And our next speaker is the voice of this festival, and he is a photographer.
That's the most important thing you need to know about Vince, is that he's a photographer.
He's not a voice, he's a photographer.
And he loves his mother.
And he loves his family, and we're all part of his family.
These are his real family.
Hunter and the greatest photographer in the world, Calla Schell.
It was short, passionate, and it ended poorly.
Totally.
Now we get to the important part.
Vince started as a sports photographer in Pittsburgh.
He's the one on the left.
I'm a wildlife photographer.
Vince is a terrorist with a camera.
Now look at this next picture.
Pedro's so sad.
It's a rabid possum.
Now to be serious, he is a photographer.
He just doesn't know exactly which photographer he is.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Vince Musi.
You're all very kind.
Thank you, Nick, I think.
I'm not sure.
That was a setup.
For the last 20 years, I've been lucky enough to work alongside
45 or 50 of really the world's greatest photographers,
those that specialize in anything and everything,
from ants to global warming, archeology, marine life,
science, natural history, seen in the pages of National Geographic
by 40 million people on a monthly basis.
And I would not be one of those guys.
Just for you, because it's such a glamorous job,
there's a little group we have called the Photo Society.
We've compiled a list of some of the things that are more glamorous
that happen to you on assignment for National Geographic.
I'd like to share them.
Frostbite, malaria.
I know this is a well-traveled group.
Most of these things have probably happened to you,
blinded by wasps.
Some of my favorites buried in avalanche.
Anyone chased by a crocodile today on the way to work?
9,000-pound seals out there on the mole, any of that?
I didn't sign up for this.
One of my favorites, Viper found in camera bag.
And this one.
Seat belt releases while helicopter tipped over erupting volcano.
Now this is true, and it happened to me.
What's important about it is not so much the seat belt releasing,
it's the falling out of the helicopter that you really have to worry about.
Which is why when the helicopter is over the erupting volcano,
I would much prefer to be here, poolside, with a club sandwich and a pina colada.
Now you laugh, but this is how I made my living for the longest time at National Geographic.
I love this stuff, right?
Look, you know about Nick, you know that story about where the wild things are?
Kid, he gets in trouble with his mom and he's got to sail off and find those monsters and tame them.
Look, I went back downstairs and made good with my mom.
Because it was like Friday night and Friday was lasagna night, man.
This is not my thing.
They don't play the theme song behind me when I go on assignment for National Geographic.
Most of the time I never got out of my car.
Why leave the bar when there's a perfectly good picture there?
And you're most likely not to be attacked by a wildebeest if you never leave your hotel room.
This is Route 66.
These were the salad days for me, right?
Interesting cars, cool people.
I had it all, right?
If I proved anything scientifically, it was the incompatibility of cowboy hats and convertibles.
The notion that I would be an animal photographer, it just didn't make any sense.
If I photographed an animal, it was make-believe, usually, right?
If I photographed a dog, it came with a side of fries and a cherry Coke.
So the notion I'd be an animal photographer in National Geographic starts with Kathy Moran
and a story about animal cognition.
I don't even know what that is.
I got to look it up.
I'm thinking, okay, I got this, Geico Gecko, right?
If you talk to him for 15 minutes, you save something on your insurance.
Or what about those dogs playing poker?
They must be smart.
Can we get them?
Is this a chance to do that?
I didn't know.
So I reached out to one of my colleagues, Joel Sartori.
He was here last year.
And he said, it's easy.
All animals, for the most part, are food motivated.
Okay, I got that.
I'm thinking, how hard can this be?
I'm not out in the wild.
I'm on a seamless background.
I can do this.
Mistakes remain.
We were going to try to do this vanity fear thing, right?
I was going to be the anti-Lieberwitz of animal photography.
If only I could get something to look at me.
Nothing looked at me.
Or if you did, it would just fly away.
It was tough.
Now, look at this.
It looks calm, right?
This is a marmoset.
I've gone all the way to Austria to photograph him.
His head is the size of a walnut, and he hates me.
Right?
And he's screaming at me and his bonobo, his little friends.
They're peeing on me.
They're flying around the room.
They're peeing on my gear.
They're peeing on me.
And they're screaming.
Lots of screaming.
And I don't deal with rejection.
Well, I started to think everything was screaming at me.
Fish were screaming at me underwater.
I'm way in over my head.
I had to go photograph this prairie dog.
And he screamed at me on the phone.
I would call, and he would be screaming in the background.
Now, prairie dogs have this language, right?
It's distinct.
It's not like, ah, there's a guy coming.
