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The Current Transcript for August 10, 2023

Host: Anthony Germain

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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I went one summer to an area called Lake O'Hara, and the camp fire next to me were grilling sausages as I was there, just kind of choking down some rehydrated, horrible fuel and thinking, I want to eat like this outside.

ANTHONY GERMAIN: Chris Nuttall-Smith enjoyed a good camping trip, but what he didn't love was camp food. But as a food writer, he knew that it just didn't have to be that way. He shares his love of cooking outdoors in his new cookbook. It's called Cook It Wild. And then.

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I think, you know, you've got to woodshed. I think you've got to pay your dues. And then at some point you through that you learn to tell the truth.

AG: In 30 minutes. We remember Canadian music legend Robbie Robertson. Plus, in an hour, we continue our presentation of the CBC podcast Love Janessa. But we begin with the era defining concert that is transforming the music industry. Good morning. I'm Anthony Jermaine in for Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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How mega-concerts are transforming the music industry

Guests: Abigale Valliere, Dean Budnick, Daniel Tsai

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AG: This is the summer of the Swifty. Taylor Swift Eras tour is a sensation, and thanks to her fans, it's on track to become an get this, the first billion dollar tour. But this isn't just about Taylor Swift's earnings. This tour is making so much that mayors and even some world leaders have taken to begging for concerts on social media. We'll have more on that in a minute. Yesterday, tickets for her six Canadian dates, all of them in Toronto went on sale. This for a concert that's not until November of 2024. And yet the scramble is on. Abigale Valliere is the creator of the Canadian Swifties Facebook Group and, of course, Swift herself. And she's here in the studio with me. Hello there.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Hi.

AG: You're bopping along there?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

AG: Pleasure to meet you. Now, getting tickets to these Taylor Swift shows has been described by some as winning a lottery. Can you just walk me through all the steps to eventually, maybe, Hopefully. Fingers crossed, getting tickets.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: So in order to get tickets, you have to become a verified fan. If you do not become a verified fan. There is a very unlikely chance that you are to get tickets unless you purchase them through a StubHub or anything like that, which that can be very costly. Or if you've checked.

AG: Are you verified?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: I am verified.

AG: Congratulations. Thank you. So you have a code?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Yes.

AG: Okay. So you're in the hunt now?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: I am in the hunt.

AG: And can I ask you, how much are you actually willing to pay to see Taylor in Toronto?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: I would pay a grand.

AG: $1,000? Yeah.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Or more.

AG: Or more.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Depending what my seats are.

AG: That's commitment.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: It is.

AG: And I assume you're independently wealthy.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: I'm wealthy for Taylor Swift.

AG: If you could go to more than one show, would you?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: I would go to all six if I could.

AG: But I'll do the math quickly. $6,000?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Yeah.

AG: Now, you actually saw her already, right? In Detroit? Yeah. And you're still willing to. To splurge?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Of course.

AG: Okay. You're obviously a diehard fan. I understand why you're in charge of the Facebook group. How did you get the ticket for Detroit?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: So I joined as a verified fan back in November of 2022 when the first sale came out and I got a code. But then I waited online eight hours on Ticketmaster and finally got through. And there--.

AG: Eight hours?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Eight hours.

AG: And then you've been working to earn the thousand you need.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: I should have, yeah. And there is nothing left. So I was really sad on that day when I couldn't get tickets. And then fast forward to May of this year, I randomly got a code sent to me from Ticketmaster and it said that there is a limited amount of production hold tickets, shop now while quality lasts. So I got on my phone immediately and I went on and I just bought the first ticket that was available.

AG: It's as if it was fate.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: It was.

AG: How much should all this cost you? The Detroit show.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Altogether maybe 1500 dollars, maybe a little bit more with gas and food and hotels.

AG: What's your advice for any fans who might be discouraged by these prices that you're citing?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Don't get discouraged. There is a reliable group of people who are ready to help you get these value tickets because nobody wants to be paying millions or thousands of dollars.

AG: Do you go with friends to these? You try to sort of arrange, you know, how to get there with somebody you want to be to share the experience?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Of course. Yeah. But if anybody needed to go alone, I would also go with somebody that has never been and would go by themself.

AG: All right. So obviously, the Detroit show must have been something.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: It was.

AG: Amazing. What was it like? Describe it for me.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Life changing to hear somebody that I've listened to my whole life and I've grown up with her and I listen to her on my Discman, my M.P. three player, just like any any chance I got in the radio to hear it live and to hear the passion that she actually has and to see the passion she performed for 4 hours and barely took a break. It's--.

AG: Four hours.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Four hours. She did 44 songs.

AG: So some of those concerts, you pay $1,000, it's over in 60, 90 minutes.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: No.

AG: So you think you get your money's worth?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: I 100% got my money's worth.

AG: Was there a highlight in the concert?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: The two surprise songs. So every night she sings two different songs off of one of her albums. So every night is different.

AG: So why was that special a particular tune you really like?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Yeah, there was two that we got. All you had to do is stay and I got Breathe, which are two of her OG tracks from, like, original albums.

AG: What was your pulse rate like?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: If I could go back and check my Apple Watch, it was probably very high.

AG: Last question for you. What is it about Taylor Swift in particular that inspires you and so many others to spend not just the money that you're talking about, but also the time?

ABIGALE VALLIERE: She stands up for what's right, and she's a very positive individual. And when I look at Taylor Swift, I don't see somebody that's just in this for the money. I see somebody that has passion and truly cares for her fans. And I think that's what makes it worth it.

AG: Well, I hope you don't have a cruel summer if you get it or.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: I do get it.

AG: You see what I did there? I really hope you get your tickets. And it's a pleasure meeting you. And I hope you have one heck of a great time when she comes to Toronto. Thanks a lot for coming in.

ABIGALE VALLIERE: Thank you.

AG: Abigale Valliere is the creator of the Canadian Swifties Facebook Group. Dean Budnick is the editor of RELIX magazine, which covers the live music industry. He's also the co-author of the book Ticketmaster The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped. Good morning.

DEAN BUDNICK: Good morning.

AG: Anthony. Dean, what do you make of what you've just heard there with Abigail and the lengths that she's willing to go, the money that she's willing to pay to get tickets to this, you know, this Taylor Swift phenomenon?

DEAN BUDNICK: Listen, big, extraordinary artists elicit extraordinary responses. I mean, particularly on on the arrest tour in which Taylor is spanning her career. Right. Performing 44 songs, not just focusing on her recent material, even though she's been putting out, you know, record after record over the past couple of years. But drawing on sort of the totality of her catalogue really is just had a lot of created excitement. Let's let's say that at a minimum.

AG: There have been some complaints, a fair number from fans, including the you know, about the complicated way tickets are allocated. And Abigail mentioned that she was registered. Can you explain why fans are asked to to register?

DEAN BUDNICK: Yeah, the intention by Ticketmaster is that this will limit the number of scalpers who are jumping in on the during the official on sale. And so Ticketmaster has everyone's information within their system who registers for verified fan and they can look at what shows they've been to in the past. They can gauge, you know, what kind of customer and not in terms of a value judgement, just in terms of what they've been done with those tickets over time simply to ensure the goal is that there will be a limited number of people who are then taking those tickets, which as you can imagine, are very, very valuable in terms of, you know, what they could elicit on the marketplace and then turn around and just just sell them to other people. The goal is to put tickets in the hands of fans.

AG: Right. And I guess, as Abigail said, because she was registered when other tickets became available after she struck out, she got information. There were some tickets.

DEAN BUDNICK: That is correct. Although it is worth it is worthy of note, Anthony, that just because you're registered didn't mean that you received a code. Right? There were plenty of people who did not receive codes and there were plenty of people who registered who also were informed that they were going to be on a waitlist. Right. So, you know, Ticketmaster is attempting to to address the you know, the problem that came with the influx of would be ticket purchasers back in the fall by sort of, you know, meting out the number of of codes that it that it distributes.

AG: One of the things people are complaining about is the service fees, which I understand are upwards of $80. What is that service fee and where does the money go?

