Miguel Sancho, Executive Producer, Showrunner, & Author

 

92-166. Miguel Sancho

SPEAKERS

Miguel Sancho, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello and welcome to The 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Miguel Sancho, Miguel, welcome to the show.

 

Miguel Sancho  00:16

Will, thank you for having me, and hello via proxy to all my classmates so I never see anymore, except the reunions. This is really exciting.

 

Will Bachman  00:25

Miguel. Tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard, right?

 

Miguel Sancho  00:30

So, I mean, I had, I’d like to say I had quite a few friends at Harvard, but I’m sure there’s plenty of people in the class who don’t remember me at all, which is just fine. So just by means of background and introduction, let’s see. So yeah, Harvard, class of 92 I was originally from a small town in eastern Kansas, and came to Harvard via Phillips Andover Academy. I studied government and history, and I lived in Adam’s House, and afterwards, I was supposed to go do what everybody in my family have done, which is go get a PhD and be an academic. Instead, I moved to New York City, tried to make it briefly as a musician. I played a lot of music at Harvard, and when that kind of ran its course, I pivoted into journalism, and starting in like 9394 and from then on, that’s what I’ve been doing. In 1995 I started working in the investigative unit of a tabloid television show called inside edition, where I spent my time running around wearing hidden cameras, kind of infiltrating corrupt and criminal organizations, which was exciting. Then I after four or five years of that, I moved to CBS News, where I worked 48 hours for eight wonderful years. And then I moved to ABC News, where I where I worked with the with everybody there at the time, helping manage a show called 2020 which is their primetime show and the big kind of deviation in my trajectory, the big surprise, everybody’s got a surprise. The big deviation was after I was married in 2005 had a lovely daughter in 2008 and 2012 I was blessed with a second child, a son who was quite inconveniently born with a very lethal and very rare primary immune deficiency. And basically we spent the next six years of his life and our lives trying to manage his condition, ultimately deciding we were going to pursue the one curative treatment, which is a bone marrow transplant, finding some way to do that because we couldn’t find a match, and then ultimately moving to North Carolina, and having basically spending a good chunk of 2016 there at Duke University, Duke University Hospital, where he was very harrowingly and arduously, but ultimately successfully treated. And so that piece of the story has a very happy ending. He is now fully recovered, and it’s goodness 10 years since the bone marrow transplant, and he’s getting ready to go to high school next year. In the meantime, after that episode, I left ABC News and began my own little production company where I do both specials and series for variety of network clients that people have heard of, including a and e networks. I’ve been there pretty much constantly since 2018 doing a variety of different kinds of shows for them and also, in the last few years, I’ve been working quite a bit with news nation, which is a relatively upstart cable news channel where a lot of my former colleagues from ABC News have ended up. So that’s my life. The other thing is, professionally, I wrote a book that came out in 2020 What the heck? 2021 Yeah, about rare disease and the breakthrough medicine that that cures it. It’s called more than you can handle. Copies are still available, and now I have a new book coming out tomorrow, in fact, which is based on one of my shows. And we can talk about that if you want.

 

Will Bachman  04:26

I would love to talk about it. Let’s hear about the new book, right?

 

Miguel Sancho  04:29

So, the new book is called Evidence of the Extraordinary. And what’s it about? Well, it’s about all the kind of areas of unexplained phenomena that people talk about these days with increasingly serious and educated and well-informed perspectives, and it’s derived large part from one of my shows. I have a kind of fun, kind of quirky show on the History Channel, the History network called the proof is out there, which. Uh, basically analyzes and breaks down and investigates caught on camera anomalous phenomena, be they UFOs or sightings of legendary creatures, like big for the monotonous monster, or miracles or amazing survival or things that are said to be, you know, proof of simulation theory or other anomalies of physics. And to be honest with you, I was surprised at myself for getting involved in this space. As I mentioned before, I came up from a kind of investigative, you know, tabloid caught on camera. You know, hard hitting journalism confront people in the parking lot. Kind of background, that’s what I’ve been doing, even after I’d left ABC. But what happened was, covid happened? I march of 2020 everybody will remember. Basically, entire world shut down, including television production that involved being in the field. Any networks, to their great credit, just wanted to keep me around, and so they offered me this show, which was a little bit out of my wheelhouse, maybe a lot out of my wheelhouse, that they were starting up in this kind of paranormal or mystery space, and I was happy to take the gig, and we made it work for the first season. But I figured, like many shows, it was going to come and go, you know, do 10 episodes, maybe 15, and then kind of go its merry way into into the distance, into the background, but, no, it performed well enough. I don’t want to say it was some huge hit. It wasn’t land man, but it performed well enough to keep going for six years now and to generate enough content that I can write a book based on my experience producing the show. And that’s what this book is about. Basically, it’s the story kind of, you know, serious journalists who kind of fell into the space of the unexplained and has kind of spent part of the last five or six years applying journalistic skepticism and critique to these things, which mostly turn out to be, you know, prosaic events like, you know, every UFO is not a UFO. Most of them are planes lining up to land at JFK. Every Bigfoot sighting is not Bigfoot. Most of them are moose or elk in the woods. But there’s a sliver of these things that cannot be explained, and that’s what the book

