Speaker 1: Alzoone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you're
Speaker 2: listening to or like watching right now. I think like
Speaker 2: ten percent of the audience watches, but it's impossible to
Speaker 2: tell because streaming numbers are famously opague. But you know
Speaker 2: what's not opegue. Our guest for the podcast today, the
Speaker 2: great Jamie Loftu, is here to help us finish the
Speaker 2: epic saga of One Taste, a Bay Area orgasm cult
Speaker 2: that went way too far. Jamie, Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3: So good to be here. I am famously translucent. It
Speaker 3: is nice to not be opaque. Yeah, I do wonder
Speaker 3: who's watching, but usually I feel like if someone is watching,
Speaker 3: they'll let you know, and they'll let you know exactly
Speaker 3: what looks wrong about you. So I'll get back to
Speaker 3: you with the numbers.
Speaker 2: Good to know. We also have on the podcast today
Speaker 2: our producer Sophie Lichterman, who is not showing up through
Speaker 2: video because you don't need to. You just need to
Speaker 2: justify that to you, you maniacs watching the show. You
Speaker 2: don't need to know why Sophie's not going to be
Speaker 2: on video. She's not deal with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we don't need another subreddit about if I'm safe
Speaker 1: or not?
Speaker 2: Guys, Yeah, podcast listeners, you can just continue ignoring.
Speaker 1: All twenty twenty six. I'm not, of course, I'm unsafe.
Speaker 2: What you Jamie? Are you excited to conclude this epic
Speaker 2: story because we had a little bit of a break,
Speaker 2: a longer one than we usually do between the first
Speaker 2: two parts and the third, so you know, I expect
Speaker 2: things have been building up, edging if you will, as
Speaker 2: we wait for you know, the conclusion here.
Speaker 3: I liked it did feel kind of like message podcasting
Speaker 3: that you sort of left me hanging on the edge
Speaker 3: of something thrilling for like ten days and now I'm
Speaker 3: ready to uh what what is like? Is enlightenment? This
Speaker 3: feeling of knowledge? Like what is if knowledge is coming?
Speaker 3: What is that? That's enlightenment? Nirvana?
Speaker 2: It's interesting they come to the longer one taste goes
Speaker 2: on the more Nicole didone, who is again like the
Speaker 2: leader of all. This gets everyone referring to orgasm as
Speaker 2: if it's like mana in like a like a like
Speaker 2: a role playing game or something like your orgasm is low,
Speaker 2: or you've got a high level of orgasm, your power,
Speaker 2: your orgasm is powerful. So like you're They refer to
Speaker 2: orgasm not as like like a biological thing that that
Speaker 2: happens you know sometimes, but as like this this mana
Speaker 2: pool that you build up over time, both through like
Speaker 2: O wimming, through like receiving it if you have a vagina,
Speaker 2: or through giving you know, O wimming you build up
Speaker 2: your orgasm level. And it's almost like this mana pool
Speaker 2: that helps you gain powers. That's kind of how she taks, and.
Speaker 3: That's what you were doing for us and for them.
Speaker 2: Okay, I see, I think I wanted to raise your mana.
Speaker 3: One of my favorite things about cult stories is just
Speaker 3: like the moving goalposts and how you're like, oh, you
Speaker 3: thought that was coming. Well, actually there's a secret different
Speaker 3: kind of come that. There is a huge financial barrier
Speaker 3: to accents.
Speaker 2: It's part of this like colts have to be all consuming.
Speaker 2: They have to like fill every space in your life.
Speaker 2: Colts don't want you to have like hobbies or you know,
Speaker 2: outside stuff going on. So you know, if you're if
Speaker 2: it's a call like scientology, where it's supposed to be
Speaker 2: all consuming, you've got this totally different way of looking
Speaker 2: at the world and psychology in the mind that's easier
Speaker 2: but if you come in with like this really narrow
Speaker 2: focus like Nicole did, where it's just about you know
Speaker 2: kind of lingis basically you really have to like you
Speaker 2: have to get creative to make that all consuming because
Speaker 2: most people just it's not an option to to have
Speaker 2: oral sex all day every day for that to be
Speaker 2: like your only behavior. So you really have to work
Speaker 2: to make that everything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you should never you should never start a cult
Speaker 3: around something that is free to do, right, Yes, it's
Speaker 3: it's gonna get difficult quickly if people figure out they
Speaker 3: can come for free at their house.
Speaker 2: Although you know, Jamie, people have always technically been able
Speaker 2: to come for free, and yet one of the most
Speaker 2: reliable ways to make money is assisting them in that.
Speaker 3: So that's true. That's true. And I will say, you know,
Speaker 3: say what you will about Nicole, but she certainly has
Speaker 3: gotten creative with it so far.
Speaker 2: She's creative. She's creative.
Speaker 3: I have never heard quite of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So in mid two thousand and six, one Taste
Speaker 2: used Rob's money, Remember our boy Rob, who's you know,
Speaker 2: she's she's turned into like the figure the male figurehead
Speaker 2: a lot of the time of the Colt in this period,
Speaker 2: she uses his money to lease a warehouse, and the
Speaker 2: coal mandates everyone's got to live together. Now we're all
Speaker 2: living in this fucking warehouse. This will be the first
Speaker 2: of two different warehouses that are like communal living spaces
Speaker 2: and initially nice warehouses.
Speaker 3: Warehouse could mean so they're in the bay.
Speaker 2: You know, it's it's off of what's it called. It's
Speaker 2: off of folsome Street. So it's not like it's an
Speaker 2: expensive area, like it's fairly expensive realist date from the videos.
Speaker 2: It's like a warehouse, but not a bad one. I
Speaker 2: have spend time in San Francisco warehouses that are living
Speaker 2: well Oakland warehouses that were living spaces. This seems like
Speaker 2: one of the nicer ones, right, okay, sound around fifty
Speaker 2: people move in it first, and they have to give
Speaker 2: up most of their early possessions to do so. Once
Speaker 2: they all live in the warehouse. Clothing, basically most things
Speaker 2: are communal and borrowed or shared. People will like borrow
Speaker 2: and take each other's clothes.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: If you complain that someone's like taking all of your
Speaker 2: clothes or taking your stuff and that you don't feel
Speaker 2: like it's equal, you'll be sort of critiqued or attacked
Speaker 2: for being too obsessed with attachments. Nicole starts having these.
Speaker 2: She'll go through a couple of different names, but they're
Speaker 2: all there's these various different sort of group meeting structures
Speaker 2: that she'll do where everyone sits around in a circle
Speaker 2: and like critiques each other. This is all downhill from
Speaker 2: send and on and the game that they played whereveryone
Speaker 2: gets in a circle and insults each other. There's different
Speaker 2: versions of this, but it's a way.
Speaker 3: Honesty approach where it's like I'm actually I'm being abusive
Speaker 3: towards you for your self improvement.
Speaker 2: Because this is a lot of ye yep, yeah. So
Speaker 2: people who complain that, like, hey, all my clothes have
Speaker 2: been taken by someone else will be critiqued as being
Speaker 2: obsessed with attachments. You don't want to be too obsessed
Speaker 2: with attachments. You know, we're we're doing this for the
Speaker 2: betterment of humankind. You know where you care that everyone's
Speaker 2: taking your shirts? Everybody sleeps. There's one giant central main
Speaker 2: room with like a dozen or more beds crammed together,
Speaker 2: like it has to be like twenty beds, twenty something
Speaker 2: beds for fifty people cram together and like between I
Speaker 2: mean two and three people for a bed. It kind
Speaker 2: of seems like I think it's usually couples, but it does,
Speaker 2: at least from some interviews, it seems like some people
Speaker 2: are doing you know, thropples or foursomes too. So again,
Speaker 2: at this point, you've got a few dozen, maybe around
Speaker 2: fifty full time members who have like really devoted themselves
Speaker 2: completely to the cult, and then a few hundred people
Speaker 2: in the Bay area who are kind of taking their courses.