It's like, no, there's a photographer coming,
and I can't do a thing with my fur.
And so I tried everything.
This is Wabash, Indiana.
A rescued prairie dog.
His name is Speed Bump.
And Speed Bump is rapidly becoming the subject
of my last photograph for National Geographic.
There are very few second chances.
This is it.
I'm done.
My life is in this guy's hands.
I'm going to scream at him.
That doesn't work.
I thought, I'll jump around.
We'll wave balloons to whatever I can.
I got nothing.
So I decided I'm going to interview him.
Rapid fire.
Mr. Bump, how are the winters in Wabash?
How about living here?
Because he came from Arizona.
And all of a sudden, boom.
He just stopped.
And I thought, okay, I've found this, like,
inner doctor do little.
I'm invincible now.
I can do this.
So we went off to photograph.
This is Kanzi.
Now Kanzi's one of the most famous animals in the world.
And I thought, okay, I can do this now.
So I go all the way to, like, Des Moines, Iowa to photograph.
And Kanzi, if you Google this guy,
he's got, like, more hits than Bill Gates.
He's been the subject of a TED Talk.
He's been on Oprah.
He's really famous.
Because Kanzi, Bonobos talk to each other a lot.
They're like us.
They have 99% of the same DNA that we do.
But they also can understand language really well.
And this guy can understand what we're saying.
He understands, like, 3,000 words.
It's incredible.
So he interacts with humans with this sheet of symbols
that have 450 words that he can use.
He presents these complex sentences.
It's pretty amazing.
It's like Kanzi wants noodles outside with Sioux now.
He's an amazing guy.
So I'm thinking, okay, I can do this.
So we write letters and make phone calls.
It's like going to see any celebrity.
And so we get there.
And where he lives is this place that's surrounded by a moat
with guys guarding the place with, like, assault weapons.
It's a really secret place, right?
That's what you think you'd see at the White House.
And when I get there, everybody's completely surprised to see me.
I think they're stunned.
I'm like, why are you here?
I'm like, well, we wrote letters and calls and like, okay.
All right.
Well, have you brought anything for Kanzi?
Uh-uh.
No?
Okay.
Well, hold on.
Stay right there.
I'm going to go over and there's words exchanged screaming back and forth.
They come back.
They said, he said, okay, yes.
But he needs six cups of coffee for him and his Bonobo friends.
Grande, Starbucks, the big thing.
I got to send my assistant back into town to go get the coffee.
So in the meantime, I'm with Kanzi and, you know, he's an amazing guy.
He sits there in, in, in this place and he, he'll make like grownups run back and forth
and do this thing like chase each other, you know, points and they run back and forth and
he sits there and he drinks his coffee and watches this thing.
Now this is a bird.
We went all the way to England to photograph these birds.
These guys make tools.
Now that's different than using tools to do something to actually create tools.
This is Weck, he's a, a, a new Caledonian crow.
And so he like made a tool out of a piece of wire to get food out of there.
Pretty amazing.
He also spent like three days trying to poke my eyes out with that beat.
This is often usually the story.
This is Betsy.
She's so famous that that's not even her real name.
That's true.
She knows like 500 words.
And if you show Betsy like a stuffed animal and you say, this is Randy, you'll find Randy.
She'll find him.
Now if you show Betsy a photograph of Randy, she'll find the thing you want in the photograph.
She makes the cognitive leap.
The thing you want in the picture is a real object.
Not, you're looking for a print.
An amazing dog.
And we, we put an elephant on a seamless for God's sakes.
You know, this is, this was crazy.
The elephants, they never knew this.
They put them in front of a mirror and they lifted their trunks and looked at themselves
for the first time.
Self-awareness.
They didn't recognize themselves as a predator.
They realized it was themselves.
They're really, really cool.
When we did this, this was an enormous sheet of seamless, the size of this screen.
And somebody who doesn't work for me anymore put a coffee right on the corner of that seamless.
You got one shot at this with an elephant because things can happen.
And, and of course, Shanti went over and went, knocked it over, all over.
And I thought, oh shit.
And, and then she went, so apparently elephants drink coffee as well.
Lemurs, this is the guy that flew away.
They learned how to count it like a toddler.
They do it for fun.
They don't even have to have food rewards.
Really cool stuff.
He got loose, which was crazy because there, you know, I was bringing my gear in and all
of a sudden I heard, he's out.
And people were running down this alleyway with butterfly nets trying to catch this lemur.
And rats have a sense of humor.
Did you know that?
Not a lot of people do.
The one guy that knows that tickles him.
He's the rat tickler.