 

Will Bachman  07:35

is about. So tell us about some of the things that you’ve investigated that your previous hard hitting investigator self would have sort of dismissed out of hand, where now you’re maybe agnostic, having looked into it, or you have not conclusively disproved. Tell us about some of these mysteries. Yeah.

 

Miguel Sancho  07:58

Well, so the big kind of paradigm shift with this that happened, and most people you know read the newspaper will know what I’m talking about. About 10 years ago, in 2016 or 17, I look at the year wrong. It’s either 16 or 17. Forgive me for knowing enough about my head. There was a big breakthrough article in New York Times that revealed that the Pentagon had actually been studying and investigating UFOs, what they call UAP seriously, and some videos leaked out that include the now famous Nimitz tic tac. Yeah. Now you know that didn’t necessarily prove anything, but what it did was, again, kind of shift the discourse where talking about these things and investigating them, you know, investing resources into these kinds of investigations wasn’t just for, you know, the tin hat tin foil hat crowd, you know, living in mom’s basement after 45 years. And obviously there’s been a whole cascade of other revelations and hearings and other videos that have come on the heels of that. So that’s kind of what justified this whole kind of enterprise for me and for the network when they launched the show. Personally, one of the things that really opened my eyes is some of the kind of underwater, deep-sea explorations that have happened, that have turned up really crazy things. We did a segment last year based on a NOAA expedition to the ocean floor off the coast of Alaska. And the thing was being live streamed in real time. And you see in you know, HD clarity, they’re coming upon when they come across what looks like this golden alien egg that something hatched out of. I mean, literally, like something out of the movie Aliens. And the there’s a bunch of scientists on the on the exhibition, and everybody’s bunch of scientists on the live stream, and nobody could figure it out. It didn’t figure out the fact pattern or the morphology of a coral or any. The other kind of known sea life. So they picked it up and took it to the Smithsonian. They may have figured it out by now, but you know, by the time we finished the beast, it was still an unknown. So there’s clearly a lot to be discovered, and there’s clearly justification into taking a much more humble approach to what we think we know. And as you know, the history of science demonstrates over and over again, the perceived wisdom the tradition, traditional knowledge, is constantly being overthrown by some radical discovery, be it Simmel vices, you know, early discoveries about the germ theory of disease, or Einstein’s, you know, theories of relativity. So the point of the book, and of these kind of investigative efforts, is to be a little bit hospitable to the extremely rare, anomalous explanation.

 

Will Bachman  10:59

Yeah, I guess the when you’re telling me about the book, the thing about the unidentified aerial phenomenon, UAPs, that’s one I was wondering if you’d be mentioning, because that’s one where you just following the news just a little bit. Over the past 10 years, it’s gone from something that was just, you know, kind of dismissed out at hand, you know, like, UFOs give me break to something where it seems like, unless they’re playing an OP on us, you know, it seems like, you know, the senators the Pentagon, they they have these videos that they can’t explain, and it seems to be serious, you know, military people who are, yeah, like, we got this video of this thing, we can’t explain it. And it just seems weird that there’d be some nation on earth that has advanced technology that we can’t detect, that that seems kind of weird. Seems kind of weird that it’d be actually, you know, aliens from outer space visiting us and just, you know, monitoring us, but allowing us to detect us. So that one, that one’s does seem like a new, unusual one, where it’s where are you kind of landing on the evidence and that and your hypotheses around the UAPs, yeah.

