong Kong, it's always anti China and pro Britain. Well, of course, Hong Kong used to belong to you, and now. You sound like you're jealous.

Yeah, right.

We could go into all kinds of stories one at a time and delineate what it is about them that makes the communicator bias for some reason, when I say I, maybe not, I wouldn't trust RT to give me all my information about Russia. I don't trust CNN or MSNBC or Fox or any US Channel and some newspapers when they give me information about the United States.

Oh, I mean, I don't think anybody will disagree on either side of the political aisle. I mean, the mainstream news media has gone off the rails. It's insane. And you probably know about this, but the New York Times has closed its offices and told all its journalists, journalists in quotes, to go work out of the house. So guess what they're gonna see? They're gonna sit on the Internet and see all the things that are the echo chamber of, of what they already believe. And that's basically gonna be stories from this formerly venerable institution. The New York Times, years ago, was this amazing company. They're not investigating anything.

There's a lot of reasons for that, though. And first of all, I will defend the honor of most journalists who are real journalists. I also understand. And there, by the way, are very few real journalists left because most of the people on television not besmirching any of these people. I'm not besmirching Tucker Carlson. I'm not besmirching Cuomo or Rachel or Anderson or any of these people. The great majority of them are not hired because they're journalists. A true journalist is someone who has cut their teeth covering stories, researching stories, picking up the phone, calling people. Tell me about this, tell me about that. Explain that to me like I have done with you while I'm sitting here in this office preparing my newscast.

Right.

A journalist is not somebody who has a television show on some cable network who they hand scripts to, and he has 42 writers who prepare his material and then he goes out there and puts on makeup and just starts reading. Yeah, nobody writes my copy. I write my own damn copy here at rt.

And I know that to be true because you interviewed me three times and two of those times you sent me a write up right off your own computer, from your email, email address before the interview and said, what do you think of these things and these talking points? And you know, this is, this is what I want to dive into today. So, yeah, those guys, you know, and.

At the same time, if I were one of those persons that I just named, and I was making 5, 6, 7, $8 million a year, which is what they're paid because there's so few of those positions, they want to take care of them. I don't want to use the word Bribe. But let's just say that they are influenced heavily by a salary that makes them then not ask the questions that in the old days, journalists used to ask. And journalism has also changed in this way. There is more control now from the outside. Look, it used to be. Jason, I'll be straight with you. In the old days, there was some guy in Miami or in Wichita or in Kansas City who owned the local newspaper, and he owned the local radio station and he owned the local television station. That's no longer the case. It's not one guy with the pride of his community.

It's all corporate.

It's this giant conglomerate who owns your company and pays everything. And the salespeople in the old days, if they walked into a newsroom in the old days and started spouting off about what they think our coverage should be or why we need to do a story on this or that, no way. They would have kicked their ass. Literally, they would have kicked their ass.

There was a real divide between advertising and news.

Absolutely. That doesn't exist anymore. The New York Times is influenced by their advertisers. They're influenced by Verizon, the people who sit on the board of the New York Times, the people who sit on the board of CNN or Time Warner, the people who sit on the board of all dis. All these major media companies. There's something called interlocking going on in our society. You know that term? It's a business school term. It means that a guy on the board of one company, let's just say Raytheon, a guy who makes money on missiles, sits on the board of a company that does news.

How convenient.

Suddenly you're doing news stories promoting a war.

Why?

Yeah, you know, and I'm just using that.

And pharmaceutical industry is another great example. I mean, exactly.

I mean, so when people say to me, my God, you're working and RT and they have Russian influence, I say, you're working at CNN or you're working wherever you're working. And let's talk about your influence. Let's talk about who really makes the decisions about what comes out. Because I'm sick and tired, Jason, of watching newscasts that do nothing but talk about the latest Trump tweet and the latest Trump faux pas and why he's good and why he's bad. While there are things going on in the world. Today, I did an interview with the ambassador from Iran, and I asked him seven or eight pointed questions about what they're doing to foment terrorism, about what happened with Soleimani the day before I had talked to the ambassador, I think you remember, I don't know if you were on that show, the ambassador from Saudi Arabia and I hammered him. And I do stories about what's going on in the South China Sea where World War 3 could pop up is about to go.

Yeah, right.

Damn it to hell. Nobody's talking about these things on those other channels. It's the same crap every day. Pardon me for getting passionate.

Yeah, you really asked the ambassador from Iran or the Iranian ambassador to the.

Us The Iranian ambassador to America came on my show live today and you.

Asked him, what are you doing to foment terrorism?

Why are you fomenting terrorism?

Oh my God, that's a tough question. You wouldn't hear that from some CNN quack.

No, I mean, but you know what, he respects me more for forward and that's because that's what I'm supposed to do, you know, or beat anybody up, you know, Rick or anti Trump.

Hearing you talk about this stuff, the word that comes to my mind and I love investigative journalism. I mean that is like my passion. That and consumer advocacy. You know, I grew up watching a show in LA called Fight Back with David Horowitz. Yeah, I used to, I used to love to watch that guy. He was a consumer advocate and he used to go out there and expose all these scams, you know, person getting ripped off at the auto repair shop or whatever it was. And I thought that guy was the best. That was journalism, you know. And the word that comes to my mind when you talk about this stuff is the word grit. You know, a journalist used to be gritty. Like they would stand up against the evils of the establishment. They would expose the charlatan and the, you know, the scammer and the church.

Doing wrong deeds or whatever it was.

The government doing, you know, payoffs.

And I mean we just.

That's all but gone, isn't it?