Speaker 2: Some of these folks are casual, maybe once or twice
Speaker 2: a year they'll do a thing. Some of these folks
Speaker 2: are more regular. You know, they're coming in every month
Speaker 2: or even every week to do a variety. Maybe they're
Speaker 2: doing a mix of yoga, some om classes, whatever. And
Speaker 2: that's kind of how the cult is limping along at
Speaker 2: this point in times.
Speaker 3: So we've fifty people like full time in the warehouse,
Speaker 3: living together, completely committed, and then a few hundred people
Speaker 3: who are like paying money.
Speaker 2: And you wouldn't even call those folks cult members, right
Speaker 2: because the cult has a business side, So it'd be
Speaker 2: more accurate to say there's maybe fifty or some members
Speaker 2: than a few hundred customers, right. I think that that.
Speaker 3: Makes sense for San Francisco.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, right, right. The cult is not at this
Speaker 2: point financially self sufficient, but it is making enough money
Speaker 2: that Nicole only needs to like donations from rich people
Speaker 2: to kind of seal the gaps. So periodically, you know,
Speaker 2: probably a few times a month, she'll be like, Okay,
Speaker 2: we need x thousand dollars, so we've got to find one, two,
Speaker 2: three wealthy donors who are willing to put in this
Speaker 2: much money. And generally what she's doing is kind of, hey,
Speaker 2: you remember you took this last class. We've got another one.
Speaker 2: It costs like five grand, but I know you're really
Speaker 2: attracted to this cult member. She'll be in the class,
Speaker 2: don't you want to get right, that's kind of how
Speaker 2: this is. And that's not quite prostitution, but that's like
Speaker 2: on the edge, right well, especially.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she has too much, she has all the power
Speaker 3: in that situation. And also I'm assuming that you know,
Speaker 3: at least some of the time she's lying about that,
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, for sure, for sure. So yeah, so in
Speaker 3: a way, that is trafficking, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's definitely trafficking or trafficking adjacent, and it's gonna
Speaker 2: get a lot more direct at this point, it's a
Speaker 2: little you know, fuzzy, and she's always.
Speaker 3: I'm still enjoying the idea of all of the like hundred,
Speaker 3: like the few hundred people who are just sort of
Speaker 3: like one toe into the cult. I think we both
Speaker 3: live in cities where that is the case for about
Speaker 3: half of the residents, where I'm like, yeah, I've been
Speaker 3: a couple a couple of times. Yeah, yeah, a couple
Speaker 3: times a month. I probably go to a place that
Speaker 3: I'm going to read an expose about in a couple
Speaker 3: of years.
Speaker 2: I don't know easily. Like I said, I'm not one
Speaker 2: hundred percent sure. I haven't been to parties with like
Speaker 2: a bunch of one taste people. Look, because I got
Speaker 2: high a lot in the Bay Area around this time.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's like, we're never going to move into
Speaker 3: the warehouse. But you know, not on a the question
Speaker 3: that maybe you've been to the warehouse.
Speaker 2: You know, I've been to a few been to a
Speaker 2: couple of warehouses.
Speaker 3: You're an open minded guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I'm an open minded guy. I love a warehouse.
Speaker 3: You know, I've maybe presed what if I done stand
Speaker 3: up at it?
Speaker 1: Robert Adams, I love a warehouse.
Speaker 2: I love good warehouse. I love a good warehouse. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So uh and this is kind of so, you know,
Speaker 2: on the on one side, you've gotten Nicole reaching out
Speaker 2: to these folks who are like regular wealthier customers. These
Speaker 2: are Bay Area tech bros generally who have a good
Speaker 2: amount of money. So she's got a list of these
Speaker 2: guys who she's like, Okay, we need money. I can
Speaker 2: reach out to these dudes and maybe that'll bring in
Speaker 2: five or ten grand that we need. And then on
Speaker 2: the other side, within the cult, she frames this often
Speaker 2: as like a game, where like she'll go to a
Speaker 2: specific member and be like, hey, so we're doing a
Speaker 2: class and it's a high dollar class. I'll give you
Speaker 2: a free ticket, but I'm gonna have to partner you
Speaker 2: up with so and so because he really likes you.
Speaker 2: You know, do you want to freak class? Right? And
Speaker 2: she would she would ask you to do her like
Speaker 2: a favor, often for you, right, or a favor for them.
Speaker 2: And so even outside of the classes, she's sometimes saying, hey,
Speaker 2: this guy needs you know, I want to convince him
Speaker 2: to sign up. Would you do me a favor? And
Speaker 2: favor is a hand job generally, usually when she uses
Speaker 2: that term that means like, I want you to jerk
Speaker 2: this guy off for me outside of the class. So
Speaker 2: now we're really now we're.
Speaker 3: Yeah, come on, no, this isn't so the line.
Speaker 2: Is this is this is kind of and from a
Speaker 2: very early point two thousand and five six, she's regularly
Speaker 2: it's not always, but she's pretty regularly crossing the line
Speaker 2: into into prostitution. Right.
Speaker 3: Well, this like ex seeds like certain Epstein tactics. To me,
Speaker 3: it's like, it's not just you're recruiting someone to go
Speaker 3: to a second location. It's your being trafficked to go
Speaker 3: give a hand job to get to a second location.
Speaker 2: Right to get them into the class where they'll then
Speaker 2: be going down on you for an hour or for
Speaker 2: three days or whatever, depending on the kind of class
Speaker 2: that they're.
Speaker 3: Doing, depending on how warehouse you are.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, how in the warehouse you are, and yeah
Speaker 2: that that kind of overtime. This just becomes a major
Speaker 2: part of how one taste gets by certain moneyed men
Speaker 2: will pay for group workshops where many of the other
Speaker 2: seats are taken by other people paying for seats, including women.
Speaker 2: There are women in the Bay Area who pay for
Speaker 2: these seats and they get paired up with these guys too,
Speaker 2: but a decent number of seats and holes kind of
Speaker 2: if we haven't sold. Oh, there's twenty four slots in
Speaker 2: this We only found fifteen people and most of them
Speaker 2: are men, so we need to make up the difference
Speaker 2: with a lot of young females from the cult.
Speaker 3: Right, the ratio is off in the colt.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we got to get right. So by two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight, the constant struggle to keep the lights on
Speaker 2: in one taste because again they're never quite in the
Speaker 2: black has made in a cold, had made in a
Speaker 2: cold desperate, right. She likes the lifestyle, but it's also
Speaker 2: not quite working, and there's I think she's aware of
Speaker 2: the risk. I think she knows I've crossed the line
Speaker 2: already and we're still not profitable. Maybe I should either
Speaker 2: leave or try to like sell off my position in
Speaker 2: the cult to a mark. Right, So she starts wondering
Speaker 2: has this thing run its course? And just as she's wondering,
Speaker 2: like do I need to cancel a say or do
Speaker 2: I need to end things? A savior appears and that
Speaker 2: savior is The New York Times. So one of their
Speaker 2: reporters calls and here's I've heard there's this Bay Area
Speaker 2: company that's, you know, an orgasm classes and they're teaching
Speaker 2: people how to do orgasmic meditation. Sounds like a great story,
Speaker 2: and Nicole is like, come on by, we would love
Speaker 2: to have you. Now. I've quoted a couple of times
Speaker 2: in previous the previous episodes from that New York Times article,
Speaker 2: and what I really want to emphasize to you is
Speaker 2: that this is a bad and irresponsible piece of journalism.
Speaker 2: The Times does not come in. There's a couple of
Speaker 2: lines in there where they're like, some people say this
Speaker 2: is problematic, and there's a couple references to they may
Speaker 2: be blurring some lines, you know, in regard.
Speaker 3: Crazy about the New York Times both sizing an issue
Speaker 3: in which there is a clear right side to be on.
Speaker 3: That's so interesting.
Speaker 2: No, they treat this like it's a cool tech company.