 

Miguel Sancho  12:11

So having spent, you know, a good chunk of the last five or six years, kind of neck deep in this, I’ve learned a couple things and come to a few kind of conclusions. One is, yes, we should all acknowledge that there are things that the US government cannot explain, which is fine and kind of understandable. There’s lots of things flying around out there that are caught on different kinds of cameras, and that’s worthy of explanation. However, making the leap that these are beings from other civilizations or other planets or other dimensions that have come to visit us at such close range and are doing it regularly, requires a number of very thin conditional probabilities to line up, not least of which is that the government knows about it and has been perpetrating a vast conspiracy to keep the truth hidden from us for 50 years. So to take the first step that, yes, there are things we can’t explain, is easy to get to where a lot of the UFO people want to get to right away, which is their aliens, you know, checking out our naval assets. That’s still a bit of a stretch. And I’m eager. And, you know, I don’t, I’m not a professional skeptic. I don’t want to, you know, dismiss all that stuff. And we there. There are we go in the book into some detail about a number of these caught on camera instances that have not been easily explained. So it’s definitely worth pursuing the one of the interesting things that kind of has been offered as an explanation that would solve some of the real challenges, cosmological challenges of interstellar travel, is that the quote, unquote aliens might not be alien at all. They may be, in fact, from the bottom of the ocean. This is called the crypto terrestrial hypothesis that has been offered by no less August personage than Lou Elizondo, who was the original whistleblower, who made those, those Pentagon videos public.

 

Will Bachman  14:32

So TBD on that one, it seems. And then, but then you get things like, I don’t know if you did in the episodes on the Havana syndrome, yes, where, like, few years ago they were, people were complaining of the headaches and stuff, and the government was saying, Hey, we have no idea. We investigate it. And then earlier this year, it seems like the US government used, used a, you know, directed energy weapon in Venezuela, right? Absolutely, oh yeah, we actually have one of those.

 

Miguel Sancho  15:02

Yeah, that’s again, there’s all. That’s why you have to be ready for the big surprises. Havana syndrome is very interesting because, and I, you know, we featured, and I’ve spoken to the main kind of the guy who’s the face of the Havana syndrome victims advocacy group, if you will, a former CIA guy named Mark Polymeropolis, and you know, he’s the first to say a lot of the people who complain about Obama syndrome wish they’d been shot instead, because it took so much to come forward and then to have basically your own government, your employer, tell you that you’re nuts and you’re making it up, and you’re part of a kind of mass hysteria phenomena. On the other hand, there are very well-respected psychologists and psychiatrists who say it aligns perfectly with known instances of mass hysteria phenomenon going they go back centuries to like the Dancing Plague of the 16th century and in Germany. So the fact that directed energy weapons now do seem to be real, and that we have them, and that we’re using them, may indeed be good news for the Havana syndrome folks who don’t just want kind of the government benefits and the disability payments, but want to be taken seriously. Yeah?

 

Will Bachman  16:24

Tell us about, kind of your approach to these episodes, and in the book, like, you know, sort of, how do you approach these things? Tell us about maybe some that you have debunked. If I can use that term, yeah, it’s

 

Miguel Sancho  16:37

primarily a debunking show, yeah, all right, yeah. That’s kind of our calling card. Like, I say, you know, we look at these things, we put them in front of experts or PhDs, and, you know, reputations to maintain. And 85 80% of the time there is an explanation. But, you know, every once in a while that we come across something that we can explain, that’s kind of the value proposition for the viewer, right? It’s almost like, like playing a slot machine. It’s the whole kind of psychology of intermittent reward. You know, every once in a while, you get the you get the cookie. So when we do, we look at these stories and, you know, some of them make news. A lot of them, you know, make local news or national news. Some of them are just, you know, viral videos that that generate millions of clicks. And the more you know, the longer we do the show, the tougher our standards get. You know, we just this, something we’ve seen. We don’t want to do a thing about just yet another, you know, white circular light floating around in the sky. You know, what is new? What about this will advance the discussion, and that’s kind of a an interesting challenge. But the good news is, and I, again, I was just being kind of willfully ignorant when I first started this. There really is an infinite world of theories and research and cool stuff that’s been done already in some of these stories that you have an opportunity to kind of contribute to. So basically, we’re just always saying to ourselves, what can we do that would enable us to say something we haven’t said 1000 times already, even if we end up debunking the thing? Right?