Now they don't know why, but they do.
They have this primal trip.
They laugh.
So there's always cool stuff I was learning.
You know, this is Georgia.
She's this beautiful chimpanzee.
And there's so many things we're learning about what chimpanzees do.
They have this social network.
They forgive each other.
It's really amazing stuff.
So this really, it is for me, was an extraordinary experience.
I had a great time doing it.
This is A.C.
He's a huge orangutan.
It's like this nine-foot wingspan and his head is that big.
Amazing.
But the scientists that work with these guys, it's like this collaborative thing.
Not just studies, but they feel like it's a collaboration between them and the animal.
A.C., if you give him a stick of gum, he'll pull it out of the little wrapper with his
hands and just take the thing out and push the wrapper back to you.
He's an amazing guy.
I think Nick photographed him once.
And this is a Pacific giant octopus.
In Seattle, these octopus were sneaking out of their tanks, out of their exhibits at night,
going into the other exhibits, eating all the fish.
And then they go back and go, I didn't see any.
Leaving this trail of water between the things.
And dolphins, they have mimicry and self-awareness.
And they're on the level of great apes, right?
And now we're talking to them.
So these machines that go underwater and that speak dolphin, that we can understand what
they're doing.
We're still learning all these things.
Everything we learn about these animals teaches us something about ourselves.
So it was a really fascinating story.
My favorite is this guy, Alex.
So he was a parrot that came from a pet shop in Chicago.
And for 30 years, Irene Pepperberg studied with him.
She recognized she could talk to him to speak.
And she could ask him what he thought.
So she did.
So he could count to seven.
He knew the difference between larger and smaller colors and shapes.
And they just, I went to photograph and they just gave him to me.
Here you go.
We're not in the room here.
And so I spent like four hours with him on like a little music stand in a hallway.
People would go, is that?
And I go, yeah.
Who the hell are you?
And I taught him songs and we talked.
And after, like at the end of this thing, he says, what did you tickle me?
I'm thinking, whoa, it's like a little girl.
Somebody's messing with me.
He's coming from over there.
But he talked to me.
And he wanted me to tickle him and I said, like, show me where.
And he put his head down and his feathers came up where he wanted me to tickle him.
He was amazing when he died.
He died.
They lived to 50 years.
He died in his 30s.
His obit was in the New York Times.
That's how important he was.
So the next story we did was on domestication, which is this like huge thing that happened.
And like Neolithic man comes out of the ice age and they domesticate plants and animals.
It's why we're here.
Why we don't die at 20.
But nobody knows how it happened or why.
So I thought, well, okay, that could be kind of cool.
I've never done that before.
And I thought, well, can we take these lights in the field and do some really crazy stuff?
I love dioramas.
Can we make dioramas?
And they said, yeah, you can make dioramas.
So we did that.
So we started with this place in Siberia where this guy tried to figure out what's the difference
between domestication.
It's not tameness.
And he domesticated this silver fox, ferocious and wild.
And he did it in like a few generations and produced one that was like a pet.
And so people have them.
Not a lot, but he took an entire generation of animals that had never been domesticated
because he thought there was a genetic basis for it.
If there's a tameness gene that we might even have, but very few animals have.
Like you can domesticate a horse, but not a zebra.
They're almost identical, but nobody knows why.
So they also do rats and they make them mean.
So these are like genetically engineered, highly weaponized rats in Siberia.
And I was talking to him.
I was like, hey, you talking to me?
And wolves, like all dogs come from wolves, right?
So we started looking at these like dislocations, like wolves in a parking lot.
Like what's that about?
And I'm like, I still don't know.
But dogs, they're still evolving.
They're changing.
They're actually reading social cues from humans now on a level greater than the Great Apes.
They keep changing as domestication goes along, but they can't find food.
And you can't send them off into the wild.
You can't do that.
And animals change when they're domesticated, like their coats change.
Like this black and white that's called piebald changes.
All these things happen.
It's really fascinating.
But they can't go back and be wild again.
Only animals that can go backwards are cats and pigs.
There are no wild cows left on the planet.
Very few wild horses of the kind that were really, truly wild.
So we did like alley cats in Baltimore.
And chickens, there's very few wild chickens.
They all come from jungle fowl.
It's the most heavily domesticated animal on the planet.
And the most rarest jungle fowl are actually in Georgia,
because they brought them over here in the 60s in a breeding experiment from India.
And they tried to hunt them, and it didn't work out.
And so somebody stole eggs.
And now there's this town in Georgia that's overrun with wild jungle fowl.