Speaker 2: They treat this like it's between somewhere between that and
Speaker 2: like an interesting new you know, uh kind of alternative
Speaker 2: healthcare thing like like cold plunges or something. It's very
Speaker 2: much written like that, or like when that dude was
Speaker 2: talking doing all those classes onlike I can be submerged
Speaker 2: in the cold. We did episodes on them for crazy periods.
Speaker 2: It's like that sort of thing where they're treating it
Speaker 2: like a fucking Malcolm Gladwell book, like, oh she made
Speaker 2: you know, yeah, she says science tells us this about orgasms.
Speaker 2: You know, they're just trying to be more scientific, right,
Speaker 2: That's how it's brand. These are researchers.
Speaker 3: How like I mean, The New York Times is its
Speaker 3: whole own set of issues. But how like East Coast
Speaker 3: journalists often talk about like West Coast trends where they
Speaker 3: are just like they're just kookie, They're just weird over there.
Speaker 3: Check out these freaks, and you're like, no, those are
Speaker 3: sex criminals.
Speaker 2: No, this is the weird problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so as a result, the the article winds up
Speaker 2: working as an advertisement for one Taste more than anything else.
Speaker 2: And it even features they take photos of om sessions
Speaker 2: of like women being stroked in and other like otherwise
Speaker 2: masturbated in these in these different clinic classes that go on,
Speaker 2: but like really work safe. So you'll just get like
Speaker 2: Sophie's gonna put one on screen for those that you
Speaker 2: can see, and it's this like beautifully lit photo of
Speaker 2: just like the top half of a woman and she's
Speaker 2: she's like it's it's reversed, so like her head is
Speaker 2: facing down and so you could just see her head
Speaker 2: and she's got this like expression of ecstasy. She's wearing
Speaker 2: like a black shirt or something. It has her hands
Speaker 2: like kind of folded across her chests, and she's lit
Speaker 2: so that like it almost looks like her face just
Speaker 2: her face is glowing.
Speaker 3: She looks like a vampire coming back to life. Said
Speaker 3: to have this picture taken in view, Oh my god.
Speaker 2: I mean in the in the article, the framing of it.
Speaker 2: It's the title of the photo is Inner Bliss and
Speaker 2: a One Taste Urban retreat Center. A resident practices or
Speaker 2: gasmic meditation. Partner not shown.
Speaker 3: Partner not shown.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so just of all. In the article, The Times
Speaker 2: describes Nicole as a literal quote sex diva. And here's
Speaker 2: Sophie'll show you again. There's this photo. Nicole's right in
Speaker 2: the center. This is her given a class. She's like,
Speaker 2: well lit sex diva. Nicole didone One Tastes founder says
Speaker 2: women will experience freedom when they own their sexuality.
Speaker 3: God, how proud was the writer who came up with
Speaker 3: the phrase sex diva that they had to write it down.
Speaker 2: God, god fuck it.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting photo to choose because it almost looks
Speaker 1: like a like like a like a ted talk.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, great, Sophie put a pin in that. So
Speaker 2: the article is a massive hit for one taste. Suddenly journalists,
Speaker 2: including a lot of like local TV news journalists in
Speaker 2: the Bay Area, are crowding in to get the story
Speaker 2: on one taste, and most of them are covering it
Speaker 2: in positive ways. They're kind of amused, look at this
Speaker 2: kooky thing, but it's like good, no, Like these are
Speaker 2: not generally wondering is this all like a sex cult
Speaker 2: that she's just like trafficking her members to rich tech
Speaker 2: guys in order to keep the lights on? Right? That's
Speaker 2: not really quite asked, you know, And she's.
Speaker 3: Still like playing into the whole. I Mean, what has
Speaker 3: kind of been striking to me about a lot of
Speaker 3: the marketing we've looked at is that she's getting she's
Speaker 3: got the girl boss scam of like making it seem
Speaker 3: like this is good for women and women centered.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this is empowered, This is empowering. Going with it, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: because this is always framed us like, did you know
Speaker 2: this very large percentage of women have never had an orgasm,
Speaker 2: never had an orgasm with another partner, you know, And
Speaker 2: then from there to like, so that makes this health
Speaker 2: issue right, and that makes this and then there's all
Speaker 2: this like and here's what we've learned about the health
Speaker 2: benefits of orgasm, and so there's always this like underpinning
Speaker 2: of actual statistics and actual stuff, and as a result,
Speaker 2: it gets covered as if it's just part of the
Speaker 2: broad sort of body hacking, body optimization stuff that's going
Speaker 2: crazy in the oughts. And so in very short order,
Speaker 2: one taste starts picking up some really like mainstream partners
Speaker 2: Audible Sponsors. One of their podcasts they have like an
Speaker 2: erotic poetry open mic night, and like Audible Sponsors turning
Speaker 2: that into a podcast.
Speaker 4: They always oh, my god, every cult is trying to
Speaker 4: get stand up comedians in the door. Some of the
Speaker 4: worst people that come in your door, they're oh, the site,
Speaker 4: never forget.
Speaker 3: I came very closed. I was nearly persuaded in twenty
Speaker 3: fifteen to go to a Scientology open mic.
Speaker 2: Oh, that would have been amazing.
Speaker 3: They have refreshments, They have refreshments.
Speaker 2: That's really been awesome.
Speaker 3: Oh man, I know my career would be at a
Speaker 3: better place of sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah they still have that. That sounds great.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So cult members were very active on social media, and
Speaker 2: specifically like a lot of like local social media, like
Speaker 2: in the Bay Area. So there's a lot of like
Speaker 2: posts about like was that this great house party? Here's
Speaker 2: some crazy pictures, and you'll see these like giant cuddle
Speaker 2: puddles a bunch of young women, and like thirty percent
Speaker 2: of the cuddle puddle will be like schlubby Bay Area
Speaker 2: engineer looking dudes. Right. These are all very much framed
Speaker 2: as being like, hey, are you like a nerdy guy
Speaker 2: with a lot of money who lives in the area,
Speaker 2: and maybe he's not good with like women, this cult,
Speaker 2: there's lots of young women who were good to go.
Speaker 2: All you got to do is pay to take a class. Right,
Speaker 2: That's very much what the messaging is to these guys.
Speaker 2: And a lot of new members are drawn and a
Speaker 2: lot of new male members in particular, are drawn in
Speaker 2: by posts from residents of the warehouse talking about these
Speaker 2: wild sex parties and you know these we're doing. We've
Speaker 2: got a party, and they'll throw parties like on the beach.
Speaker 2: Here's a one Taste party on the beach. Come on,
Speaker 2: like show up. You know, people are being plied with
Speaker 2: drugs off and at these events, they're being plied with
Speaker 2: sex to get them to pay for and come in and
Speaker 2: take classes and stuff. I watched an interview with and
Speaker 2: I think this actual was from the Netflix documentary. I've
Speaker 2: watched a couple of interviews, but I watched an interview
Speaker 2: from one of these members who joined during this period
Speaker 2: of time. And this is a like a middle aged
Speaker 2: nerdy engineer dude who discovered one taste via these posts,
Speaker 2: and it first assumed this is his quote was like, oh,
Speaker 2: this either has to be fake or if it's real,
Speaker 2: they'll never have me, right, But when he showed up,
Speaker 2: he found out that he in fact had what they
Speaker 2: wanted most a credit card quote. One night, I was
Speaker 2: living on a boat by myself, and the next I
Speaker 2: was living with like forty people, sleeping in a bed
Speaker 2: with my research partner. I was like this nerdy tech
Speaker 2: guy by day and at night I'd go home and
Speaker 2: be in the middle of this craziness. And that's the appeal.
Speaker 2: You can keep being because they want they don't want
Speaker 2: you to quit your if you're like making a lot
Speaker 2: of money in the tech industry. You can keep being
Speaker 2: your nerdy tech guy by day, but you don't you
Speaker 2: get to actually be cooler than that. You've got a
Speaker 2: secret life where you're researching orgasm magic with like beautiful
Speaker 2: young women and living in this like free love compound,
Speaker 2: and so your life is a lot more exciting than
Speaker 2: the other fucking engineers at Google or whatever. Uh.