 

Will Bachman  18:15

All right. Again, what’s the title of the book? And we’ll include a link in the show notes for

 

Miguel Sancho  18:19

Oh yeah, sure. It’s called evidence of the extraordinary, published by Simon and Schuster. Published date, May 5. And yeah, it will be on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all other sellers of fine books,

 

Will Bachman  18:33

wherever fine books are sold. Let’s turn back the clock. Sure. I’m curious to hear a bit more about your work at inside edition wearing covert cameras while you investigated corrupt and criminal organizations. That sounds a little bit dangerous. Tell us about give us an example or two of your work in that time of your life.

 

Miguel Sancho  18:53

Yeah, so, you know, like, it’s interesting, you know, I went to Harvard, so I I was, kind of like many people who graduate from Harvard, you know, kind of seemed to be predestined for some, you know, again graduate school, or, you know, law school, medical school, in my case, you know, academia. But I was always really interested in, you know, kind of street level activity, you know, black market economies. How? You know, people make a living outside the law. And this opportunity just kind of popped into my lap and changed my life. You know, people, people who are listening, can probably relate to that. A lot of our lives is the result of serendipity. Yeah, a guy I’d met through the music scene knew that I was working as a journalist. I was doing local radio in New York, actually, 1010, wins and, oh, really, other stuff. And writing for give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world, right, exactly. And he said, you know, we needed somebody to come. And I. Participate in this long-term undercover engagement. And the job was to get hired at a corrupt insurance company in Arkansas that was selling worthless policies, primarily to poor and black people in the Little Rock area as part of a bigger institutional and systemic problem within the insurance industry, or these, these door-to-door insurance policies.

 

Will Bachman  20:26

So I went there, I got like, like, life insurance, or, yeah, but it’s

 

Miguel Sancho  20:30

life insurance that has, you know, again, insurance is a sophisticated product where the actual value of the thing is, you know, contingent upon what you’re paying and what the benefit is, etc., etc. And a lot of the time, you know, they would sell policies that you would end up paying more into it than you’d ever get back right over the course of the of the thing. Anyway. So went there. Oh, and by the way, aside from the value of the thing, they the salesman would frequently lie and misrepresent what they were doing to take advantage of these people and get a piece of their savings or their government checks or whatever. So I went to Little Rock back in those days, we talked about 1995 right? Hidden cameras weren’t what they are now. Right? These days, everybody’s got a camera on their phone and you can get a pair of, you know, glasses that have a tiny little lens, etc. Back then, like cell phones were big as bricks, you know, the cameras, the cameras were relatively small. It was about the size of a credit card sewn into my tie. But the deck, you know, it was a high eight cassette tape, and it was, the deck was like the size of a small lunch box that I had to have under strapped under my under my shoulder. So I did that for a couple of months. And the funny thing was, that story ended up winning basically every journalism award you can win. And I was like this, this great career, let’s do this. This is gonna be like this every time. And of course, it wasn’t. And, you know, the news business has gone through several, you know, foundational changes in the last 30 years I’ve been in it. But that’s, that’s kind of what it was. And the, you know, that was indeed the golden age of tabloid people, you know, I mean, the class of 92 will remember, but a lot of younger people don’t,

 

Will Bachman  22:23

in fact, you know, define, define tabloid. For me, how are you using that term?

 

Miguel Sancho  22:27

Well, primarily, they were syndicated TV shows, right? That would come on an access hour, which is when, you know, Jeopardy, and those syndicated shows come on most local stations, and they would, you know, focus on sensational stories that aren’t about policy so much as, you know, again, you know, shocking crime caught on camera stuff, and it was also, you know, I mean, people had done, you know, door to door insurance, you know, I’m trying to think, you know, like, I think the Washington Post at one point had done a article about it, but they do it differently than we did, right? They we take a story and we do, you know, operations like going undercover, getting things caught on tape, and then, you know, chasing people down in front of their cars, in front of their houses, confronting them with the tape. That’s kind of the tabloid style. Okay? Now we didn’t pay for, I should say, tabloids also associated with, like paying people for interviews, right? You know, going to the murder victim’s house and giving them $500 to talk to you and only you. And we didn’t do that, but, but in terms of the writing style, the approach, it was, I would like to think as high tabloid. And I still, I still, when I write scripts, I kind of write in that high tablet

 

Will Bachman  23:47

style, tell us about any other, you know, kind of investigations that stand out for you, for your time at inside edition.