DEAN BUDNICK: Sure. Now, in terms of upwards of $80, it can be plenty more than that because service fees are variable there depending on what the face value of the ticket is. And they're often they can be 30 to 40% on average of what the ticket price is. Now, as to where the proceeds then are allocated, Ticketmaster certainly shares in some of the service fees, the concert promoter shares in some of the service fees and the venue shares and some of the service fees. And this is established through contractual relationships that Ticketmaster has with the promoters, with the venues.

AG: Now when you mentioned Ticketmaster, it's owned by the biggest concert promoter Live Nation, and what impact does that have on the overall price?

DEAN BUDNICK: Well, the one thing I would say about the Taylor Swift tour is that her promoter, Louis Messina, is affiliated with Ticketmaster with Live Nation's loan competitor, AEG. So at least in this particular instance, there isn't the sort of relationship that make that makes people uncomfortable. However, when Live Nation is putting a ticket on sale for an event through Ticketmaster and particularly a ticket on sale at an event it owns for an artist that it manages. There's not a lot of pressure to keep those service fees down. And that's where some people tend to get a little bit agitated.

AG: And despite the complaints about high prices and the tickets for Taylor Swift and other major artists, they sell, you know, even higher prices on the resale market sites like StubHub. And I want to turn to whack a doodle here, but is there an argument the prices are actually set too low and that this is really what the market will bear? You know, if Abigail's $1,000, I'm sure there's other young women who are willing to do that.

DEAN BUDNICK: Sure. Listen, one can make that contention. And in fact, there was a Bruce Springsteen tour a little over a decade ago where he priced all of his tickets at $95 and he was getting all sorts of heat from his fans and a number of other individuals within the industry because they believed, he said his ticket price is way too low at that time and it simply encouraged scalpers and secondary ticket sellers to jump on in. I mean, certainly what one could make the case that these tickets are, you know, worth more in the marketplace. However, ultimately, that's a decision for the artist. I mean, does the artist want those tickets to go to his or her fans as soon as they go on sale? Or does she want them to sort of filter out? And by the way, if the tickets do filter out to the secondary market, the artist isn't going to profit from that ultimate sale as well, which is a consideration for certain individuals swinging back to Springsteen. That's why, you know, he instituted dynamic pricing on his recent tour. So which Taylor Swift does not do, by the way, to try to balance out what the on sale price would be and try to match it with what the secondary market price is.

AG: Dean, really appreciate your thoughts on this. Thanks a lot. Sure. That's Dean Budnick, editor of RELIX magazine, which covers the live music industry. He's also the co-author of the book Ticket Masters The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped. When Taylor Swift's ERA's Tour finally rolls into Toronto in November 2024. Fan expectations will be high, but so will the expectations of an economic boost is being dubbed Swift Genomics, and so far, Citi say her impact is undeniable. Daniel Tsai is a business professor at the University of Toronto and he joins me in our Toronto studio. Good morning.

DANIEL TSAI: Good morning.

AG: So what do you make about all the hype around ticket sales for these six Taylor Swift shows here in Toronto? Well, the.

DANIEL TSAI: Hype is real. There's going to be a lot of money coming into Toronto. We're looking at potentially $20 million for the tickets and so forth for the concerts per date. There's six of those dates. That's 100 million bucks. Wow. Plus, there is a spin off effects. Hotels are already doubling the cost of rooms in November 2024 already. Yes. Some of the hotels are going for over $900 a night. And as well, you can see that there's going to be some pricing gouging going on in terms of parking that's going to go up and restaurants are going to be maxed out and a whole bunch of other economic spinoffs.

AG: There's a report in Colorado that found that Swift's two shows Summer in July, led to $140 million boost to that state's GDP for the year. Similar boost report in Philadelphia and in total. Some estimates say her tour could generate $4.6 billion in consumer spending. What do you think that economic boost could could look like here above and beyond 120 million you mentioned?

DANIEL TSAI: It's going to be a lot more. First of all, those numbers are American figures. And if you do the conversion and work it out, Toronto and Ontario could be looking at and Canada could be looking at around 6 to $700 million and spin off effects. And the other thing that's really kind of interesting is her concerts aren't just about people who get tickets and go to the concert. It's also about the tailgating parties that come with it. Now we're talking Super Bowl epic proportions here, even bigger than Super Bowl. Some of these concerts have 10 to 20000 people outside of the concert listening Toronto. And here's a message to Rogers. If they open up the dome, potentially you could be looking at 30, 40, 50,000 people on Harbourfront outside just listening to Terry Swift for six nights.

AG: It's almost if Taylor Swift's your own industry, how do you see this going beyond Toronto? Because I know in my home province in Newfoundland, Labrador, people are already looking at flights, people hoping to get verified and find a code. How does it spread from Toronto to other parts of the country?

DANIEL TSAI: Well, you know, if Taylor Swift was a marketer, she'd have a Ph.D. in it. She's a genius at social media marketing and the viral nature of how social media works. She's built sort of what you would call a cult of personality around her brand. And the fact of the matter is, people are willing to spend big money on the experience of Taylor Swift as opposed to just calling this a concert. So I think what we have here is a generational event where people are saying, you know, I'm not going to worry about the recession or my purse strings and I will spend the big bucks this year.

AG: And given that so many people are willing to try to get tickets. You describe a certain scenario. How do businesses actually prepare for this tidal wave of Swifties?

DANIEL TSAI: Well, they need labour, Labour, they need staff. And so it's a strange time when she's coming. It's the shoulder season, it's low season. No one's really doing anything in November as we in Canada. It gets cold up here. And so what will happen is all these businesses, restaurants, hotels, people in the service, hospitality industry, they're going to try to get staff to be there for those two weeks that Taylor's going to be here. And the other thing as well is just look at the potential in terms of all the people that are going to be coming. It's not just people watching the shows, it's their families and everything else. So they're going to be a lot of spin effects.

AG: There've been other mega concerts this summer thinking of Beyoncé for for one example. How does the economic impact of a Swift concert compare to other sold out stadium shows that Canadian cities have hosted?

DANIEL TSAI: Well, this one is unprecedented. So, number one, she's doing six concerts here in Toronto. And if you look at Beyonce, it was two shows and one in Vancouver. So the scale of the number of shows is double what are triple what she was doing. And the fact of the matter is this economic spinoff effects will be that much greater.

AG: Do you expect, Professor Tsai, that we could see venues not just in Toronto and Montreal, Vancouver, some of the bigger cities pushing for more of these kinds of multiday mega concert extravaganzas in the future for big stars?

DANIEL TSAI: Well, that comes down to money. It's great to have these stars come, but they have to see an economic case for it. It just turns out that Toronto has the facilities and enough capacity to support an artist. Now, normally in the United States, she's doing venues that have capacity of 80,000 fans to go into the concert stadium. In this case, it's about half that here in Toronto. And that's why you have double the number of tour dates. But the economic benefits, like I said, potentially for tailgating and having these people fans go and visit at regions like Niagara, Montreal, etc., that's a huge potential upside.

AG: It wasn't that long ago, Daniel Schorr, that the idea of so many people gathering together would seem almost impossible to even think about, given what we've been through. How much of what we're seeing is about Swift herself and being out of the lockdown oppression that we've felt during the pandemic?

DANIEL TSAI: I think that's a part of it. I think the fact of the matter is there's a lot of pent up demand to spend some of these dollars. And but at the same time, Swift has her own unique phenomena. So I think this is like a once in a lifetime type experience for people. And she's so smart at her marketing that it's just building an idea to a viral haze for people. A lavender haze.

AG: Very well put it. I see what you did there, Port. Last question for you. Have you been able to get tickets to one of Taylor Swift shows here for research purposes of course?

DANIEL TSAI: Well, I'm going to say it's a blank space for me. I didn't get any tickets.

AG: Okay. You can't expense that. You have to You can't, you know, make that part of your sabbatical research.

DANIEL TSAI: Well, I'm hoping that I get some tickets to Abigail. She's wonderful. So I'll ask her.

