[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:05] Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Mallory's Weird World Adventures, the podcast. I'm your host, Mallory, and I'm here to show you just how weird this world of ours really is.
[00:00:14] This week we are celebrating a very special event. Michael and I went to Sai Con up in Buffalo, New York, and we're very excited because I got to speak speak there about skepticism and exploration. And I wanted to today for our podcast, share my talk with you. So please, here it is. Now listen and enjoy my talk from Saikon 2026.
[00:00:41] And if you'd like to see a photo, because I do reference a photo and you know you can't see it in the podcast. If you'd like to see the photo of Chubby, the African penguin, I have made it the main photo for this episode. So if you visit mallorysadventures.com and search for this podcast, if you search for the key phrase Psychon 2026, or chasing shadows is the name of the talk, you will see a lovely picture of a P4, mostly, you know, still. Still an adolescent, but African penguin named Chubby.
[00:01:19] Thank you guys so much and enjoy the talk.
[00:01:25] Hi, everyone. My name is Mallory Mackey, and I want to start with a confession. I've spent my career chasing things that might not exist.
[00:01:33] As a journalist specializing in anthropology and an explorer, I track down folklore and document disappearing traditions. I've stood in allegedly haunted forest at midnight. I've interviewed people who swear they've seen creatures science says are impossible.
[00:01:48] And I've learned something critical.
[00:01:52] The biggest threat to good exploration isn't the unknown. It's what we want the unknown to be.
[00:01:59] Today I want to talk about hope, specifically how hope can blind us to reality, corrupt our data, and turn good explorers into shadow chasers.
[00:02:10] I'm going to talk about two very distinct instances where this affects my work and exploration personally.
[00:02:16] Let's start with penguins, because who doesn't love penguins?
[00:02:21] This is Chubby. Chubby is a P4 adolescent penguin, meaning he's almost an adult. Chubby became our mascot when I was working with penguins on Robben island, and his adorable little face more or less encapsulated our desire to want to save a dying species.
[00:02:39] Let me elaborate.
[00:02:42] Let me take you to Robben Island, South Africa. You probably know it as the prison where Nelson Mandela was held for 18 years, but it's also home to one of the most important African penguin colonies on Earth. Or at least it was. I worked on Robben island documenting penguin populations, and here's what you need to understand. These birds are in free fall in 1956, there were over 141,000 breeding pairs in South Africa.
[00:03:09] Today, fewer than 10,000 penguins remain, less than 1,200 of which remain on Robben Island. The African penguin is listed as endangered. And the trajectory is very clear. We're watching a species go extinct in real time. And gosh, do we want to be wrong about that. When you're out there every day counting nests, monitoring chicks, watching these derpy little birds waddle around what used to be a prison island, now their sanctuary, when you see Chubby's adorable little face as you drive past the Robben island leper cemetery daily, you become invested. You start to notice things.
[00:03:47] Maybe there are more birds today than yesterday. Maybe that breeding pair looks a little bit healthier. Maybe the chick survival rate is ticking up just slightly. This temptation, and I felt it viscerally, is to see those small fluctuations as the beginning of a trend.
[00:04:03] To take that one successful breeding season and project it forward. To want the data to tell a comeback story so badly that you start seeing comeback data.
[00:04:14] But here's the thing. Hope doesn't change the numbers. Random variation is not recovery. And if we let our desire for a happy ending override what the data actually shows, we stop becoming scientists. We start becoming storytellers, spinning fables, while the real world marches on without us.
[00:04:33] The African penguin population is not recovering, it's collapsing. And no amount of wanting it to be different makes it different.
[00:04:41] And starting to believe something like this, something that untrue it can also be damaging to the birds in the long run, too, if we believe all this false evidence.
[00:04:52] This isn't unique to penguins.
[00:04:54] Look at any allegedly extinct species that captures public imagination and you will find the same pattern.
[00:05:01] The thylacine. The Tasmanian tiger was declared extinct in 1936. Since then, there have been thousands of reported sightings.
[00:05:12] Thousands. People desperately want this animal to still exist. Every blurry photo, every questionable footprint, every nighttime glimpse becomes evidence. Not because the evidence is strong, but because the desire is overwhelming.
[00:05:28] Same with the ivory billed woodpecker in North America, officially extinct since the 1940s, with a supposed rediscovery in 2004 that sparked massive media coverage and conservation funding. Except the evidence.
[00:05:43] A few seconds, a blurry video and some ambiguous audio recordings.
[00:05:47] The scientific community is deeply divided. And here's why.
[00:05:52] Because we want it to be true, we're willing to accept a lower standard of proof.
[00:05:57] And I get it, I really do. The idea that we could pull a species back from the brink, that extinction isn't Always final, that nature is more resilient than we feared. That's intoxicating.
[00:06:09] It's hope in its purest form. And I desperately want and hope for a chance for the future of all African penguins out there, all the little chubbies.
[00:06:17] But hope is not data. And when we treat it like data, we make decisions that could be tragic for the species we're working with and for ourselves and for society as a whole.
[00:06:29] Now, let's move on to the second aspect of where I see this all the time.
[00:06:34] Let's move from conservation over into anthropology.
[00:06:40] So this gets infinitely more complicated when we add culture into the mix.
[00:06:46] Because as a student of anthropology, I'm trained in cultural relativism, the idea that beliefs and practices should be understood within their own cultural context, not judged by external standards. And that's important. I mean, it's essential. The history of anthropology is littered with outsiders barging into communities, declaring their beliefs primitive or superstitious and causing real harm.