 

Miguel Sancho  23:56

Oh, goodness, it’s been so long. Well, I infiltrated a pit bull fighting ring that was dangerous you talk about, you know, when it’s dangerous. And found myself, you know, in the basement of a of a house in South Jersey, where a lot of people were gathered to to fight their pit bulls. And that had a that was pretty gruesome. I went undercover as a Carney to investigate drug dealing among carnival workers. And you think, of course, but you know that going to work is getting high. Isn’t that surprising. It’s them being high while they’re kind of whirling your kids around. You know, the hurricane ride or the scrambler, whatever? There’s where the safety issues are, stuff like that.

 

Will Bachman  24:45

And how did you, um, think about the just like the legal issues when you are participating in one of these things, yeah, like, if you’re going to the pit bull fighting, you know, championship. And you’re there and it gets raided by the police or something, you know. Or how did you think about that participating in these activities?

 

Miguel Sancho  25:09

Yeah, so, I mean, these, you know, TV shows have lawyers. Everyone does. And before, I’m happy to say that inside edition was very responsible about that, you know, they want to get the story right, but also they didn’t want to get sued. You didn’t want to get sued, right? So we’ve always have, you know, extensive, you know, pre shoot planning and, you know, make sure that we were not just going on a fishing expedition, that we’d done enough research to know the, you know, the target was, you know, indeed, engaged in the activity we hypothesized. There’s certain places where you can and can’t shoot. There’s certain things you can and can’t say. You can’t induce somebody to commit a crime. You can’t report suppositionally. And you know, in certain states, depending on what their what their surpasses recording laws are. And then, you know, the whole industry change, and you’re talking about the legal aspects of it, you know, while we were, while I was doing this, you know, ABC got rolled up in this lawsuit, the food line case that made it basically illegal for news operations or anybody to send somebody to get a job at another company, to investigate them, right? So, yeah, and generally, you know, I think this is, I think it’s safe to say I’m not a lawyer, but I think it’s safe to say that when it comes to things like liable, most people know what libel is. These days, it’s not that hard to determine whether or not you’re committing libel where they the gray area has been about news gathering. What are you doing to get this information, not whether or not it’s accurate, not whether or not it’s damaging, but whether or not you are invading somebody’s privacy, whether or not you’re inducing them or manipulating them in an unethical or legal way, or whether or not you’re violating one of These serpents’ recording statutes.

 

Will Bachman  26:58

What kind of training did you get to go undercover? I mean, if a detective goes undercover to infiltrate the mafia, they probably get some training. What they’re just going to throw you out there? Or is there? I mean, it probably, and it probably takes some real skill to take on that persona and to act the part. Tell us about that a little bit

 

Miguel Sancho  27:22

well, the skill, the most important skill, is the skill that probably comes least naturally to Harvard graduates, which is act stupid, act like you don’t know anything, and get people to explain stuff, right? Just elicit information, as opposed to trying to establish that you’re as smart and informed as people. We had a guy, legendary guy, I don’t know if he’s still alive, but he was one of my mentors, a guy named Steve Shapiro, and he was a professional videographer and photographer, but he was the guy who would do a lot of the hidden camera shooting also depending on the depending on the story. And in the mid 90s, he had a pair of early, early pair of the glasses camera, really crude. And when I say crude, I mean there was literally a lipstick camera, like welded to the side of the arm and a wire coming out the back. Okay? And nobody would wear this thing except Steve. Okay, and he just did it by completely just inhabiting the role, being fearless, and acting confident. He told me, once he’s like, Yeah, you don’t understand. If you’ve got your confidence. It takes quite a bit for people to actually believe that you’re wearing a hidden camera and recording them in your glasses. I mean, it sounds absurd. I have a friend who did one of the Sasha Baron Cohen documentaries, not the original Borat, but the second, the follow up, he was involved in that. And he said, you know, even after the whole character, the first movie come out, and everybody knew the scam, they were able to get people left and right, believing and participating. And it’s because it’s just very difficult. There’s a whole cognitive dissonance. Okay, I’m here, living my life over here, and then over there, there’s these people from TV world who have, like, flown to where I am put on costumes. And are, you know, going to the trouble to engage me personally? You know that guy, James O’Keefe. I know he’s very controversial, but James O’Keefe with Project Veritas, yeah, some of his costumes are, I mean, absurd. It looks like he’s, you know, going to like a Halloween disco themed party or something. And he gets away with it, maybe not every time, but often enough to make his videos. And again, it’s just about kind of Poirier. Punching through and being competent, playing on people’s difficulty comprehending that they are being targeted by a hidden camera operation, right? It’s only a very select few, like Master criminals, you know, you know who, who think that that could be the case. You know,