Speaker 3: And the fact that all of this is because it's
Speaker 3: like the wish fulfillment uh, Like this thing is very clear.
Speaker 3: She couldn't have chosen a better location to find this
Speaker 3: particular kind of guy. Perfect And also the Silicon Valley,
Speaker 3: but the Silicon Valley detail of corporate sponsors for the
Speaker 3: sex cultriz wah.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, it's perfect stuff. And you know what else
Speaker 2: would be a corporate sponsor for a sex cult?
Speaker 3: Oh, I have a feeling.
Speaker 2: I know the products and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 2: Some of them may have been We've had audible ads before,
Speaker 2: like this is what we've shared at least one advertise
Speaker 2: with this sex cult.
Speaker 1: Let's go over to more than one, Let's be honest.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, more than one almost certainly anyway, God.
Speaker 1: What if it's what if it's what if it's an
Speaker 1: ad for dick pills.
Speaker 3: What if it's an ad for dick pills.
Speaker 2: There's a good chance it will be, and I know
Speaker 2: it is. I know we're back, and we're all hoping
Speaker 2: that the ad you just heard was for dick pills,
Speaker 2: because they do. We do have some Dick Pills sponsors.
Speaker 2: Wouldn't that be fun? Wouldn't that be a good time?
Speaker 2: Every guy?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 2: Comedy hahaha, comedy it So. Nicole spent the first few
Speaker 2: years of the Colt's life sharing spaces with everyone else.
Speaker 2: She's living there, initially at the warehouse. But after a
Speaker 2: few years, around two thousand and ten or eleven, I
Speaker 2: think is kind of when this starts to happen, she
Speaker 2: decides there's too many demands on her attention. Now coincidently,
Speaker 2: this is shortly after she starts sometime we're in two
Speaker 2: thousand and six or seven, off and on seeing and
Speaker 2: then eventually dating seriously, this Silicon Valley entrepreneur and multimillionaire
Speaker 2: named Reys Jones. Right now, Reese meet. This guy's pushing fifty.
Speaker 2: He's not in great shape, but he's just sold his
Speaker 2: company to Motorola for a shitload of money. So this
Speaker 2: guy has spent the first chunk of his life building up,
Speaker 2: and he finally cashed out and he's like kind of
Speaker 2: over the hill and looking to recapture his like youth
Speaker 2: now that he's got a shitload of money, and he
Speaker 2: stumbles into One Taste for the same reason a fly
Speaker 2: winds up in a Venus fly trap. Right, it's made
Speaker 2: as a trap for this guy.
Speaker 3: Reese Jones excellent name for an insecure multimillionaire. Couldn't have
Speaker 3: written better.
Speaker 2: Myself had to be a recee.
Speaker 3: Yeah, had to Yeah, and just oh god, the yeah,
Speaker 3: the idea of conceptually, I feel like we encounter them
Speaker 3: all the time. A fifty year old guy that's like,
Speaker 3: you know, I think I'm ready to sell down. I
Speaker 3: think I'm ready. I was like, wow, huge, huge, You've
Speaker 3: really just figured it out, haven't you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I'm ready to settle down with a
Speaker 2: building full of trafficked people. So Reese, Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: One Taste is losing money badly during most of this period,
Speaker 2: and Nicole needs a rich mark like Reese to prop
Speaker 2: everything up. He gives them like a million dollars. He's
Speaker 2: absolutely critical to their survival during this period of time.
Speaker 2: So Nicole starts dating Reese, and this is going on
Speaker 2: from like two thys and six or so's like twenty eleven,
Speaker 2: and she's over this period of time, spending more and
Speaker 2: more time with him, less and less time at the
Speaker 2: warehouse around her members. She's going on vacations with him.
Speaker 2: She moves out of the warehouse and into a mansion
Speaker 2: with him because she decides that it's way better to
Speaker 2: live like a multi millionaire than to live with her
Speaker 2: colleagues at the masturbation Store.
Speaker 3: Another classic cult moment where you're like, and now the
Speaker 3: leader has decided that personal space does matter only for
Speaker 3: them for the leader.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So from this point on, she no longer lives
Speaker 2: full time in the communal spaces with her cult members,
Speaker 2: who are still technically researchers but are starting to look
Speaker 2: a lot more like her workforce. Twenty eleven was the
Speaker 2: big shift year for One Taste, where it goes from
Speaker 2: being a weird self help culty thing to a Silicon
Speaker 2: Valley body hacking startup. Nicole publishes I Mean and this
Speaker 2: is there's a couple of big moments that kind of
Speaker 2: delineate this shift from the past where One Taste is
Speaker 2: very much like a descendant of these previous kind of
Speaker 2: orgasm wu cults that we'd talked about, right okay, And
Speaker 2: there's not much to differentiate her from that until she
Speaker 2: publishes a book called Slow Sex, The Art and Craft
Speaker 2: of the Female Orgasm, And that happens, like right as
Speaker 2: one taste is sort of maturing to be more of
Speaker 2: a service provider and more of like a body hacking
Speaker 2: thing than a we're re searching, you know, the future,
Speaker 2: We're researching orgasm magic too. We're selling courses on orgasmic meditation.
Speaker 2: Right as that shift happens, it's kind of signposted by
Speaker 2: she puts out this book that sells very well called
Speaker 2: Slow Sex, and it's framed is that a guide for
Speaker 2: both men and women and dedicated to quote the orgasm,
Speaker 2: may each of us find ours now? Right kind of
Speaker 2: talking again of like of orgasm like it's magic. One
Speaker 2: of the book jacket quotes for Slow Sex is by
Speaker 2: Ian Kerner, a sexuality counselor and New York Times best
Speaker 2: selling author of She Comes First. Ian said, no, close sex.
Speaker 3: Is no dude, No oh my close.
Speaker 2: Sex is the real deal on pleasuring a woman for
Speaker 2: any guy who wants is fifteen minutes of sexual fame
Speaker 2: to don't offers practical and inspired guide to the orgasmic
Speaker 2: big leagues. What No, fifteen.
Speaker 3: Minutes of sexual fame? What the male feminist has clocked in?
Speaker 1: This is why I'm more than one of my female
Speaker 1: friends has given me a taser.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh, there's a lot that's like just the Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's wow.
Speaker 1: She comes first, Wow, she comes first, she tastes second, and.
Speaker 2: You get you.
Speaker 4: You.
Speaker 2: You really see a lot in terms of who the
Speaker 2: real customers are here because it's always framed as we're
Speaker 2: doing this for women. This is foreign by women, But
Speaker 2: that quote is like, yeah, for any guy who wants
Speaker 2: is fifteen minutes of sexual fame? Do you want to
Speaker 2: feel like a big shot? You know, I feel like
Speaker 2: you're the best at like sex and pleasure right, Like
Speaker 2: you're a fucking sex god. Like that's what will make
Speaker 2: you into is that It's like, really, what one taste
Speaker 2: is selling?
Speaker 3: This slow switch to an orgasm is not something that
Speaker 3: happens for women, but at them in this way that
Speaker 3: feels really like that ugh, I don't know it, it's gross.
Speaker 3: It almost like it feels reminiscent to me of like
Speaker 3: a justin Baldoni playbook of like I'm me, Respecting women
Speaker 3: is a business that I have. Yeah, yeah, and it
Speaker 3: is marketed at men, but it's for women, and I
Speaker 3: just happen to be financially benefiting from it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, Sophie, I told you to put a pin
Speaker 2: in this. But the moment that most embodied the evolution
Speaker 2: of One Taste into Silicon Valley startup was Nicole's Ted
Speaker 2: talk Nicole de doone Orgasm the Cure for Hunger, this speech,
Speaker 2: and Sophie's got to play you a long clip from
Speaker 2: this fucking Ted talk that shows you how Nicole is
Speaker 2: pitching this to like a mass audience. This is her
Speaker 2: gearing her pitch to like the biggest possible group of people. Right,
Speaker 2: So here is like the mainstream focused look at this.