Yeah, that's why guys like me get fired all the time. Because at the end of the day you gotta be able to look at yourself in the mirror and fight for whatever you believe the truth is and be as transparent as possible in sharing with your audience how you got there. And they may disagree, there may be some. Sometimes you're going to get it wrong. I'm highly imperfect, I'm a human screw up. But you know what, if you go in every day thinking, I'm going to try and find out what actually is going on, I'm going to dig, I'm going to question, try and fill every minute of my time before I go on the air trying to find out what the story is really all about. And then I'm going to present it. At the end of the day, that's what we do. We tell stories. We are. And in television, we are the theater of facts. The theater of facts. Think about that. We have to still. You still have to put on a show. You still have to go on here and say, good evening, everybody, I'm Rick Sanchez. Today we have found out such and such, and I can't wait to share this with you, blah, blah, blah. So I am, to a certain extent, performing my facts right. Damn it to hell. It better be factual. It better be real. And don't bs, you know.

Yeah, that's great. That's great. You know, one area of life that has become so corrupted also is the area of. And this is kind of a sideline, but the area of awards, you know, like the Nobel Prize or. And what I want to ask you about is one of my favorites, the Pulitzer Prize. You know, that's an investigative journalist award, right? Have those become kind of just walking watered down and political, where they're giving them to people? I mean, you look at what goes on in, like, Hollywood, even with the Academy Awards. Not that I have any respect for.

No, it's funny you say that because obviously I'm a capitalist, right? I believe in the free market and I defend it. But I do believe that we do get to a point in our own capitalistic society. I guess this is where it turns into maybe crony capitalism, where people can get so much amass, so much power and wealth that they start a buy, just like they buy politicians and senators and congressmen today, they can also buy. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. So there's these organizations like the Spanish, the Hispanic American Journalist Association, Black American Journalist Association. Every organization has their own group, right? Well, these organizations are essentially paid, right, to promote the welfare of that group, Guys with Blue Shirts Journalists Association.

There won't be a white guys association, though, I'll tell you that much, right? That'll never happen.

Whatever the association is, and it may be, and that's fine, people should have association of groupings. But here's the problem with those associations, okay? So the Hispanic Association, Hispanic American association, who you think is going to defend and go after cnn, for example, or MSNBC or Fox or whoever. Fox writes them a check for $200,000 to make sure that they don't go after them. And guess what? They don't go after them. When Lou Dawes was in a lot of trouble at CNN because he was saying some things that I frankly wish he hadn't said, and Lou's my friend, and the Hispanic American association of Journalists was going to do something against him, I was there. CNN wrote a check to the organization. Suddenly they had him as their guest speaker.

So.

Do some of these groups get influenced? Yeah, unfortunately they do. And I've seen it with my own eyes.

Yeah, it's just like, you know, Deep Throat from Watergate. Right?

Follow the money.

Follow the money. You know, that's the. That's what makes the world go round. And there's influence everywhere you look. It's. It's absolutely crazy.

The only thing that I think is a little different for me now, when I was. I told you I was. Was running this company in Miami, and the company was doing very well. Canoe Health, it's a great company. And there were three of us. One was the CEO, the other one was the chief medical officer, and I was the chief marketing officer. And then I got a call from an agent in California, and he said, you know, there's these guys looking for you. They want you back in the business to go back and do television, national or global in this case. You know, Jason, I said, no, I don't want to get back in. There's no way. I don't want to get back in. And then I came up here and I talked to him when I felt like I had an opportunity to produce a show with true journalistic independence where I get to choose the stories and talk about the things that matter and not be interfered with. And when I felt like they made that commitment to me and I never looked back, I took the opportunity. And it's been a lot of fun doing the stories that nobody else is doing.

That's awesome. That's really good. So where's the new news business going, Rick? Maybe we'll just kind of wrap it up with a little discussion on this. Is there any hope for real journalism to come back? I mean, I do like the thing that you have all these small independent outlets nowadays. You know, that's good, but the social media platforms are censoring everybody like crazy.

It's.

This is an Orwellian, dystopian world we live in. I don't know what to think of it.

Find a way to communicate. Communicate their message, and I think it'll be up to us as consumers, as news consumers to be able to find the difference. I think we're Going into unchartered territory, though. And you're a guy who studies trends, right? There's nobody watching CNN or FOX or MSNBC or CBS or ABC or name your damn channel under the age of 45. There's barely anybody watching under the age of 55, and most are over the age of 60 or 70. So what happens to this new generation? How are they going to consume news? Where are they going to get their news? They're not going to get it in terrestrial stations. So the streaming, the places on our.

Phones.

This is where it's going to live. And let us just hope that the principles, the ethics that guys like I learn by going to a real journalism school at the University of Minnesota where these things were pounded into you. Let's just hope that those people have some of those core principles. Because without them, in the end, we're lost. Whether we're talking about real estate or business or journalism or anything else.

I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. Rick, do you have anything you want to share, like a website or a Twitter handle or anything like that?

No.

I do share show every night. It's called the News with Rick Sanchez. You can watch it on RT America. Or these days we've established something that we just started called portable tv. Portable tv, to answer your question earlier about what's coming up in the future, is a place where you can go to get the news and you can do so automatically. It's an app. And in the future people are going to get their news from apps. And it's pretty cool that we just started this app and it's blowing up.

So it's kind of good stuff, good to hear. So how does someone find that? Do they look up portable TV literally? Or do they look up rt?

Download the portable TV app and you'll see Rick Sanchez all over the place.

Good stuff. Good stuff. Well, Rick Sanchez, thanks for keeping journalism alive, what's left of it. And so let's hope it comes back. And we appreciate your contribution to that. Take care.

I appreciate yours, Jason. You're a good guy. I like you. Thank you very much.

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