AG: All right, listen, Daniel, I appreciate your thoughts on all this, and I hope you do manage to actually take in as Taylor Swift. So thanks a lot.

DANIEL TSAI: Thank you.

AG: Daniel Tsai is a professor of business at the University of Toronto.

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AG: Coming up, your campfire cooking. And we'll also remember Canadian rock great Robbie Robertson. I'm Anthony Jermaine. You're listening to The Current.

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Bringing finer dining to the campfire stove; Remembering musician Robbie Robertson

Guests: Chris Nuttall-Smith, Alan Smith

AG: I'm Anthony Germain and you're listening to The Current. To call Robbie Robertson a Canadian musical icon just seems insufficient. Icon just doesn't really capture his impact. He was the driving force behind the band, as you're hearing right now, backing up Bob Dylan and then going out on their own when they famously broke up, he forged a successful solo career and he influenced generations of musicians here in Canada and right around the world. Robbie Robertson has died at the age of 80 after a long illness. That song you're hearing, Chest Fever was just one of the band's many hits. He wrote or co-wrote most of them, including The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and The Shape I'm In. Alan Cross is a Canadian radio and TV broadcaster and a writer on music. Alan Hello.

ALAN CROSS: Hello.

AG: So, Alan, tell me what went through your mind when you heard that Robbie Robertson had passed away?

ALAN CROSS: Well, the first thing was I didn't know he was ill. I haven't run across him in person in a number of years, but every time I had, he seemed like a healthy, vital super, you know? Okay, dude. So when when he did when it was revealed that he died after a long illness, I was actually quite, quite surprised when that was followed by the feeling that, oh, here we go again. We have reached that period in history when almost every month, if not more frequently, we're hearing about one of our musical icons passing on. And this is a big problem for for baby boomers on down, because we have lived in a world where these people have always been with us, you know, since the 1960s, 1950s in some respects. And now we're all facing our mortality as we look at the actuarial tables and realised that these people who have provided the soundtrack to our lives with some of the greatest music ever written are going away.

AG: With Robbie Robertson. Maybe you could tell us how it all started. What did he first pick up a guitar?

ALAN CROSS: He was a nine or ten years old. He was living with his mum on the Six Nations Reserve west of Hamilton. His father had died just before he was born, so Mum brought him up as a single parent and he looked around and there were all the people on the reserve who were always playing music and he thought, You know what, I'd like to be able to do this. So he started watching them, listening to them. They started teaching him lessons on a cheap guitar. Meanwhile, he was lying awake at night with a transistor radio tuning in rock and roll stations from south of the border. And he got pretty good, the guitar so good that by the time he was six years old, he was playing with Ronnie Hawkins, who was this Arkansas refugee who would come north to ply his hillbilly rockabilly trade. And Ronnie Hawkins was a giant, you know, serious taskmaster with the people in his band. He made them play for hours and hours and hours, and then they'd rehearsed for hours and hours and hours. So they became the tightest thing that you could ever imagine. They played up and down Young Street and toured around North America. And then one day in 1965, Bob Dylan shows up and says, You've got a really tight band, Ronnie, I'm going electric. I need a backup band, and I'm stealing yours. And that was how the Hawks became the band. They were just referred to as Bob Dylan's band, which is why they were just the band. And then we have Dylan getting in the car and the motorcycle accident, leaving them to their own devices, and that's when the backup band became the band.

AG: This after the controversy of Dylan ditching acoustic. How would you describe what made the band unique at the time?

ALAN CROSS: They were. If we look at the first two albums, 68 and 69, the rest of the world was getting into, you know, early metal. It was getting into psychedelic sounds. It was still very much, you know, a hangover from the Summer of Love in 1967. That sounds like the band didn't do any of that. They played the regular rock and roll instruments. But Robbie Robertson was a storyteller, fascinated by many aspects of American culture and the songs that he wrote were. Unlike anything anybody had really tried up until that point. George Harrison was a giant fan of the band. Paul McCartney actually, when there was a performance of Hey Jude on television and he sings bits of the weight in his performance, Eric Clapton wanted to be a member of the band. So they were just they were musicians, musicians and anybody who knew what it took to make the kind of music that they made understood how important they were.

AG: I'm just thinking, Alan, when you mention those Eric Clapton, George Harrison McCartney, I mean, these are giants. When you think about the overall industry from a I guess from an artistic point of view, how how would you describe the impact that Robbie Robertson had on on popular music in his time?

ALAN CROSS: Well, it's almost incalculable because that sort of rootsy ness, that authenticity, that back to the land kind of rock and roll set the foundations for a genre that we would eventually call Americana, which exists today. You know, with bands like Wilco, The Revivalists and maybe Lumineers to a certain extent, and on and on. And I think it's fascinating that Americana was invented by a group that was 80% Canadian, led by a half indigenous man from Six Nations Reserve.

AG: Now, you interviewed him about his book, Legends, Icons and Rebels Music that Change the World. And that book celebrated 27 musical legends. He must have met just about every important person in North American music over the years. How do you think he saw himself fitting into the history, the history of music?

ALAN CROSS: I think he knew it, but he was never one to brag about it. He was you know, I did some stuff. I wrote some songs. I'm living a decent life. I'm comfortable with who I am and where I came from. He was never, you know, every time I met him, he was just like it was easy to be disarmed by his. Normally this year, you know, you'd be sitting talking to them in a green room before an event someplace, and you'd lose. You completely forget that this is the man that wrote the night they drove Dixie Down or chest fever or the weight in. You would never, ever figure it out from him. And not only was he important with, you know, rock and roll, but he was a collaborator with with Martin Scorsese. They worked on 14 different films together, ranging from Raging Bull to Casino to The Wolf of Wall Street to Gangs of New York. In fact, there's the new film Flowers of the Killer Moon. That's not out yet. That was Robbie Robertson's last musical project, working again with Martin Scorsese.

AG: It's not just The Last Waltz.

ALAN CROSS: No.

AG: So tell me, what's your favourite Robbie Robertson tune?

ALAN CROSS: Well, you play Chess Fever because I love how Garth Hudson plays that. But Lowrey Organ is just so, so dirty. But, you know, you listen to a song like The Weight, and it's almost biblical, you know, in its storytelling. I learned when I was growing up and I would hear in the night they drove Dixie down, I there was a history lesson. It was a genuine history lesson taken from the perspective of a Confederate soldier. It's this just so much there. But if I'm going to pick one song, I have to go to his 1987 album, Somewhere Down the Crazy River. And that particular song, you know, it has swampy as it has magic and the occult and mystery and darkness and weirdness, all the growth into one. Just a great piece of music.

AG: Alison, thanks a lot for your time and thank you for helping us remember Robbie Robertson.

ALAN CROSS: You're welcome.

Alan Cross is a Canadian radio and TV broadcaster and he writes about music.

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AG: Hello, I'm Anthony Germain, and you're listening to The Current. Well, there's something special about being in the wilderness, enjoying a delicious meal cooked over a fire.Chris Nuttall-Smith enjoyed a good camping trip, but what he didn't love was camp food. But as a food writer and a restaurant critic, he knew it didn't need to be this way. His new book is Cook It Wild All about how to Make Great Meals Outside and Over the Fire. Matt Galloway spoke with him in May. Here's that conversation.

MG: Chris, good morning.

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: Good morning. Great to see you.

MG: Good to see you. Let's start with the outdoors. What do you remember about when you were young and eating food outside?

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: I remember where we set our tent up on our first trip. We went to Pacific Rim National Park with my family. We had one of these kind of flopsy tents that could barely stand up. We used to be able to camp on the beach there, this area called Schooner Cove. And I'll never forget my dad set the tent up below the tide line. What did we know? It was our first time.

MG: In coming in.

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: In coming in the middle of the night, you know, very, very quick. Relocation. The food wasn't a huge part of what we did. When it really begins registering was when I was in grade 12. When I was in university, I used to hitchhike out to the Rockies. I grew up in B.C. and I would eat Mr. noodles and power bars. I would eat, you know, what I think a lot of people still eat. But I went one summer to an area called Lake Ohara in Yoho National Park, and the campfire next to me in the base camp were grilling sausages. And I will never forget the smell of their dinner as I was there, just kind of choking down some rehydrated horrible fuel and thinking, I want to eat like this outside.