And they're the purest on the planet.
So everybody comes to study them.
And horses were first domesticated in what's now Kazakhstan.
But you're more likely to find like million-dollar race horses out there now
than you will the horses that were used to eat.
They were used for labor.
And they still milk horses in Kazakhstan.
If anybody wants any of that.
So these dogs are bred only to alert, they're hunting dogs.
They're only bred to alert on bobcats.
And you find all these crazy things that humans do to sort of tailor wild animals
to tailor animals for their pleasure.
Goats are like little dogs and cats now.
They're novelty items.
These are little miniature dairy goats.
They breed these and show them at fairs.
They're not truly trying to get milk out of them.
They're just little pets.
And so I thought, well, this could be cool.
Can we bring them all in on a big seamless?
Can we do that?
And it was mayhem.
They were running, trampling, people running.
And it was pretty nuts.
So it didn't work out.
So we decided, well, there's always beautiful sheep.
I don't love sheep.
Who doesn't, right?
And could we photograph sheep and make these beautiful like high school portraits of them?
Because I just love them.
There's all of these sheep.
Aren't they great?
And it's just beautiful.
They all come from like one animal, like a black sheep.
This is all the hand of man on one animal.
And you know it from dogs and things, but sheep have much larger eyes and they're cool.
Isn't that cool?
That's your fashion statement, right?
I love these guys.
All of them come from that one animal.
This is all the hand of man of what we've done.
So the last thing we did was sort of trying to figure out like how does an animal go from being hunted for food?
To go from the dining room to the living room.
Which is this path of many pets and things like that.
This is the Vietnamese pot belly pig that lives in a house in West St. Paul, Minnesota.
Daisy May.
And Daisy May was like so important they like changed laws so that she could live in this house.
Folks who have exotic pets are kind of on the same line.
They think, well, we can connect to wild animals in a way that people didn't do.
And so you find these crazy dislocations.
This is a cougar living in like a brick rancher in like Florida, Central Florida, right?
A bear in Ohio in the backyard of a guy's house.
People have connections with these animals, but to me like initially it's like, wow, this is nuts, right?
Jim Panzee in the kitchen.
Dilly, one of the sweetest animals I've ever met.
She was a blind deer taken in by a veterinarian.
And that's her bed.
That's her bedroom.
She sleeps.
No, a kid doesn't have that kind of bedroom.
And she has this like webcam on her.
And it follows her all the time.
And at one point Dilly got flipped out about something.
She lived there for nine years and she disappeared from the webcam.
And they got emails like, where's Dilly?
And they were coming from like the International Space Station.
They're watching her in outer space.
So if aliens attack, you do the math.
They're going to be looking for deer in houses.
And this is Albert.
Albert loves snakes.
Like what's the relationship between people who have these animals?
Albert can't really hold them or touch them.
He's holding this python for me because he wanted to bring out these Egyptian cobas that'll kill you in a second.
I'm like, no, no, no, let's not do that.
And this is Albert's bedroom.
It looks like the Museum of Natural History.
And on the door is a list of like, it's old like faded map quest directions to every hospital.
And on every cabinet is like the antivenom that you need for this animal.
Egyptian cobra needs this type two.
Take me to that hospital.
They have it.
It's pretty crazy.
And it's not an animal you could touch or play with or, you know, fetch a ball with.
Folks believe these connections, like could they go further?
Could they wind up being the next dogs?
Could kangaroos and lemurs be the next dogs?
Or that they're perpetuating a species by doing it.
But what's important to understand, because people, how can they do that?
None of these animals are wild.
They never were.
They've been born in captivity for generations and generations.
They're there.
So you either stop that like you do in zoos or in these breeders.
But you couldn't take this animal and set it free.
It would die.
This is a capybara.
It's a huge hundred pound rat.
It comes from South America.
And Melanie goes swimming with it every day.
It has the run of the house.
She believes that she can, maybe this is the next animal will domesticate.
And this guy spent hours, thousands of hours learning how to take care of a cougar.
It's the guy with the cougar in his backyard.
He has a great relationship with the cougar.
I'm in like a caged area that I've built.
I've built a cage to make this photograph.
We're not just walking by to do this because she'll tear you up in half.
And it starts with these breeders like this is cute, right?
That's a bobcat.
It's ferocious.
It will grow up and be ferocious.
So you can put a human imprint on it, which is what they're trying to do here by putting it in their family and having it around dogs.
But that's kind of where this journey starts for these animals.
It starts innocently, they're small and they're cute and then they get big and nobody knows what to do with them.
