The Evidence for Aliens, the Afterlife, Bigfoot, Sea Monsters, and More | Miguel Sancho

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. We talk a lot on this show about the value of having an open mind, about intellectual humility. But how open minded should you be when it comes to things like Bigfoot or UFOs or the afterlife? Today, we're talking to an experienced journalist, a hardened skeptic, my old friend Miguel Santrio. We used to work together at ABC News where he helped to run the legendary, news magazine show twenty twenty. Miguel has gone on to become the executive producer of a show called The Proof is Out There, which is on the History Channel. And he's got a new book, which is called Evidence of the Extraordinary. We're gonna talk about how Miguel has gone from, as I said, a hardened skeptic to somebody who is a little bit more open minded, Miguel Sancho. Welcome back to the show. Dan, great to see you. Honored to be on your show and, grateful, of course, to your audience for lending us a little bit of their time. Let's make it worthwhile. Let me just start with your story. So, I mean, I worked with you. We started working together, like, I think the late aughts, and we did a bunch of investigative stories together. We took on self help fuckaroos, and we took on the the Church of Scientology. And my memory of you is of somebody who was pretty hard bitten in his skepticism and atheism, etcetera, etcetera. But now you're the executive producer of a show called The Proof is Out There, and you've got this new book. So, like, what has happened? Give me your arc. Yeah. So it would be great if there was some sort of dramatic, you know, Damascus Road epiphany, and I could kind of complete the stereotypical Hollywood arc of the cynical hardened journalism professional who has some transformative experience that, leads him to embrace every single corner of the woo that's out there. I would say this in my in my own defense as a, as a reconstructed cynic and skeptic that back when we were doing our stuff, and I I thought it actually was not just worthwhile, but some of the most important work I've ever done in my career, We weren't necessarily cracking on any particular belief per se, but rather the degree to which certain charlatans and unscrupulous exploiters of people's desire to believe in something bigger, not only kind of drain people of their money, oftentimes, but also their autonomy and their identity and their grasp on reality. So I'd like to kind of separate the two questions about whether or not there is something more than straight up hardcore, scientific materialism as a lens through which to understand our world, our universe, and our experiences and the, nefarious ways in which some of the gullible and credulous are taken advantage of. Because fundamentally, I do conclude in this book that …