MG: So this book is, I mean, there might be sausages, but there's much more in here as well. When did you start to think, and I ask you this as somebody who loves food, I've sat and ate with you. I've seen what you love and how you eat and how you think about food. When did you realize that that identity, that part of your identity could be mixed with your love of the outdoors?

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: Well, they never did mix until I realized on a trip with some friends who I call them accomplished indoors people. They were not hikers, they were not campers. I brought them canoeing on a trip and told them, you know, pack light, We got to go easy. I was expecting very, very simple meals. And my friend Sasha who is this incredible cook, we’re on the portage and I say, hey, what did you bring? And she says, well, I've got a block of frozen squid.

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: And my eyes, I remember bugging out and thinking, this weekend is going to be a disaster. She'd meal prepped everything, though. She'd done the chopping, the mixing, the measuring, she'd pre-cooked the vegetables. She made the most spectacular paella I've ever had in my life to this day. And it took her 25 minutes and no work. And we just had this course after course of beautiful food that was easy to transport, easy to prepare, that was joyful. That really made the trip for us. And that's when I started realizing if you prep food ahead of time, if you do whatever work there is before, you can have the most beautiful meals when you're camping and you can do it in a way that doesn't knock you out at home. The prep doesn't have to be, you know, a huge labour and more than half the recipes in the book take less than 10 minutes at camp. So it's easy there as well.

MG: This is a really practical book. I mean, from how to pack a cooler to how to make sure that, you know, the bear doesn't eat your food, all of the various steps that you would perhaps not think about. What do people get wrong when they think about the food that they could be eating when they are out camping? And again, you can be car camping, you can be deep in the bush, but what do people get wrong?

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: Camping is a really private endeavour. It's something people do on their own, with their families or with small groups. The shared knowledge isn't really out there, so people get a ton of stuff wrong from, you know, we'll be on a portage and I will see families who are obviously new to camping carrying flats or bottled water because they don't know that you can filter your water. I think one of the greatest kind of myths of eating outdoors, though, is that you have to pack like you're going to Everest base camp. You need to bring a stove that's a blow torch that will boil water and not do much else, and you need to bring dehydrated, freeze dried kind of survivalist food in the packages. When you walk into an outdoor store, that's what you see. That's what they sell. And I do not fault them for doing that, but the reality is if you know what you're doing, you can bring, and you can keep this lightweight, by the way, you can bring beautiful cheeses that don't need refrigeration. You can bring DANDAN noodles that will last in your pack for a week without refrigeration. You can bring so many beautiful foods that are easy to prepare, that are going to make people delighted. And you know what you said in the intro about eating around a campfire or if you've got a stove, those moments around a fire or a stove in the most beautiful places in the world, frankly, at the peak of produce season, yeah, why not indulge in that, Enjoy it, especially if you can do it in a way that anybody can do?

MG: How did you figure out that these recipes would actually work? Again, most people aren't thinking of making a risotto or a paella or fondue when they're camping. How did you, aside from thinking about it, understand that these things would actually, people could actually pull them off?

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: There were a few steps in that. One of them was just realizing these are the techniques, the things that you can universally do at home. Like when you do, you know, chop and mix vegetables or measure things at home or pre-cook some things at home, those work almost universally across recipes. So the planning phase was really sitting down in blue sky going, okay, camp food to a lot of people is still hotdogs and beans. What else can we do? How do people like to eat? What about some just indulgent beautiful pastas or fresh vegetables or a bit of fruit, you know? And the other thing I wanted to do in kind of conceiving this was most camp cookbooks are only for car campers. They're only if you can carry a lot of weight. I really wanted to make a book that included backpackers because I backpack, paddlers because I paddle, RVs because I have a tiny little rooftop tent on my car that I use all summer. So I wanted it to go across the kind of span of the outdoors community. So the conception part was that. But then, you know, I went backpacking, I went paddling. I took a friend into a Jasper for five days on a backpacking trip and we cooked out there. We carried our food. We literally drew crowds of backpackers around a pot of lentils one day, people just saying, what is that? These people were like bug eyed with hunger. And to go out there and field test this and make sure this works, make sure this makes sense for a trip was a really important part of developing the book.

MG: And again, a lot of this is about taking steps before you leave, before you leave your house, to prep things, to pre-cook some stuff, pack it away, freeze it so that when you get there, you don't have four hours of work to do, but you can present a meal. Again, risotto in a park in the middle of nowhere, that's going to be delicious and kind of stun your audience.

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: Risotto is one of those great examples. You know, whenever you go to a restaurant and they say, oh, we're going to make the risotto fresh for you, no, they're not. That is a lie. They never do. Risotto is always pre-cooked to 80%. You pre-cook it at home to 80%, you chill it, you put it in a little zip top bag. When you get to camp, you put it in a pot with a bit of water, you stir it for five minutes and you've got a spectacular, I love the words restaurant quality, but it is a restaurant quality risotto. You know, you put vegetables on it, whatever. The paella, you pre-cook the vegetables so you go there and it's easy to do. You know, in other cases, you know, there's a pancake mix I make with buttermilk powder. It's just a basic ingredient. You can get it at any bulk store. You just add water and you have these fluffy, beautiful buttermilk pancakes. If you want French toast, you make the batter at home, you whisk it up, you put it in a little bottle and you freeze it. It's so easy to do once you're there. So there are so many of these tricks that once you understand them, they're completely intuitive. You know, but the other thing that's important in the book is I also list, hey, here's a bunch of foods you can get at the grocery store that are instant, that you don't have to cook, that you should be thinking about because you don't need to make every single thing from scratch. There's a spread on, you know, the cheeses to bring. Canadians, I think most Canadians believe that if you leave a block of cheese on the counter for more than five minutes, you know, and you touch it afterwards, you're going to die immediately. Cheese was developed through millennia to last without refrigeration. Cheese making is a storage technique. So I list, hey, here are the great cheeses you can bring camping that are delicious. A beautiful piece of cheese when you're out in the middle of nowhere is a spectacular thing. So there are so many tricks like that that you pick up, that you learn. And I see them now in people's hands even from last weekend. People are so delighted to be eating great food out in the wild.

MG: Where will you go this summer and what will you cook?

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: Our big trip will be to Haida Gwaii, which I'm so excited about. It's a five-day paddling trip. The one catch is it's guided. The logistics of paddling off Haida Gwaii are so challenging of getting gear that we went with guiding. There'll be cooking, which will be an exercising kind of restraint…

MG: Restraint.

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: Restraint for me, but it should be good. But we will do a ton of paddling around Ontario as we always do. You know, we'll be going to the French River off Georgian Bay. And on those trips, we do a ton of cooking. I'm also hoping to sneak in an early fall backpacking trip in B.C.

MG: Nice. As I mentioned, this is great guidance for people and inspiration for people who are going to get out. But if people want somebody else to cook for them and they can afford to go to a restaurant, you have this list of what you say are the 20 best places to eat in this country for Maclean's magazine. What was the single best meal that you had when you were putting this thing together?

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: Oh, man, there were so many. I love, I love the restaurant Mon Lapin in Montreal. To me, it's the perfect restaurant. It's joyful. The feeling in there is light. The cooking is fresh right from the Jean-Talon market next door. I had some beautiful sliced fluke fish. They preserve tiny little sungold tomatoes every summer, and then they make a jelly out of the brine. So you have these little like yellow diamonds of cold tomato jelly next to the fish. They pour hot brown butter over top. That was pretty spectacular. But, you know, I had some of the best, some of the best Indian cooking I've ever had. I had this spectacular soup at a place called the Fish Man in Richmond, B.C. that was made with a whole B.C. rock fish and pickled cabbage and Sichuan chillies. It's a soup that they put down in front of you and the steam is one of the most intoxicating things you've ever kind of bathed in. We all just sat around that bowl of soup for a good solid minute just thinking, what do we do with this? This is so good. There are so many great restaurants and so many great experiences across Canada. It was a real joy to experience that.