[00:07:11] But here's where it gets tricky.
[00:07:14] Cultural relativism does not mean abandoning critical thinking.
[00:07:18] It doesn't mean every belief system is equally valid or equally harmless.
[00:07:24] And that's a painful line to walk sometimes. And many times, my wonderfully skeptical husband Mike has to pull me back in from the wrong side of that line. No one's perfect. I'm definitely not.
[00:07:35] I've done fieldwork in communities where certain animals are considered sacred, where seeing them is thought to bring messages from ancestors.
[00:07:44] Sometimes these beliefs lead to genuine conservation. Sacred animals are protected. Their habitats are preserved. That's beautiful. That's local ecological knowledge that predates Western conservation biology.
[00:07:59] But sometimes those same beliefs can mask decline. If an animal is spiritually essential to a culture, admitting its disappearance isn't just acknowledging ecological loss. It's acknowledging cultural loss, spiritual loss, identity loss. The stakes are enormous.
[00:08:19] So when community members insist they're seeing these animals regularly, what's my job as an anthropologist? Do I nod and respectfully record their testimony without questions? I mean, my anthropology professor would sure like me to do that. Do I respectfully push back?
[00:08:37] Do I ask for evidence? Do I check the data? There's no right answer to this, unfortunately. Just many, many more questions.
[00:08:46] Here's a concrete example of where this gets really difficult. I worked in areas where traditional beliefs about wildlife include the idea that certain species can't truly go extinct because they're spiritually protected.
[00:08:59] The belief provides real psychological comfort. It maintains cultural continuity. It reinforces spiritual worldviews that have sustained communities for generations.
[00:09:10] It's also just empirically wrong.
[00:09:13] Species go extinct regardless of how sacred we consider them. And when the belief prevents communities from taking conservation action. Because why would you need Western style conservation efforts? If the ancestors have it handled well, that becomes harmful. As an anthropologist, I'm supposed to honor that belief system. But as a scientist and conservationist and a human who cares about biodiversity, I can see the harm unfolding. I'm compelled to act.
[00:09:42] This is the tightrope I walk constantly.
[00:09:45] How do I respect cultural knowledge while also maintaining the skeptical rigor that might actually save what we're all trying to protect?
[00:09:54] The answer isn't to barrel in with science and dismiss local knowledge. Indigenous communities have ecological knowledge that Western science is only beginning to appreciate.
[00:10:04] There are documented cases of species rediscovered by scientists who finally listen to people who've been saying, we've seen these all along.
[00:10:12] But the answer also isn't to treat all cultural beliefs as sacrosant and beyond examination.
[00:10:20] The answer, and this is hard, is to ask better questions.
[00:10:27] What would constitute real evidence here? And who gets to define real?
[00:10:32] What does the actual population data support? And whose data collection methods are we privileging?
[00:10:39] Am I giving this claim extra credibility because it aligns with my desire to be a good anthropologist who respects culture? Or am I dismissing it too quickly because it doesn't fit my scientific framework?
[00:10:52] As anthropologists, we can hold two truths simultaneously. The cultural beliefs matter deeply and that some beliefs can lead to harmful outcomes.
[00:11:04] That local knowledge is valuable and that it can be wrong about specific facts. That respecting a culture does not mean abandoning our responsibility to pursue truth.
[00:11:17] Here's what nobody tells you when you become an explorer. The hardest discoveries aren't out there in the field. They're in here, in yourself. And recognizing your own blind spots in admitting when you've let desire override data and having the courage to report what you found rather than what you hoped to find. I call this the explorer's burden.
[00:11:38] We venture into the unknown seeking truth, but we carry our hopes with us like invisible cargo. And if you're an anthropologist, you're carrying additional weight. The hope that you can be respectful, that you can honor different cultures, that you won't be another outsider causing harm.
[00:11:53] These hopes shape what we notice, what we investigate, and what we ultimately report.
[00:11:59] And in emotionally charged situations, species extinction, cultural erasure, the loss of wild places and ancient traditions, the weight of hope becomes almost unbearable. Because if we're wrong, if the species really is gone, if the belief system really is leading to harm, if the damage really is irreversible, then we failed not Just as scientists, but as humans who care deeply about the world and the people in it.
[00:12:28] But here's the paradox.
[00:12:30] The only way we might actually help is by seeking, clearly, by not chasing shadows, by reporting the hard truths, even when they break our hearts or challenge our desires to be culturally sensitive.
[00:12:42] So, yes, I still chase things that might not exist. I still investigate folklore and track down mysteries and venture into the unknown. I still sit with communities and listen to their stories. Stories and try to understand their worldviews. But I have learned to ask myself a question at every turn. Am I following evidence, or am I following hope?
[00:13:03] Am I practicing cultural respect? Or am I avoiding difficult truths because confronting them feels uncomfortable?
[00:13:10] Because hope is beautiful. Cultural respect is essential. Both are necessary. But neither is a methodology.
[00:13:18] Neither is data.
[00:13:19] And when we confuse them for evidence, we don't just fail as explorers and anthropologists, we fail the very things we're trying to protect and the very people we're trying to understand.
[00:13:30] The shadows will always be there, dancing at the edge of what we know. And our job is to illuminate them, not to chase them. And to do it with both scientific rigor and genuine respect for the communities whose worlds we enter.
[00:13:45] Thank you guys again. I'm Mallory Mackey, and if you liked what you heard today, please follow my
[email protected] and please check out my unique adventure show called Weird World Adventures on Amazon Prime.
[00:13:58] Thank you.