 

Will Bachman  30:19

expand a bit tell us a bit more about this extraordinary experience that you had helping to find a cure for your son and help or helping him get through the right treatment to go through that

 

Miguel Sancho  30:34

right so again, this was May of 2012 and when he was born, he it took five months for us to figure out what was wrong with him. He started getting these fevers. He started getting these infections. Some of them required operations for a long time. They’re just saying, oh, you know these babies, they, you know, babies have trouble, you know, adapting, or they get these things. You get these abscesses anyway. So after five months of being in and out of emergency rooms, my wife, to her great credit, said, We need to talk to an immunologist. And the immunologist, to her great credit, you know, kind of saw the zebra looking lurking back in the in the background. And, you know, guessed it might be a zebra, not a horse. So, she did the tests. We had the diagnosis. It was devastating. Your whole life is, you know, turned upside down, because when you’ve got a young kid, a baby, it’s going in the hospital, all you want to do is get back to normal. Like, okay, whatever it is, we’re going to treat it, and then we’ll get back to normal. We’ll get back on track. And when you get a diagnosis like that, there is no getting back on track. And a large part of the book, frankly, is about what those kind of rare disease diagnoses do to families. The kind of cinematic presumption is that when parents get these diagnoses, they somehow miraculously are able to tap into an infinitely deep reservoir of compassion and dedication and love and self-sacrifice. And that happens, of course, but the other thing that happens is people get angry and depressed, and their work life suffer, their mental health suffers, their physical health suffers, their relationships suffer, and we dealt with a lot of that. So the good news, of course, is that, you know, for all the critiques, legitimate critiques, that could be made of the American healthcare system, there’s some wonderful research being done, and and my wife was able to get us into the National Institutes of Health, the NIH and they, in turn, hooked us up with the folks at Duke, who not only do the bone marrow transplants, which is essentially an immune system transplant, but a specific kind of protocol for my son’s specific disease using a, again, relatively experimental form of getting donor cells, which is from umbilical cord blood. So again, this all took years of research and anxiety and hard decisions, but thanks to a lot of hard work and a lot of help and a lot of luck the grace of God, if you’re religious, he not only survived, but he made it through with flying colors. And we were in that pediatric transplant unit for months, and I can assure you that not everybody makes it through a bone marrow transplant at all and many people make it through with some rather serious post-transplant conditions that make life difficult.

 

Will Bachman  33:54

Tell us about the transition from being an employee of 2020, or these other shows to setting up and running your own production company. Tell us what that was required of doing that. What does that even mean? Like if someone doesn’t know what a production company is, like me, what’s that involve? Right?

 

Miguel Sancho  34:17

Well, I would imagine that many people from our class have started businesses, and I’m sure many of them have started businesses are today, much larger and much more profitable than mine. But basically, no, you just start an S Corp, and you establish that instead of just, you know, doing, being an employee, right, where you’re working with them full time, and you get benefits. You’re essentially freelancing, but you’re also able to take on, you know, a lot of the aspects of a given production, be it the research, be it the shooting, be it the editing, be it the graphics. And you don’t necessarily hire people you know. Of full time for your company. You kind of partner with other folks as you’re as you’re standing in the operations. You want to be flexible to, you know, expand and contract depending on the size of a given project. What it means is, on a functional basis, you got to go out there and hustle for work. You’ve got to, you know, really cultivate and maintain your client relationships, and you’ve constantly gotta be ideating and thinking of like, what the next show is. You know, when I was at, you know, the networks, yes, pitching stories was a huge thing. But if you you know, just as often, you know, the phone would ring or you get an email, you know, come to the boss’s office. We’ve got an assignment. This is what you need to do. But really, it’s a it’s a the news divisions are, you know, entirely vertically integrated operations. You walk in the building. They can do everything. But most networks aren’t like that. Most networks, they buy the content from outside production companies. They sell their audience to their advertisers, but they don’t necessarily have, you know, completely staffed, you know, edit operations or staff videographers. So that’s kind of what the production company does, right? You watch any TV show on say, NBC, and it won’t. It won’t be made by NBC. It’ll be made by, you know, Buena Vista, or Time Warner, or whatever, any one of 1000 different production companies that make TV shows, and I’m one of them.