MG: Is a $600 meal better than a $20 dinner of dosa?

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: Emphatically no.

MG: Okay. Can you explain why that is? Because people will. And there are restaurants that are very expensive here and there are restaurants that are not expensive. One 2 Snacks here in Toronto that I love.

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: One of my favourite places.

MG: I'm reluctant to mention any other names because I'll never get into them now because you've written them up. But explain why price doesn't really matter.

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: Price doesn't matter and price matters. I think most restaurant lists, I don't think most restaurant lists. This is fact. The big fancy restaurant lists generally don't include less expensive places. It's about where is expensive, where's fancy, where's the decor well-appointed, you know, where are the service staff kind of jumping all over to get you what you need? And I think the reality of going out to eat is you can have a spectacular meal at a dosa place at Guru Lukshmi in Mississauga. I think it's one of the toughest reservations in the GTA. Getting in there is really, really tough, but dinner is 20 bucks. One 2 Snacks to this day, and I think this is actually a problem, but bless them, not a single thing in that restaurant cost more than $10. The labour and the love and the skill and the tradition that go into these beautiful plates of noodles and soups there are incredible. I think what unifies great restaurants is a sense of joy, a sense of hospitality, a sense when you're in there that you are somewhere incredibly special and you are experiencing something that is not an everyday thing. And you can find that in very expensive restaurants and there are very expensive restaurants on the list. You can find that in mid-range restaurants and those are disappearing in a lot of places in Canada. You can also find them in very inexpensive places.

MG: The pandemic was not kind to restaurants and restaurateurs, the people who work in them and the people who run these institutions. What did you see coming out of the worst of the pandemic in terms of that scene and a scene that you know really well?

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: Coming out of the pandemic was about what you would see and also what you wouldn't see. The first thing is a lot of places disappeared. A lot of very good places disappeared. A lot of the mid-range disappeared. The places where you might take your family on a Wednesday night or a Tuesday night when you're home from work, you're too tired to cook, you want something simple that's not going to cost a lot, but you want it to be a nice time. I went out for one of those meals with my family to a place we used to go to and the bill was $170. You don't do that again at that price. So prices have come way up. And for the most part, this isn't gouging. This is the cost of Labour.

MG: Actually paying people for their work.

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: Actually paying people. You know, one of the things that I really saw is in a lot of places, and this is by no means across the board, but in a lot of places and especially more expensive places, staff are getting paid a real living wage now. They're working four-day workweeks. They're incredibly hard days, but they're four days now, so they have a weekend. There are benefits, but rents have gone up. Costs of, I mean, anybody who grocery shops know that food is far more expensive. So we lost a lot of restaurants. We also lost a lot of the mid-range, although it's still there, it's still possible. One of the things that I've really noticed and really begun to lean on is the importance of international restaurants, places in the suburbs maybe that have been the mid-range heroes all along. They're still great, they're still there and they are still for the most part affordable. But what I also saw in restaurants was, especially the places that I fell in love with that I listed, was a sense of joy, a sense of relief, a sense of happiness to be back professional restaurant people, whether they work in the kitchens or whether they work out front, this is what they do. You get a real sense of joy, of purpose, and I found that in Spades. It was so beautiful to be in to experience, you know, to eat that food, to be around those people. I think good restaurants today, and there are so many of them in Canada, are so special. I think we all value them more. The one other thing I saw is patrons are generally so much happier to be out. I missed restaurants. I think so many people missed restaurants. So many people missed the experience of being out in a beautiful dining room with happy people, you know, drinking, eating, talking, catching up on the week, making up for lost time. That is such a common feeling right now in restaurant dining rooms. It's a beautiful thing. I don't know how you could ever replace it.

MG: Especially when life is expensive. And I mean, this is not a daily thing or a weekly thing or a monthly thing for many people. When you go to a restaurant, it's a big deal when life is so costly and you want it to mean something. And that joy kind of matters at the heart of it, right?

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: I think I used the word joy about 15 times in my piece because that's really what I went looking for. There are a lot of restaurants, not just in Canada, but around the world where it's all about the chef, it's all about, you know, the hauteur, you know, they're temples to cuisine and all that. I don't care about that anymore. I really don't. I mean, great food is great, but what I really want is a welcome. What I really want is to see in the faces of the staff and the faces of the people behind the stove that they look happy, they look like they're glad to be there. I want to see a great welcome. I want to see a sense of lightness. Eating out is a special occasion. I get to eat out for a living. I think I went to 57 restaurants for this package.

MG: Hard job.

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: It's still a special occasion. It's still eating out. You feel like you are a lucky person. I don't do it nearly as often with my family anymore. So yeah, it is a special occasion. And I think the restaurants that work great, the restaurants on this list are places that recognize that, that treat their guests like that and also treat their staff like that, like their staff are doing something vital and important and skilled.

MG: So in the last couple of minutes we have, take us to one of those places and one of those dishes where all of that comes together, where it just lands and that sense of joy is felt the moment you walk through the door or into the parking lot.

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: I'm going to take you to Ucluelet. Ucluelet, B.C., it's on the outer West Coast. There's a restaurant called PLUVIO that's run by a couple there. It's a tiny little room. It's in, you know, a surf and fishing and holiday town. You walk in and you expect it to be very, very relaxed, which it is, but, you know, you don't expect anybody to be working too, too hard. I mean, this is where you move to get away from it all. This couple are making everything from scratch from the soy sauce. They're sourcing from all over Vancouver Island. The food is fun. There's just a spirit of playfulness to what they put in front of you. They have a tiny little hot dog they bring you. It's a squid hot dog with this freeze of shallots on top. It's like looking at a children's toy almost. I mean, you see it and you can't help but be happy. And it's so delicious and the staff are so delighted to be serving it. They're in on this great secret, this great, you know, Joy as they bring it. They so clearly love what they do. Being in a place like that to me is such an affirming thing. You get food that you're never going to make at home and you have an experience around other people who are also so delighted, so tickled to be there, so happy with what they see. That to me is an evening beautifully, beautifully spent.

MG: The enthusiasm that you have will make people hungry by default, but hopefully they will take that hunger and maybe cook something from the book or go to one of these places. Chris, thank you as always.

CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH: It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me, Matt.

AG: Chris Nuttall-Smith is a food writer and author.

His book is called 'Cook it Wild'.

He spoke with Matt Galloway in May.

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Love, Janessa – Ep. 6

AG: I'm Anthony Germain and you're listening to The Current. Throughout the summer, we're bringing you some of the CBC's best podcasts. Today we continue "Love, Janessa", with host Hannah Ajala. And a note, this deals with mature content.

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JANESSA: Good morning!

LAURA: Wow, hi. We brought Hannah with us.

HANNAH AJALA: Hi.

LAURA: And this around. There we go.

HANNAH AJALA: Hi, nice to see you.

JANESSA: How are you?

HANNAH AJALA: Let me set the scene. I'm in Nigeria, and that second voice is my producer, Laura. In Vanessa's apartment in the U.S.. I'm being carried around on a laptop, getting the full 360 tour via video chat. I'm really good. Thanks. It's so good to see you.

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JANESSA: We're trying to figure out what we're going to do like the sound, but I think my bedroom.

HANNAH AJALA: She looks relaxed. Black summer dress. A cascade of thick black hair. It's kind of fitting that even though we're finally together, we're talking to each other digitally, and yet it still feels like a reunion, which is ridiculous. Right? I mean, I don't know Vanessa at all. All I know are the images of her alter ego, Janessa Brazil. I want to find out exactly where Janessa ends and Vanessa begins.

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JANESSA: Now he's coming up. I buzzed him in. Yeah. So he should be coming up in a minute.

HANNAH AJALA: Donuts and coffee are being delivered.

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JANESSA: Right so then for this. Oh, yay coffee.

HANNAH AJALA: With Vanessa's apartment is a one bedroom condo. Small kitchen, big couch in the living room, but not a ton of furniture. It's nice, but modest, really. And it's very hot.