These are tigers that have been bought at somewhere along the way, maybe for photos.
Maybe people have their picture made with a baby tiger.
And then what do they do now?
And so there's this path they go on from refuge to private owners to refuges, the people that can handle them.
They eat a lot of food.
This is a guy in Ohio who's trying to sort of is one of those stops along the way.
This guy bought the bear. He didn't really want to buy the bear, but somehow he wound up going home with a baby bear.
And then when it got so big that it could crush him, he thought, what am I going to do?
And so the bear went off to a refuge, but no claws.
It's been altered.
But, you know, he really had a relationship with this animal for a long time.
He's devastated by it.
And so I went, I thought, well, it's got to be pets, right?
But I really wanted to deal with people who really had a different relationship.
We went to circuses and performers.
This guy's grandfather was like the first bear act in the United States.
He came from Norway.
He worked for Disney.
And he was the bear guy and did all the famous movies.
His bears were on the Lucy show.
And so he's like one of the last bear acts in the country.
These bears stand up.
They jump around.
They ride bicycles, all that kind of stuff.
And this was the youngest lion tamer in the United States at one time, Clayton Rosira.
At 19, he took over from his mother, his aunts, and his mother were all part of a family
that all sort of divvied up.
Tigers and dogs and bears.
Every one of them did a specialty and say they knew their animals really, really well.
And so Clayton's mom did big cats and he still does this.
He's like one of the last cat shows.
And I will tell you, it's the most beautiful lion I think I've ever seen.
I mean, it's Maine.
Everything is stunning.
But, you know, it lives in this enclosure and it goes around and does stuff.
This is his aunt, Pam, who's really the last person with a chimp act in the United States.
And so she's got five chimps that are like 45 years old because they live forever.
They all outlive you if you buy them at the wrong time.
And this is Chance.
He was a pet.
People couldn't take care of it.
And then it went on that path and it could have went to a number of different ways.
But Pam bought him.
This chimp is in the Wolf of Wall Street.
As is the lion.
So they're animal actors.
But they have this amazing relationship with these animals.
So who knows what happens to Chance?
You know, Pam has not likely to live another 50 years.
I hope she does.
But who knows what will happen to him?
And this whole area is really great.
It's the most controversial story I've ever done.
This is Bob Frear.
He has an incredible love of these animals.
He got a little baby alligator when he was a kid.
His dad threw it at him in the back seat of a car.
Here you go.
And so Bob spent his life rehabilitating injured wildlife.
He's got a great refuge, but he loves wrestling alligators.
He still does it.
He spent 25 years doing it every day, like going down and tying them.
So he loves an animal he can't touch that could kill him as well.
So I'm like, what's the connection between people?
Like we looked at different animals.
We looked at the same animal with different people.
Like what attracts somebody to want a skunk, for example?
So we went to Skunk Fest.
And this is the place where people bring all their skunks.
And this is Travis.
And so he's a DJ in like a stripper club.
And he's got a skunk.
And she's a mom of two.
Perfectly normal.
It's the little girl from Pennsylvania who likes to dress up as skunks.
All same animal.
Little girl 12 loves her skunk.
The guy in the middle is an IT engineer.
And the woman on the right is the CEO of a fashion company.
Loves her skunks.
So I don't know.
It's a fascinating world.
And I got into it honestly with the help of Robin Schwartz
who photographed here, spoke here a few years ago.
And she's got a lot of connections.
And she works in this world a lot.
And she turned me on to Allison Friedman in New York
who was a great help to me and sort of given me some perspective on this.
But more so, Allison shared this monkey with me, this capuchin monkey
who was 45 years old.
Probably the oldest capuchin monkey in captivity in the U.S.
And she had carried it around with her in her pocket for like 33 years.
It's a little tiny monkey.
And I said, I want to photograph you guys.
She said, no, no.
She's bald.
She's an old broad.
What are you going to do with her?
It's never going to work.
And I convinced her to let me come up there.
And it was really a touching relationship.
It was not like there was no trophy.
There was no braggart.
She wasn't trying to show off.
It was a real relationship with these two.
So we made this photograph on like a Friday, I think.
And within a few days, Amelia died.
This animal had such an impact, Robin named her daughter after this animal.
And she was truly remarkable, but the relationship was extraordinary.
So my point is, I don't want to say, hey, you should or you shouldn't do it.
But I've been lucky enough to be exposed to this world.
It's been fascinating.
So I'm going to leave you with Dilly.
I love Dilly.
If I could take an animal home, it would be Dilly.
And I thank you for sitting with this stuff.
Thank you.