 

Will Bachman  36:35

And so what’s it? What tell us a little bit about the process of actually selling a show to a network, yeah,

 

Miguel Sancho  36:43

well, it used to be very easy. There’s people who will tell you, you know, you take one page right up to a convention like real screen and put it in front of different executives. Is in the heyday of reality television. And, you know, there’d be bidding wars for it. These days, is a lot more labor intensive, right? I mean, the TV business is, you know, going through, as I’d said, you know, a number of concurrent paradigms shifts so, but I have some I can answer this question because I’m actually in the process of doing it right now. I can’t say too much about what this show is, but I’ll tell you one of our episodes on the proof is out there for history performed quite well and had a specific theme. So I said, Well, why don’t we try to turn this theme into its own show and network like that? So then you go into the development phase, where you spend a lot of time coming up, not just with the format of the show and the concept of it, and what it’s going to look like, what the viewing experience is going to look like, but actually plotting out act by act, what the first season is going to be. You know, coming up with enough stories or enough through lines so that when you print a deck, or you put a document in front of the executives, they can say, Okay, this is what the show is going to be, and this is how we’re going to scale it up. It can’t just be a cool concept, right? It has to be something that they can put, not necessarily, you know, eight episodes on, but maybe 80 episodes. Is what a lot of my clients are looking for, scalability. So like, right here on my other computer screen, I have the most recent version of this pitch document, which is going to be, you know, a big, thick deck that’s going to have, you know, what the show concept is, the log line, how it’s going to lay out, and then the first eight episodes, kind of act by act, beat by beat, so they’ll have a very clear idea of what, what it is they’re getting. And then you got those, of course, the talent part of it, I’m rambling now, but there’s who’s going to Who are they going to see on TV? So you come up with ideas for who the talent might be. You know, a lot of shows start the other way, right? Some celebrity wants to do a show. And so they come up with a, you know, a rally show. I’ve always said, like, the greatest TV shows where you have, like, an A list celebrity doing something that they wouldn’t normally be doing, right? I’ve always had the greatest pitch would be, you know, turns out that George Clooney really likes plumbing, and the show is George Clooney is going to go to people’s houses and unclog their toilets. And that would sell itself

 

Will Bachman  39:28

in a second. That would be amazing.

 

Miguel Sancho  39:31

So a lot of the times, you know, a celebrity will, you know, want to, will have their own production company, and we’ll be kind of pitching ideas of with them fronting it, so that part’s taken care of. But, and I actually have another body. I have a meeting later this week with a, again, I’m not going to name names, but a very well known chef who has had TV shows in the past, eager to do another one. And so that’s how that one will develop. You know, start with the talent, get to the concept, as opposed. Let’s do this other one I’m talking about, where we’re starting with the concept, and then once the network likes it enough, we’ll find the talent.

 

Will Bachman  40:06

You mentioned challenges that the TV industry has gone through. You know, one of them, of course, is just the rise of YouTube and other streaming platforms and short form video. How do you think about, or have you considered, maybe, you know, producing for that non TV kind of segment, what, what are sort of the pros, cons, the profit loss, like the economics of, of making something that would be, you know, live on a, on a YouTube as a, as a, you know, advertising supported kind of thing.

 

Miguel Sancho  40:42

Yeah, so a good friend of mine, actually a Harvard classmate, not exactly our classmate. I think she graduated a year after is now a, you know, big wig at YouTube. And we talk quite frequently about how, you know, the whole business has changed and the ad model has changed, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, good news about what I do, right? I make the content so it’s not entirely independent or orthogonal to the platform, but the content can live, you know, almost anywhere. I often say, I bake the cookies. I don’t fix the ovens. But, yeah, I mean, it’s an extremely, extremely competitive environment. There’s hundreds of 1000s of alternatives people have, as opposed to, you know, when we were going up and it was just either three networks or then, ooh, a cable and we had 30 channels, my word. But, you

 

Miguel Sancho  41:37

know, one of the things that I think is not just

 

Miguel Sancho  41:42

helpful, but maybe even necessary to something like the news business, okay, which is where my other foot is. Is the rise of prediction markets, operations like poly market, Cal she, yeah, that potentially could not only, you know, kind of add an interesting angle to a story, like, you know, presidential election and a different kind of metric other than you know, polls, but you can envision a future where there’s, you know, pure interactivity, where you’re watching something on TV, on your screen, and you click on a widget and you’re able To, you know, make a wager based on what you see, what you’re watching. And, you know, the folks, some of the folks are in the space, kind of said to me, and I just had to take a breath and acknowledge the truth of it. It’s like, it’s very difficult physically, for people under 30 years old to sit down and just watch TV and endure like a four-minute commercial break. They’re so hooked on the dopamine hit from the phone that if they don’t get some sort of, you know, stimulation like that is they’re going to they’re gonna get antsy. They’re gonna look for something to do so you can envision a near future in which that itch is scratched by something like engagement with prediction markets as an interface while you’re consuming the news.