Speaker 1: Okay, Sands Steva, I just want to give it for
Speaker 1: the for the non Netflix watchers. She's wearing what I
Speaker 1: can only describe as like a peak peak like express.
Speaker 2: It looks like twenty eleven in there.
Speaker 1: That's pretty damn express blazer with like with like a
Speaker 1: like a ooh is this a tank underneath? And purple.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a serious. Woman would never show her arms,
Speaker 3: so she's very a peaceful blazer, but a little bit
Speaker 3: of cleave is that.
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 5: Sorry, So I figure we're ten people, were fast, we're savvy,
Speaker 5: we're smart, so I'm just going to break the ice
Speaker 5: for us.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 5: My topic is female orgasm for absolutely odd. So that said,
Speaker 5: I want to thank the people of ted X for
Speaker 5: having me on this stage. This has been a dream
Speaker 5: of mine that I thought was absolutely impossible that we
Speaker 5: could have a relevant, intelligent conversation about female orgasm was
Speaker 5: just a distant dream for me. I just fell in
Speaker 5: love with this practice. That's what happened for me. I
Speaker 5: gave nearly ten thousand hours to this practice.
Speaker 3: That's a lot of hours.
Speaker 5: But I learned some key things in that time that
Speaker 5: I am bringing to you. The first is that female
Speaker 5: orgasm is vital for every single woman on the planet.
Speaker 5: The second is it's not.
Speaker 3: So bad for the guys either.
Speaker 5: The third, and on a much more serious note, is
Speaker 5: that it roots our fundamental capacity for connection. It's for
Speaker 5: this reason that I believe that at some day, at
Speaker 5: some point, you will hear.
Speaker 3: They cut to two women who let it.
Speaker 5: And orgasm, and you won't hear it. Yoga meditation and orgasm.
Speaker 5: So in two thousand and four I found one taste
Speaker 5: urban retreat centers with this.
Speaker 2: I think that's one taste. Yeah, that great.
Speaker 3: Yes, girl, give us nothing. Oh my god, I love it.
Speaker 2: I love it. That's Peak twenty eleven Silicon Valley hype
Speaker 2: train nonsense. She's very very much. She's doing a Steve job.
Speaker 2: She's doing a fucking fairhose. She's she's really trying to
Speaker 2: thread that needle and doing it very honestly, very successfully.
Speaker 2: This this this great.
Speaker 1: You know what she was giving. She was like, I
Speaker 1: don't shop, but Ann Taylor. I shop, but Ann Taylor lost.
Speaker 3: This is a show. But I really love this is
Speaker 3: I feel like a common feature of any time. I'm
Speaker 3: like watching a TEDx talk for whatever reason, that mentioning
Speaker 3: at the top, like, I never thought I would make
Speaker 3: it here when I can guarantee you any garden variety
Speaker 3: narcissist can get a TEDx talk. It is not it
Speaker 3: is not difficult.
Speaker 2: I never thought I would email a fucking PR representative
Speaker 2: and show them, hey, look at how many followers I
Speaker 2: have on social media. Can I have a TEDx talk?
Speaker 3: I never thought, Oh god.
Speaker 2: Like an award and not what every hack and grifter
Speaker 2: in the aughts and fucking early twenty teens did a
Speaker 2: fucking TED talk, Like I think we can us olds
Speaker 2: remember when there seemed to be some prestige around ted talks,
Speaker 2: But a lot of it was just a con. You know.
Speaker 2: A lot of it is how a lot of grifters grifted.
Speaker 3: Particularly ted X, which is like, yeah, yeah, Sophia was
Speaker 3: reminding me so much of like how we were encouraged
Speaker 3: to dress in high school and college. We're like, I'll
Speaker 3: look at a picture of myself at nineteen and be like,
Speaker 3: why am I dressed like I'm fifty years old?
Speaker 1: Why am I wearing business casual?
Speaker 2: To the frack we all dressed in business casual.
Speaker 3: I should have been dressing like a huge slut, and
Speaker 3: it was just such a missed opportunity.
Speaker 1: I have the exact same regret, Jamie.
Speaker 3: But you know what, there's always time we could do that.
Speaker 2: I dressed as a huge slut for that period of time,
Speaker 2: which means I only wore ed hardy shirts, my pants
Speaker 2: ed hardy shirts, my underwear ed hardy shirts, my ed
Speaker 2: heart are your shirts actually not for Bett Hardy anyway.
Speaker 3: That's the sluttiest thing a man could do at one time.
Speaker 3: So Jamie and I are out here in our.
Speaker 1: Ann Taylor law.
Speaker 2: That's right, just like older.
Speaker 3: Than my mother. There truly are pictures of me as
Speaker 3: a teenager where I think I look older than I
Speaker 3: do now. It's so bizarre.
Speaker 1: Time I will find a pantsuit pic. I mean, like
Speaker 1: a little pant suit skirt picture that will ruin your day.
Speaker 2: There was a period of time. Yeah, we just thought that,
Speaker 2: like everyone was kind of dressed like Hillary Clinton. You know,
Speaker 2: if only, if only that had taken over.
Speaker 1: Hillary Clinton wishes. She found this outfit that I definitely
Speaker 1: got from H and M on sale.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2: So, while Nicole was absent from the two different warehouses
Speaker 2: that her cult members lived in over the years, she
Speaker 2: was always present in spirit. And by that I mean
Speaker 2: Nicole picked who slept in each bed. She had like
Speaker 2: a seating chart for beds in the commune spaces, and
Speaker 2: she would decide who was sleeping with who and paired
Speaker 2: with who is a research partner and for all that.
Speaker 2: Nicole over the years she would sometimes date women and
Speaker 2: she would portray herself. And one taste is very queer
Speaker 2: positive because it's the aughts and the twenty teens in
Speaker 2: the bay and you have to. But despite all that,
Speaker 2: one tastes, teaching and practice were very heteronormative and very
Speaker 2: much like anti queer in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3: Well, even what how she was talking about sex and
Speaker 3: orgasms felt just yeah, like because she's ultimately her customers
Speaker 3: are men.
Speaker 2: Right, yes, exactly exactly, so I mean well not, I
Speaker 2: mean there are like she does have to get a
Speaker 2: certain number of like female like customers buying in and
Speaker 2: getting into the cult because she needs to use their
Speaker 2: bodies in order to further the business. So it is
Speaker 2: true that and we've talked about this, right, Like in
Speaker 2: the last episode, I showed you this was kind of
Speaker 2: the pitches she's making it to a lot of these women,
Speaker 2: But it is they like, the money part of the
Speaker 2: cult is entirely focused at selling to men, right. She
Speaker 2: has to sell one taste to women to get the
Speaker 2: workforce that she then basically traffics to get the money
Speaker 2: from the guys. Right, So there is kind of a
Speaker 2: two part aspect of it, I guess, which is important
Speaker 2: to see.
Speaker 3: The name never gets easier to hear.
Speaker 2: I have to say, it's always upsetting. So as I
Speaker 2: was saying men, it is very heteronormative, like the actual
Speaker 2: cults teaching, and Nicole is like kind of really anti
Speaker 2: queer past a certain point, men and women are always
Speaker 2: pretty much paired together as far as I can tell,
Speaker 2: and Nicole would even break up existing queer relationships when
Speaker 2: people joined the group in order to pair them with
Speaker 2: opposite sex partners because she doesn't think queer relationships are real.
Speaker 2: The bleakest example of this is probably the story of
Speaker 2: two One Taste members, Jamie and Caitlin. They are a
Speaker 2: lesbian couple who were drawn.
Speaker 3: Hold On said, look, I can tell you I fake names.
Speaker 2: I think these are fake names that I believe because
Speaker 2: I found this account from Ellen Hewitt's book Empirate of Orgasm.
Speaker 2: I think she's using pseudonyms for these people, right.