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JANESSA: I'm sweating. Don't mind me. It's supposed to get hotter, though. And I need to get this air conditioning fix before it gets worse. Alrighty, let's check out.

HANNAH AJALA: Her little dog is running around.

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JANESSA: Jasper, he's a little French bulldog.

HANNAH AJALA: Oh, my gosh.

JANESSA: He's so cute. Yeah, he's a sweetie. He's my baby.

HANNAH AJALA: Then we go into our bedroom. There's a scented candle flickering. A giant bed, piles of makeup and clothes. It's like a spa collided with a slumber party.

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HANNAH AJALA: What do the words say?

JANESSA: Oh, says dream. And the little neon sign.

HANNAH AJALA: I've seen it before, actually. That neon sign of the word dream that sits on the wall above Vanessa's headboard. It's prominent in videos from her caming days. This room also contains a lot of tech equipment, and Vanessa knows how to use it. There's a problem with a laptop camera, and she solves it faster than my producers do. And when we're all set up, she hopes up on the bed and looks directly into the camera.

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JANESSA: We are in my bedroom right now where the magic happens and I mean where I make my money on webcam made my money. But yeah, in the comfort of my own bed.

HANNAH AJALA: Throughout this podcast, so many people have spoken for Janessa Brazil, the scammers, of course, who stole her images and put words in her mouth, and those who escaped, who claim that Janessa Brazil needs their help, their love. I can't imagine what it's been like for her if she sees herself as a victim or if she feels at all responsible for the damage that's been done in her name. But what right do I have to even think she should be remorseful? Is the worm on the hook guilty? These are the questions running through my head as we settle into talk at last. Now, finally, the real Janessa Brazil gets to speak for herself. From CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. My name is Hannah Ajala, and this is Love, Janessa. The story of my wild quest to find the woman whose face and body is the bait used in catfishing schemes around the world. Episode six Love, Vanessa.

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JANESSA: Should I say my real name or my model name? Vanessa is my real name. My model name is Janessa Brazil.

HANNAH AJALA: And where were you born?

JANESSA: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1982.

HANNAH AJALA: Vanessa grew up in a mountain village about 3 hours north of Rio.

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JANESSA: Very small town feel. It was a street that went downhill and a bunch of houses, you know, up and down the cobblestone streets. All the kids played together. It was just kind of a little community village type of thing, you know. And then we had the park up there and we hung out in the park. I used to love just walking around the streets. And then at night I used to love going out, dancing at the discotheques. So I sneaked in. So it's pretty disturbing because I didn't realize it until I went back there after so many years and seeing these little girls act like that. Like I started drinking at nine years old.

HANNAH AJALA: Vanessa's childhood, as she tells it, contained a lot of sadness. Her father wasn't in the picture much. Her parents divorced when she was young. Soon after, Vanessa's mom moved to the US with a new boyfriend.

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JANESSA: My mom actually left me and my brother behind on my sixth birthday, and my brother was two. And I'll never forget that day. So yeah, it was tough.

HANNAH AJALA: Vanessa's father had 13 siblings and for years she and her brother bounced around between relatives homes. Finally landing with an aunt and uncle in 1994, when she was 12, Vanessa joined her mother in the States.

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JANESSA: So she used to be a dentist in Brazil. But when she got here, she couldn't practice. She would have to go back to school. So she became a dancer and a stripper.

HANNAH AJALA: Vanessa describes herself as a shy immigrant kid with an unhappy home life to fit in. She learned English fast and swallowed her accent. She went to a private all girls school.

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JANESSA: I put myself through high school because my mom was like, I can't afford to pay. So my mom went from being a stripper to making costumes for strippers. That was her business. And so she taught me how to sew, and I helped her make costumes. I made my own prom dresses, my own bikinis, and she paid me $600 a month, goes to school, and that's how I put myself through.

HANNAH AJALA: She'd always been a good actress, dressing up and pretending to be someone she wasn't for fun.

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JANESSA: You know, it was just my thing. I love that I was living such a horrible life. What I was doing was pretending that I was an actress in a movie. These things were not true. They were a script. So I detached myself and just became this other person. This was my role and I was going to play it and I was going to play it. Well. Little did I know that everything that I played well at was going to lead me here today. Be careful what you wish for.

HANNAH AJALA: I know that many of us are walking around wondering about paths not taken. What if. Fill in the blank. Then who would I have been? But Vanessa's story seems unusually riddled with these junctures points where things just happen to things beyond her control. Events that changed everything. Here's one. Vanessa was a really good student. She says she has a photographic memory. She could study for a test on the bus to school and ace it by the end of high school. She had her eye on studying international business at university in Hawaii.

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JANESSA: But I didn't realize that I didn't have a Social Security number and I was illegal, so I was not able to apply for college.

HANNAH AJALA: Vanessa says her mother hadn't told her that she was undocumented. She has our papers now, but at the time, a door slammed shut. She didn't go to college and said she got serious with her boyfriend, an older guy, a bouncer she met at a nightclub.

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JANESSA: And we grew up together. I was a kid.

HANNAH AJALA: So how long were you together for?

JANESSA: Um, let's see. We were together six years before we got engaged. And then nine years of marriage.

HANNAH AJALA: The day before they were married, Vanessa got in a car accident. Not too serious, but she got a settlement.

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JANESSA: I've always wanted a boob job, so, you know, I made money with my car crash, so I figured, you know what? Road by myself. New boobs and a new car. So that's what I did.

HANNAH AJALA: Vanessa Modeled about Then what does a massage therapist. She took an admin job in an office.

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JANESSA: What was the amount of money I used to make? Say, probably like 500 bucks a week. You know, I was married. I had a nice little job. I helped out with bills or whatever.

HANNAH AJALA: A low key life. Vanessa describes herself as someone who wore a lot of turtlenecks. But then on a holiday, another one of those junctures.

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JANESSA: Me and my ex-husband were on vacation in Florida, and we're just sitting there. Minding our own business. Beach was packed and you just get that like feeling, you know, one that feeling people, like, staring at you. I look back and I see this couple. They keep moving over until they finally get to us and we start talking a nice couple. And she was very beautiful, you know, very porn star like, you know, big boobs and his lips and just that distinctive look about her. So we got to talking and she finally tells me that she's the porn star and her husband is her manager. At that time, I was very, very innocent. Next thing you know, start telling me about Web cam and how much money I could make. And I'd be really great at this because I'm so beautiful, blah, blah, blah, the whole story. We go back home and I was like, I don't think I don't think we're going to do that. But, you know, I kept it in the back of my head. I was already having problems at work with sexual harassment, so I gave it a second thought. And I like to give things a chance, you know, try everything once. Then you can say if you like it or you don't. So I talked to my husband and he said he'll be totally cool with me working on webcam and, you know, nudes or whatever I was comfortable with. He was okay with me doing so. That was like the biggest thing for me. So long as he's fine, I'll take it at my own pace. Because you don't have to be nude. You can start off with clothes and progress from there.

HANNAH AJALA: They were living in Tampa, Florida, at the time.

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JANESSA: So I'd get home around 5:30 in the afternoon from my regular job, hop on cam for a couple of hours and kind of get warmed up, see if something was going to be of my liking or if I was going to be comfortable right away.

HANNAH AJALA: She made a connection with the fans.

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JANESSA: I'll never forget the noises from the site, like the noises that it made. Every time a guy would I don't know what it is from their end, but if they liked you, there would be a whistle noise. Boo! Boo, boo! (noise sounds) That noise would just be constantly going to the point where it didn't stop. (noise contines to sound)

HANNAH AJALA: A woman taking her clothes off in front of a camera.

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HANNAH AJALA: What is that experience like?

JANESSA: Right. Well, my husband was my first. I was a virgin when I met him, so I don't have a lot of experience. And I was really shy. So I just went on there and I said, You know what? I'm going to make an alter ego and I'm going to be someone completely different. You know, it's not really me, so I won't be ashamed of what I was doing once that camera turned on. That was it.