 

Will Bachman  43:15

Wow. Tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way.

 

Miguel Sancho  43:25

Yeah, I think about this more often than you’d think I so. Like I said, I was a government history major. I took a course that I’ll remember for the rest of my life on the US Constitution with Bernard Bailen, who was one of the Pulitzer Prize winners, who was in the history department at the time. I not only learned from a befriended an English professor named Elaine scary who wrote a very popular book at the time called the body in pain, and has been at Harvard ever since I had I’m not proud to say this, but I would kind of develop crush, is not the right word, but like obsessive fascinations with some professors, and I developed an obsessive fascination with a very well respected political theory professor named Judith schwaR with whom I took a course called my one of the core courses called modern political ideologies, which is great, and then a number of other courses and seminars with her. And yeah, she was very, very influential on me. She was herself, I believe, a student of Hannah Arendt, and kind of really opened me up to that, that school of kind of 20th century thought, what else though? Oh, EO Wilson, it’s funny. God, I remember the core courses, sometimes better than my better than my concentration courses. Sure. You know, I took evolutionary biology with EO Wilson. For which EO Wilson’s on human nature was required reading, and I did not read the book. And I didn’t pay much attention to the class. I didn’t really care for the class. Years later, I’m like, whatever in my apartment in Manhattan. I’m 2728 years old. I saw the book lying around. I decided to read EO Wilson’s on human nature, and I got it like, literally, you know, eight years after I was supposed to complete the reading, I not only did it, but I really enjoyed it. I was an E O Wilson fan thereafter.

 

Will Bachman  45:36

What is something from Judith Sklar that you learned or that fascinated you. Has that shown up at all in your professional work, or more been more something that kind of, was it intellectual interest?

 

Miguel Sancho  45:51

Yeah, well, Judas Glar was very much, you know, a humanist, and she said some things that might sound completely obvious but clearly need to be said, need to be need people to remember. One was that she believed very firmly in the sanctity of the individual. And she believe that as soon as you kind of shift your polarity from the individual individual rights to group rights, whether or not they’re defined by class or race or any other any other metric or any other axis you’re pretty much on, you know, you’re you’re finding yourself on a slippery slope to forms of political extremism that may or may not result in capital T totalitarianism, but you know, can get you very close to doing Things that we would consider barbaric. The other thing is kind of walking hand in hand with this. She wrote a book called ordinary vices that made, you know, very good case that the moral decisions that the most important moral decisions most people make are not, you know, the kind of hugely dramatic life and death, stuff that you know you read about in newspapers or in philosophy classes, they’re the little ticky tack ethical decisions we make every day in terms of how we treat people. And the core thesis of her book was that cruelty is by far the worst vice you can have the enjoyment of someone else’s suffering. So insofar as you know, we’re responsible for our own decisions and kind of creating our own moral habitat. She was very good at kind of emphasizing the need to, again, maintain focus on the individual and avoid cruelty those I mean, I’m completely, you know, cheapening and sanding down the infinite nuances of her political thought, but those are the two things that kind of stuck

 

Will Bachman  48:18

with me. Miguel, thank you so much for joining today. For listeners who want to follow up and keep and stay abreast of what you’re working on, let us know. Where can we find you online, and I think your book that’s being published tomorrow, we’ll include a link for that in the show notes. Are there any other websites or links that people should be aware of.

 

Miguel Sancho  48:41

You can find me on LinkedIn. I had a website called Miguel sancho.net that I need to update. So this is why it’s so great, just for the audience. You know, we’re recording this a little bit before, before it’s going to get published. So today is the kick in the rear end. I need to make sure that all my internet presence is up to date and adequately seoed.

 

Will Bachman  49:06

All right, all right, so we’ll and we’ll include those links in the show notes. Miguel, thank you so much for joining today. Fascinating, fascinating stories that you shared with us.

 

Miguel Sancho  49:16

All right, lots of fun. And thank you so much for having me. And hello to everybody back at class of 92.