Speaker 3: I think she's a or she wants I don't know.
Speaker 2: These are sympathetic people. So Jamie and Caitlyn. This, Jamie
Speaker 2: and Caitlyn are a lesbian couple who get into One Taste.
Speaker 2: They're like teenagers, they're young adults, very young adults, and
Speaker 2: they're broke, and so they're both obviously interested in female
Speaker 2: pleasure because they're lesbians. But they also don't have any money,
Speaker 2: and so being able to live for free in the
Speaker 2: bay and this warehouse seems kind of rad as soon
Speaker 2: as they move in, and again they move in as
Speaker 2: a as a partnership, as a unit. Nicole tells them, well,
Speaker 2: this this all is about exploration. We're all trying to grow,
Speaker 2: and you're not going to grow if you just stay
Speaker 2: with like the partner that you like, and you're not
Speaker 2: going to grow as a queer woman. You can't grow
Speaker 2: by just having sex with the people you're attracted to.
Speaker 2: You can only grow by by having male partners. That's
Speaker 2: the only way to grow as a queer one, right,
Speaker 2: and so you should you need where you need to
Speaker 2: experiment with your sexuality by letting men oweim you, right
Speaker 2: and eventually by having sex with men. Now, in public,
Speaker 2: o wiming is all that one taste is about, and
Speaker 2: in public owim is described in almost asexual terms because
Speaker 2: they really want to avoid the allegations that they're just
Speaker 2: trafficking and sex. But within the actual commune, people aren't
Speaker 2: just oimming two times a day in the morning and
Speaker 2: two times at night. They're being commanded buying a cold
Speaker 2: to have intercourse. Right when she's pairing people up for beds.
Speaker 2: Those aren't just your om partners. You're ordered to fuck them.
Speaker 2: And so Caitlin and Jamie are paired with dudes in
Speaker 2: the cult, often with dudes you know, maybe who have
Speaker 2: some money that are that that Nicole wants to make
Speaker 2: sure stay right. But they're told they have to fuck
Speaker 2: dudes to level up. Basically in order to like gain
Speaker 2: XP in this cult system, in order to make your
Speaker 2: orgasm more powerful, you have to do these things that
Speaker 2: you're physically uncomfortable with because you're not into guys. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna quote.
Speaker 3: From well at this point, are Jamie and Caitlin as
Speaker 3: an ally to both are Are Jamie and Caitlin paying
Speaker 3: for this? Or are they quote unquote being paid in
Speaker 3: free logic?
Speaker 2: Like how there what they're being paid? I think mostly
Speaker 2: in free life, I think because a lot of members
Speaker 2: do pay, but a lot of the ones who don't
Speaker 2: are the women, especially the younger women, and these two
Speaker 2: are broke, so I don't think they now maybe because
Speaker 2: they are getting some money when they're working for the company,
Speaker 2: but it's it's very uneven and those one taste will
Speaker 2: switch up what you're being paid at the last minute,
Speaker 2: and often you're feeding that right back into the company.
Speaker 2: So to that extent, maybe they're being given money that
Speaker 2: they then have to Yeah, I'm not sure how it
Speaker 2: works for every individual person. It's kind of out different
Speaker 2: for everybody, depending on your position and what Nicole is
Speaker 2: getting out of you. Right, But to quote from the
Speaker 2: book Empire of Orgasm, Jamie said that in courses she
Speaker 2: heard a repeated message, all women are hungry for cock.
Speaker 2: If you're not feeling cock hungry, you're not connected to
Speaker 2: a part of yourself. Right. This is very anti queer. Now,
Speaker 2: eventually both women start having sex with male members of
Speaker 2: the group, and this is psychologically devastating to Jamie, who
Speaker 2: started to feel like her desire for her girlfriend or
Speaker 2: the woman because they're broke. They've been broken up forcibly
Speaker 2: by now, but the person who had been her girlfriend
Speaker 2: was wrong. She convinces herself to push on because Nicole
Speaker 2: keeps teaching her resistance is key to growth, and she
Speaker 2: really admires Nicole, and she also needs this place to live. Experiences,
Speaker 2: Nicole tells Jamie, aren't good or bad for you. Experiences
Speaker 2: aren't good or bad at all. You choose. It's the meaning.
Speaker 2: So you are, if you're deciding that this is an
Speaker 2: unpleasant sexual experience, that's because you made a choice. You
Speaker 2: could choose for it to be a good one. Why
Speaker 2: aren't you choosing for it to be a good one? Right, right?
Speaker 2: The fucking abusive this.
Speaker 3: Logic, this is just like yeah, and all under and
Speaker 3: it still sort of falls under the like early twenty
Speaker 3: tens definition of like being pro woman is. I mean,
Speaker 3: you could even extend this to like Cheryl Sandberg logic
Speaker 3: of like it is your fault that you are feeling
Speaker 3: oppressed and abused, and it is on you to behave
Speaker 3: the right way to be accepted in this environment.
Speaker 2: Yep, And there's bits of all there's bits of the
Speaker 2: secret in there, right, you just have to change your
Speaker 2: attitude and you can change reality. And you can see
Speaker 2: both how people don't necessarily pick this out as poisonous initially,
Speaker 2: but also how running with this logic, the obvious instate
Speaker 2: of this is that like, there's no such thing as rape. Ever,
Speaker 2: if experiences are not bad or good, there can't be
Speaker 2: such a thing as rape. You are choosing to be
Speaker 2: raped if you're raped, because you're choosing to interpret that
Speaker 2: as a bad experience. This is directly in those words
Speaker 2: what Nicole will eventually be teaching her followers, right and
Speaker 2: not I'm so, I know it's really bad.
Speaker 3: Like that is Yeah, that's horrifict It's so real. It's
Speaker 3: oh god, it's like that. Even in the way she's
Speaker 3: like the number of like pressure points she's attempting to
Speaker 3: attack is like she's sort of telling people to dissociate,
Speaker 3: but also telling them that, like the failure to do so,
Speaker 3: or the failure to feel pleasure or pleasure doesn't exist
Speaker 3: because its abuse is a personal failure. But it also
Speaker 3: sounds like she's like, well, if you don't like it,
Speaker 3: then just pretend you're a person who likes it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretend you're a person who likes it. Why why
Speaker 2: can't you do that? And it's you'll, well, well yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean yeah, we'll keep talking. So in time, Jamie
Speaker 2: becomes a coach and she starts to see success in
Speaker 2: the organization, and this success, the fact that she's moving
Speaker 2: up the ladder, so to speak, validates is like the
Speaker 2: first she because again, this is a young queer woman
Speaker 2: who doesn't have a lot of life experience. You've seen
Speaker 2: I think had a pretty rough background, and so this
Speaker 2: is like the first validation she's gotten as an adult person.
Speaker 2: So she becomes extremely loyal, even though this is she's
Speaker 2: been horribly abused by this cult, which is a common
Speaker 2: cold story, right sure. Yeah. So then in twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: Nicole calls Jamie and Caitlin in for a little one
Speaker 2: on one and she informs them she's breaking up with Reese,
Speaker 2: the Silicon Valley millionaire who had kept the cult alive
Speaker 2: through its bad years. But she still owes him a
Speaker 2: lot of money from all the you know, because he's
Speaker 2: calling in basically you know, the loans he'd given them, the.
Speaker 3: Amount of like discarded one taste guys at this point
Speaker 3: could like unionize.
Speaker 2: And it she hasn't. I don't fully understand the financials here.
Speaker 2: She does not discard him. Some reports I've said, suggest
Speaker 2: that she repays him by twenty twelve, that she's repaid
Speaker 2: him for like the million dollars that he loans the COLT.