HANNAH AJALA: She decided to give the persona a name. Janessa Brazil.

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JANESSA: There are only two reasons why I picked that name. So it's still the same, but different, right? The last name Brazil, obviously it's from where I'm from, but also is one of the most searched words on the Internet. First page on Google immediately. You know, that was pretty much it. I hate that name. Janessa Brazil, but it helped me. It helped me get popular quickly.

HANNAH AJALA: How did you learn to get into the act and perform on camera?

JANESSA: I just went with it. Like, whatever came to my mind and whatever the guys were asking me to do. And it eventually I, you know, made my own thing go like my own personality. It helped me become very sexually aware of myself as a woman. So it was a great learning experience.

HANNAH AJALA: Immediately the money started rolling in, so she decided to quit her day job.

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JANESSA: This is what everyone wants to do. Go in your bosses office and be like, I quit! And not have a worry in the world because you're making triple of the money. Somewhere else in half of the time.

HANNAH AJALA: It was the late 2006 on the Internet was evolving fast. The shift from the web is a gigantic library of porn to a perpetual peepshow was underway, but it would still be several years before subscription platforms for live sex shows really took off with the idea of an adult entertainment model having a website building and controlling her own image and money. It was still relatively new. Porn is an industry that often marginalizes female creators or flat out exploits them. Vanessa says she was one of the first to upend that system.

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JANESSA: I started being able to think outside the box. I was trying to think of ways of doing things that nobody else was doing. I launched my website the Summer 2008 and made my first appearance on Howard Stern shortly after, and that's when everything blew up.

HANNAH AJALA: At the time, Howard Stern was one of the biggest radio hosts in the U.S. There's a video of this appearance online. Vanessa walks into the studio in a leopard print bikini and high heels. And Stern asks her if she'd like to remove everything but the heels. She does. Then she rides a machine that resembles a pommel horse from gymnastics. That's probably the part of the segment that most people tuned in for. But Vanessa also hangs around for an interview. She holds her own standing naked among a group of clothed, middle aged dudes. She's funny, impressive, unflappable, and only 27 years old.

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JANESSA: And when I did my interview, my whole website crashed. With so many people joining it. I mean, it was insane. You know, I was on the air for 45 minutes. It was a great experience.

HANNAH AJALA: Vanessa was building herself into a brand. The Janessa Brazil image was carefully cultivated. She had a long game in mind.

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JANESSA: I never cross over into a boy/girl because once I did that, there was no coming back from that. Like, I could go and get a regular job still. But if I crossed over, I'm not really sure that would be possible. I was offered, I think, like 500,000 for my first boy/girl scene. But I was like, No, no, no, no. Because if I were to do Boy/girl, I would control the content. I would do the video and everybody that's been waiting for me to do boy/girl. I would get 100% of that money. I'm like, I'm not that dumb. I'd probably triple that over time. You have to think about these things, you know? And a lot of girls make that mistake because they offer them a lot of money for boy/girl scenes. Instant gratification. That's what they're looking for. And they don't think about these things and they don't last.

HANNAH AJALA: Vanessa had her sights set on a more analog marker of success. She says she called Penthouse the adult magazine. She got a meeting and ended up with an eight page spread. And then in 2013, Vanessa, as Janessa Brazil made the cover of Penthouse Portugal.

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JANESSA: Another one for the books.

HANNAH AJALA: At the peak of her career through subscriptions and live shows and carefully managing her brand. Vanessa says she was bringing in about $1,000,000 a year. And it wasn't just money. There were gifts, too. Vanessa would post wish lists online of stuff she wanted and it would show up on her doorstep.

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JANESSA: Piles and piles of boxes like clothes, shoes, anything I put on my wish list, I would get it or buy me gifts for my birthday or just anything. Outfits for Cam like costumes, gift cards. We had to get a storage unit. I paved the way to the other girls and they still watch my videos to this day to see what was she doing.

HANNAH AJALA: And what exactly was the thing that Janessa Brazil did so well.

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JANESSA: So you got to think like your mind is powerful, right? You can really get yourself going by just thinking of things. You ask them what they want. What do they like? Not about me. Me, me, me. They're paying me $20 a minute. It's all about them. It's kindness and caring. You don't judge them for the weird things you're to be like. I'm into it, too. Let's. Let's go. And when they see a hot girl not judging them and making things. Okay. So that's what sets me apart. Because most of the time, I actually do care. And I want to please them, and I want to have fun with that. And they get hooked and they get like, Oh, shoot, I really liked that. I didn't even know I liked that. I do. I know you like something before you actually like it, because I read and research. I read endless books on psychology, hypnotism and how to manipulate their minds, but not in a bad way. That's what they're there for. So let's play. Bring it. You know, and I shock them every time, you know, like, Whoa, whoa, what's next? And they come back for more caring and kindness. You win their hearts, you win their wallets, and the rest is history.

HANNAH AJALA: But as the Janessa Brazil machine got bigger and bigger, it needed to be fed. And the fuel was Vanessa. It became too much. Coming had started as an after work side hustle, but several years in it had become all consuming. Vanessa says that she was now the breadwinner in her marriage and the marriage was falling apart. All of it was wearing on her mental health. She says she got a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which she contested and started taking prescription drugs. She was working long hours in front of the camera.

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JANESSA: Sometimes 24, 48 hours at a time. I wasn't getting sleep. Just like moneymaking machine. You know, eventually I became soulless. I was just, like, gone. Like my eyes. There was no one in there. And my fans saw that. They all knew something was happening. You know, I couldn't get on Cam unless I was wasted. Drinking two bottles of wine a night, four or five days a week. I'm like, This is not a life if I need to do this to get on there. There's no way I can keep this going.

HANNAH AJALA: And to make matters worse. There was another layer of stress in her life. That layer is the reason for this interview and this whole journey and why I wanted to meet with Vanessa in the first place. The scammers. If we go back to the first time that you discovered someone was using your name with a scam. Do you remember it?

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JANESSA: This started a very long time ago. This guy comes into my chat and he says that we're married. I was like. I'm sorry. What? And they're like, You're my wife. And you told me you were going to quit this. And I went, Is this guy joking with me? Is this like a prank? And I was like, Why don't you send me an email and tell me what's going on? And that's when I started to realize what was happening.

HANNAH AJALA: And it wasn't just the victims. She says the scammers started popping up in the chat during her shows, too.

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JANESSA: They would come in and ask me to do weird things, put your hand on your head, or like put a red hat on, because that was the ways they would prove to these other people they're scamming. That's the real me. It got out of control. But what was crazy was my friends were getting messages from these scammers pretending to be me.

HANNAH AJALA: How did you feel knowing that your image was being used in such a way?

JANESSA: I didn't think I was going to get out of control the way it did. I thought it was going to be one of those things that was just going to pass. And I was like, You know what? This is probably like a fad. It's going to blow over. It's going to be fine. And next thing you know, I'm just like everybody would come in my chat and would say, You're my girlfriend. I sent you money to get your visa. What do you still do? I'm like, What is going on? It was a nightmare. I felt bad for these guys. What am I supposed to do? They're asking me to prove my identity now. I'm like, That's not my job. I'm here to have fun on webcam.

HANNAH AJALA: Did you respond to any of them?

JANESSA: I did. I did respond to pretty much all of it at first. It took me about 5 hours a day to respond to these scam emails. I literally would respond to every single one of them. And then my ex-husband started monitoring my chats. And he's like, You cannot keep doing this because people are leaving your chat. You're losing money. It's becoming like a drama, you know, negativity, drama. It affected everything. My mood, my money. I didn't want to work. It was like, too much.

HANNAH AJALA: Do you have a sense or a figure in mind of how many of these imposters have been using your face or identity?

JANESSA: While I have a few fans that told me how much they lost. And I have to say, I think the one with the most money was $70,000. How do you send that much money to somebody you don't know? Like if I got all the money that these guys sent, all these scammers, I would be a billionaire today, not sitting here in my little apartment. It's incredible.