Speaker 2: But that's when this is all happening, And that doesn't
Speaker 2: entirely line up with this, because this suggests she's still
Speaker 2: getting some money from him in twenty twelve. I don't
Speaker 2: fully know, and I don't claim to know at which
Speaker 2: point was Reese giving the Colt money, which point was
Speaker 2: Rees receiving money, But whatever the case, at this point
Speaker 2: in twenty twelve, she still wants to keep Reese in
Speaker 2: the fold, even though she's breaking up with him, right
Speaker 2: because she tells Nicole, I'm not gonna I have to
Speaker 2: move to Los Angeles because I've important work to do there,
Speaker 2: which is she's trying to find more rich guys. Right,
Speaker 2: But Reese needs a handler, and I've been his handler
Speaker 2: for the last, you know, several years. And in my place,
Speaker 2: I need you two to be Reese's handlers so that
Speaker 2: I can move on to Los Angeles. And here's how
Speaker 2: Ellen Hewitt describes what happens next. Jamie paused everything she
Speaker 2: learned up to this point had primed her to say
Speaker 2: yes to the position, and to do so willingly, idolizing Nicole,
Speaker 2: becoming accustomed to having sex with me, and to having
Speaker 2: sex with any kind of man, getting off on any stroke.
Speaker 2: Being told that she should provide anything to help the company.
Speaker 2: Plus being asked to be Reese's handler felt like an honor.
Speaker 2: Jamie knew that only a few women in One Tastes
Speaker 2: history had held the same position. They were often Nicole's confidants,
Speaker 2: an admired group. She also knew the unspoken threat. The
Speaker 2: consequence of saying no is that you would be ostracized, ignored,
Speaker 2: and stripped of all your power in that world. Jamie said, So,
Speaker 2: I want to be clear that last bit, the fact
Speaker 2: that if you displease Nicole, if you like wind up
Speaker 2: on the outskirts, you'll be kicked out. You'll lose everything
Speaker 2: that you've gotten from this world. That is something she
Speaker 2: directly tells people during lectures after everyone has experienced orgasmic meditation,
Speaker 2: When folks, you're in this powerful cathartic afterglow, she will
Speaker 2: tell them. This is a direct quote from one of
Speaker 2: her sessions. That's why this place is called one taste.
Speaker 2: Once you've tasted being inside of yourself and knowing yourself,
Speaker 2: there is some part of your soul that will always
Speaker 2: crawl to get back. The truth is, if you get
Speaker 2: kicked out, your soul will never relax again. She's very
Speaker 2: direct about this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and she's also like just describing chasing
Speaker 3: a drag.
Speaker 2: And chasing a high. And one of the things when
Speaker 2: this becomes a quirky people say no one was ever
Speaker 2: forced to have sex with anyone. No one was ever
Speaker 2: forced to stay, and they weren't. They were just heavily
Speaker 2: coerced and basically told that life will be like a gray,
Speaker 2: colorless hell of an experience if you get forced out
Speaker 2: of this group because you fuck this rich guy, right.
Speaker 3: You're like, well, yeah, maybe then in that case we
Speaker 3: should expand the definition a little bit.
Speaker 2: So by twenty twelve, One Taste has totally come around
Speaker 2: to becoming like seen as a tech startup, to fashioning
Speaker 2: itself that way. Her followers in public face and communications
Speaker 2: are talking less about all the crazy parties and a
Speaker 2: lot more about how Nicole is like a philosopher but
Speaker 2: also like a Steve Jobs figure.
Speaker 3: Right, what is she selling you though? Like, what is
Speaker 3: the product exactly?
Speaker 2: Or has any power? Magic?
Speaker 3: God? Oh, I guess, I guess it's at least we're
Speaker 3: not having children overseas manufacturing customs.
Speaker 2: Sure, jesus. So in the years after twenty twelve, you know,
Speaker 2: One Taste finally gets in the black right. It had
Speaker 2: been struggling. It had been utterly reliant upon these like
Speaker 2: infusions of cash from these rich dudes, and that's not
Speaker 2: really the case, I mean kind of. After twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: it's it's it's profitable. After twenty twelve, the money is
Speaker 2: still coming from like rich guys we're paying for sex,
Speaker 2: right sure, but not one rich not one rich guy,
Speaker 2: and not her saying hey, I need a loan, and
Speaker 2: it's her instead selling courses to these guys. Right, So
Speaker 2: it's no longer loan. It's like it is a profitable
Speaker 2: business after this point. In fact, a quite profitable business.
Speaker 2: One Taste not only repays Reese, but it starts to
Speaker 2: succeed on its own, raking in millions a year. And
Speaker 2: they do this. They make this switch in large part
Speaker 2: by copying something Nicole had seen from the yoga industry.
Speaker 2: So during the first part of the twenty first century,
Speaker 2: a lot of yoga studios begin offering teacher training. Now
Speaker 2: this qualifies somebody to teach a different kind of yoga.
Speaker 2: Most attendees who do teach your training don't become yoga
Speaker 2: teachers because there's not that many yoga teacher jobs, and
Speaker 2: so it's often they're doing it for self improvement. It's
Speaker 2: being pitched as like a well you take to teach
Speaker 2: your class because it makes you that much better, right,
Speaker 2: And these are expense and there's and I'm not if
Speaker 2: you do if you like, that's fine, right whatever. There
Speaker 2: are some cults within yoga, but also it's fine to
Speaker 2: pay money to get better at a thing that you
Speaker 2: like to do. Right, I'm not shitting on it.
Speaker 3: I'm just saying I s receive a gentle touch from
Speaker 3: a beautiful woman. This is what I mean when it's like,
Speaker 3: we all got our toes in the call.
Speaker 2: Right, a little bit piece, and so she takes that
Speaker 2: idea and moves it over to one taste. So she
Speaker 2: starts selling teaching courses and this is like, this will
Speaker 2: certify you to teach om and to do classes of
Speaker 2: your own right. And there's often more advanced because there's
Speaker 2: there's endless layers and endless Every teacher always wants to
Speaker 2: be you have to be up on the latest thing.
Speaker 2: So every year there's a new class about the stuff
Speaker 2: that you have to get to stay certified. And it's
Speaker 2: another five to ten thousand dollars. Right, these are multi
Speaker 2: day courses. Again, these are a lot of these are
Speaker 2: hugely expensive.
Speaker 3: And I'm assuming that the teacher is the teacher. Training
Speaker 3: also includes abuse.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I mean yes, like that like big sure yes.
Speaker 2: Now Nicole had offered a coaching program since twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: and this takes off. It's successfully, they make money of it,
Speaker 2: so increasingly One Taste pours all of its efforts into
Speaker 2: either hosting coaching classes or selling them. Right, They recruit
Speaker 2: a huge crop of students in twenty twelve, and eventually
Speaker 2: they are going to license or whatever, more than thirteen
Speaker 2: hundred people as home coaches, each of whom have paid
Speaker 2: probably well in access of ten grand to get to
Speaker 2: that point, right, in some cases much more. The company
Speaker 2: starts turning a profit in twenty thirteen, and before long
Speaker 2: they are making a surprising amount of money. Olbrigan's bringing
Speaker 2: in celebrity guests to provide a sheen of legitimacy. They
Speaker 2: start doing cult events. They have these like One Taste
Speaker 2: Mastery for which are like these big you know, they're
Speaker 2: these like conferences and stuff for the One Taste family
Speaker 2: for all the people who were coaches. Because now there's
Speaker 2: One Taste houses in different states, they're starting to fill up,
Speaker 2: and people are doing classes outside of the Bay Area.
Speaker 2: So they're doing these courses, and she's hiring celebrities to
Speaker 2: like talk to everybody at the start of these like
Speaker 2: three day and five day events. For one event in
Speaker 2: twenty thirteen, she hires doctor Joscelyn Elders, the former Attorney General,
Speaker 2: who tells students you are part of a new sexual revolution. Great,
Speaker 2: thank you, Jocelyn. Wow. I'm sure she just cast the jetway.
Speaker 3: It is always wild hearing these celebrities that you that
Speaker 3: cult managed to back for things like this. It's a
Speaker 3: it's a good reminder that people are desperate for attention
Speaker 3: and refuse to do even a basic level of research.