HANNAH AJALA: It is incredible. And to be honest, it's something I don't think I've ever been able to wrap my head around. Why these men keep going back, emptying their pockets for someone they think is jealous of Brazil, someone they've never met in the real world. But Vanessa has a very clear view of what she thinks is going on.

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JANESSA: It's the heart. Men are caretakers by nature. They want to take care of women. And there's a purpose for them because they're going to take care of this girl and she's possibly going to love him back. See, most of us grow up not knowing what unconditional love is. Most of us grow up knowing what conditional love is. So even if they don't have the money, they're still willing to give it just to feel loved. The breadcrumbing is the worst part that these scammers do. They keep them on the hook, so they show love and then they take it away. And when they take it away, the guys get desperate and they're willing to do anything to get it back. That's just how the brain works. I know this because I went through it just to get that tiny little bit of love. It's all about wanting someone to love you and you're willing to do anything just for a little bit of that high. And the highs and lows is what they're doing. So they breadcrumb them. Take it away. Give it, take it away. And every time they take it away, these men are willing to do a little bit more than the last time. And that's why they keep coming back. It hurts me. My heart hurts. Not even because of the money, like where I could have had it. But for them.

HANNAH AJALA: By the mid 2010’s a decade since the invention of Janessa Brazil, the Internet was changing. New online platforms for explicit performances were emerging, and Vanessa gave it a try. But reentering the cam world didn't feel very good to her.

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JANESSA: So I just decided to give it up. I couldn't look at myself on there anymore. I couldn't look at pictures of myself. I couldn't look at videos of myself. I just was like, Nope, can't do this. Just brings me back. I knew. Every video that I've recorded, every picture I've taken, I could go through it all and tell you exactly what was happening that day and how I felt. You can see it in my eyes.

HANNAH AJALA: This was around 2016, the time when Janessa Brazile's online presence faded. The fake Janessa Brazil's were proliferating and their targets were tracking down Vanessa the stories.

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JANESSA: It was sad. I started becoming depressed, you know, and then like blaming myself. Maybe if my pictures weren't out there. These men wouldn't be getting scammed. Or maybe I should stop doing content. I no longer want to give them the power to use anything of mine ever again. You know, when I shut that cam off, I was just like, I felt not awful, but numb. I knew it wasn't for me anymore. I need to move on. That person is no more. There's just too many bad memories attached to that. I left that behind. The one thing that I was still hanging on to was Janessa. That attached me to that past life. And I needed to let it go. That's when I started focusing on Vanessa. Finding her again. Pulling her out. And healing everything that came along with her that I had forgotten because Vanessa got lost in there, you know? So now it was time to care about Vanessa, like, take care of me for once.

HANNAH AJALA: She got divorced and she says she left without much money.

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JANESSA: I packed my car and I left everything behind, and I drove from Florida and started my new life from scratch. I had nothing to show for my previous work.

HANNAH AJALA: Vanessa ended up in the small town where she is for our interview. Even though she wasn't posting much, she kept hearing from people who had fallen for the scammer version of Janessa Brazil. So here's a question. There are a lot of pictures of beautiful, semi-naked women online available for the taking. What was it about Vanessa that made scammers choose her? How do they know she would have this mass appeal?

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JANESSA: I say my looks. My look is very versatile. I can pass off for Italian, maybe Greek. You know.

HANNAH AJALA: It's true. Vanessa's beauty is racially ambiguous. A global look for a global scam and the sheer volume of Janessa Brazil images in circulation was exceptional.

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JANESSA: You know, I had a lot of candid videos just like I did with my pictures. I took phone videos, you know, just me out there being regular girl. And they used that. I put myself out there completely, you know, my private life and then my work life. So they had a lot to work with. It never really died out. The scammers kept alive. They kept my image alive. No publicity is bad publicity. So even people that were new online fans, guys online that never knew me before. Now they do not because I'm on there because they see the Janessa Brazil from scammers. Scammers kept me relevant. So thank you, guys. But unfortunately for the fans of sorry.

HANNAH AJALA: So, Vanessa, what are you doing with yourself now?

JANESSA: I live pretty much day by day. I have loyal fans that literally send me money weekly just to say, hey, I appreciate you. Don't expect anything back. I mean, I have this one mysterious guy and he sends me a few hundred dollars a week, which I use for groceries and, you know, whatever else, and then I scrape by. And then some of my fans help me with my rent every once in a while. And it's literally like I tore myself down to nothing to like the bare minimum. And I'm still here living. Pretty comfortably. Other than the air conditioning. But that's not my fault. I paid the electric bill, I swear. Did I help? I did. But yeah.

HANNAH AJALA: What do you think of the term sugar daddy?

JANESSA: I've had a couple.

HANNAH AJALA: A sugar daddy is a man usually older, richer, who pays the way of a younger woman, usually in exchange for sex. So this this man, would you say he is a clear example?

JANESSA: Yeah, he was a sugar daddy, but I never gave him any sugar. He's just a daddy.

HANNAH AJALA: Sugar daddy. But hold the sugar.

JANESSA: He was more of a Splenda daddy or an equal daddy. No sugar. I have this. I don't know what it is like just, ability to just be able to get them to give me money. But I don't give anything back. What it is, is it comes down to him thinking that eventually I'm going to give in. They're going to change my mind and they know the game. I don't have sex with fans. Like, that's not my thing. And I make it clear you want a pretty girl to go to lunch with. Great. But that's where it. That's right there. That's where it stops.

HANNAH AJALA: And here's the twist. These men who help Vanessa pay her bills. These Splenda Daddies? Some of them were scammed by fake Janessa Brazils. So maybe this is part of what Vanessa means when she says she should thank the scammers. You could say she's benefited from their work. If indirectly, of course, there's a massive difference between her and the scammers. Beyond fraudulently claiming to be Janessa, they lie about being sick or needing money for fake boobs. Lie about being stranded without food in Toronto in the winter. Lie about being in love. Meanwhile, Vanessa says that she is upfront with the men in her life about who she is and what they get and won't get in return. Transparency all around.

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JANESSA: The one that has bought me all this furniture in here. And a lot of my stuff, my clothes, shoes, everything. He's also another one that was catfished and then found the real me. So he emailed me and said, Hey, can we do a Skype show? And I charge like $100 for 10 minutes, right? So he's like, Let me just get 10 minutes. I think he just wanted to see if I was real. So we got on there and we just started talking and just kind of like the time went on and on. I took the time. I didn't ask him for the extra money for the extra minutes because I care and I made him comfortable and gained his trust. And that was it. Like, they're very grateful for that and.

HANNAH AJALA: When you think that there are possibly thousands of fake Janessa Brazil accounts out there, maybe even thousands of scammers hiding behind her image, it feels like lottery odds that these men actually tracked down Vanessa, let alone became part of her life. That made me wonder about one person who was sure he'd contacted the real Janessa Brazil. Roberto. Remember Roberto, the romantic Sardinian farmer? He lost $250,000 to scammers. We asked Vanessa to check her inbox for messages from him. She opened up her laptop.

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JANESSA: I am logging into my Gmail to see if we can find this guy. See if we ever communicated with him. Okay. So let's see. What's his email?

HANNAH AJALA: Her inbox contains thousands of unread emails.

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JANESSA: Here we go. So it dates back to the first one. Here we go. 2016. His first email to me is 10:30. So this is it. Hi. I have the need to talk with the real Janessa Brazil.

HANNAH AJALA: And guess what? The real Janessa Brazil wrote him back. Next time on the final episode of Love, Janessa.

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JANESSA: Hi, Roberto. How are you?

ROBERTO: I'm very good, thanks, and you?

JANESSA: I'm good look at you, very handsome.

AG: We'll hear the final episode of Love, Janessa tomorrow. The whole series is available on the CBC Listen App or wherever you get your podcasts. If you don't have the CBC Listen App - try it. It's free, and lets you discover the very best in Canadian audio, from CBC Radio, CBC Podcasts, and CBC Music. You can also listen to The Current live from anywhere on your phone or tablet, and catch up on show highlights on demand anytime. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. I'm Anthony Germain. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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Thursday August 10, 2023 Episode Transcript

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