Speaker 2: Of course, not that's offensive. So I want to show
Speaker 2: you guys an example of an ad for one Tastes
Speaker 2: Mastery program, which is one of their like really advanced,
Speaker 2: you know, certifications. So Sophia is going to play that
Speaker 2: for us.
Speaker 1: Now looks like the masterclass logo.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say, it does the very tech logo.
Speaker 2: Master class master something else.
Speaker 1: It's like, this is a course in how to open
Speaker 1: your sex life.
Speaker 3: It's a way for you to research what your actual
Speaker 3: boundaries are.
Speaker 5: I like to make sure that my whole mouth, my.
Speaker 2: Whole tones without boundaries.
Speaker 3: And it takes sex to a whole new paradigm. I
Speaker 3: learned how to slow down and actually feel everything that's
Speaker 3: happening versus constantly being in my life.
Speaker 2: Yes, oh my god, looks great.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: I love that. One of their quotes is.
Speaker 3: Sex about boundaries. Now there's at least three phrases present
Speaker 3: in the advertising that could plausibly describe assault. Energetic sex
Speaker 3: also feels kind of like a line also with all
Speaker 3: of these, I mean, I guess something that like feels
Speaker 3: like a big other than like the techification of this
Speaker 3: sex cult. It's like been decades since this has been
Speaker 3: accessible to anyone who doesn't have an insane amount of
Speaker 3: disposable because like the original.
Speaker 2: Is going to be trafficked, right yeah.
Speaker 3: Right, where it's like the the the earlier sex cults
Speaker 3: were like at least you could beat, you could be
Speaker 3: trafficked as someone who doesn't have a lot of money
Speaker 3: laying around, Yeah right yeah. The cuts to rooms full
Speaker 3: of white people with bad haircuts really does kind of
Speaker 3: pull it all into foe of like, what's going on here? God,
Speaker 3: that's so bleak.
Speaker 2: It's really yeah. Yeah, isn't that remarkable? It's so mlm me,
Speaker 2: it's so yeah, I I it's it's really upsetting to me,
Speaker 2: it's upsetting, like again coming out of like the sex positive,
Speaker 2: you know community, the kink community, like the idea that
Speaker 2: anyone could hear the phrase sex without boundaries and not
Speaker 2: immediately be like, whoa wait a second, what are you
Speaker 2: talking about? What do you mean by that? Because that's
Speaker 2: a that's a dangerous phrase.
Speaker 3: Right, and it feels so that's why it's like going
Speaker 3: back to the New York Times article, like it's so
Speaker 3: clearly preying on people who don't have basic, a basic understanding,
Speaker 3: and it's just how they imagine like non vanilla sect
Speaker 3: to work, right, non vanilla sex to work.
Speaker 1: That video really really really reminded me of nexium.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very similar, and I didn't catch this until
Speaker 2: right now, But honestly, that's part of what's most upsetting
Speaker 2: to me about all of this is that she's almost
Speaker 2: set this up to be like a flies web in
Speaker 2: between people who like are know that they want more
Speaker 2: out of like sex than they're getting, know that like
Speaker 2: maybe what they weren't educated, they didn't get a good
Speaker 2: enough educating like what sex could be. They want more
Speaker 2: out of like their relationships than they feel like they're getting,
Speaker 2: and there is like a sex positive, a kink community
Speaker 2: where people like aren't trying to like just take your
Speaker 2: money and abuse you, where you can like learn stuff
Speaker 2: like that if you're into that. And she's created like
Speaker 2: the spider's web in front of it to ensnare people,
Speaker 2: But in a way that is very much different because
Speaker 2: like if you were to like every kink community, every
Speaker 2: kink event that I have ever been to, starts and
Speaker 2: a lot of like education, and that starts with boundaries
Speaker 2: and boundaries setting. And the importance is not sex without boundaries.
Speaker 2: The importance is knowing what your boundaries are and having
Speaker 2: ways to make sure everyone else knows them and that
Speaker 2: you're communicating them and that you can like that's what's important.
Speaker 2: Like the it's so fucked up to create this thing
Speaker 2: that is meant to almost like stand in between that
Speaker 2: and people who are curious in order to ensnare and
Speaker 2: hurt them very much. What's happening, Hey.
Speaker 1: Jamie, is Barbie naked behind you?
Speaker 3: Is Barbie naked behind me? No, she's wearing a painted
Speaker 3: on body suit.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, great, I was just making sure I used
Speaker 1: to use her on stage.
Speaker 3: But she does have a body suit painted on the doll. Great, great,
Speaker 3: thanks for trying to add Robert.
Speaker 1: Now that I have checked in on Barbie, it is
Speaker 1: time for an ad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we should do an ad break, Okay, all right,
Speaker 2: and we're back.
Speaker 3: So I just just sort of closing the loop on
Speaker 3: talking about kink where like I feel like truly kink
Speaker 3: communities are our best communicators, like it, and it makes
Speaker 3: me really sad, like you're saying, to see people who
Speaker 3: are seeking something out and then very likely getting scarred
Speaker 3: to the point where sex at all is going to
Speaker 3: be definitely traumatized. Yeah, but at least they were parted
Speaker 3: with ten thousand dollars in the process.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, at least that happens, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, as the most expensive courses went from thousands to
Speaker 2: tens of thousands of dollars and the big money started
Speaker 2: rolling in, much of what the early members had loved
Speaker 2: about life in the cult changed. The clatoral massages were
Speaker 2: still a part of life there, but members now were
Speaker 2: not called researchers. In fact, there's like a big announcement
Speaker 2: that like you're no longer researchers, You're now employees. And
Speaker 2: now in fact most of you are salesman. Most of
Speaker 2: you are like doing calling, right, Like, your job is
Speaker 2: to call people and try to get them to take classes, right, Like,
Speaker 2: that's the new business is selling and teaching classes. You're
Speaker 2: no longer We did the research, we figured it out, right,
Speaker 2: the experiments over. So they moved to a new warehouse
Speaker 2: which has semi private rooms, and yeah, everybody sales people now.
Speaker 2: In order to justify this change, Nicole tells her followers
Speaker 2: the universe is made of love. Sales is love. Therefore,
Speaker 2: the universe is made of sales.
Speaker 3: Okay, honestly, based on the level of cruelty and evil
Speaker 3: she's capable of. She's half assing it with this.
Speaker 2: She's half assing it. That's lazy. That's lazy. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: If sales is love and love huh.
Speaker 2: Really, Nicole, that's what we're going with. Uh. God, it's
Speaker 2: a measure of her charisma that no one leaves on
Speaker 2: the spot after hearing that.
Speaker 5: Sure.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 2: One of Nicole's most valuable members and employees during this period,
Speaker 2: there's a young man named Sayid who first gets drawn
Speaker 2: into the group because he was in love with somebody.
Speaker 2: He goes to like a class and he falls in
Speaker 2: love with someone who lives at the warehouse named Maya,
Speaker 2: and he basically tells Maya, Hey, I've got a crush
Speaker 2: on you, and she's like, well, if you're into me,
Speaker 2: the best way for us to hang out is for
Speaker 2: you to take more classes here, and eventually he winds
Speaker 2: up moving in. Now said is a really conventionally attractive guy, right,
Speaker 2: and he starts being used as a lure by Nicole
Speaker 2: and Rachel, who's like her head of sales. This woman
Speaker 2: Rachel and like the other people running the cold said
Speaker 2: both as like maybe a way to get off themselves,
Speaker 2: but also, here's a really hot guy. We can use
Speaker 2: him to bring in both hot women that we want
Speaker 2: to work and join the cult, but also maybe older
Speaker 2: women who have money to spend on expensive classes and
Speaker 2: they want to be paired with this hot dude. Right.
Speaker 2: So a separate part of internal one taste culture. As
Speaker 2: I've said before, these like circular meetings where people will,
Speaker 2: you know, one way the other the purpose is for
Speaker 2: you to get insulted and mocked and derided and have
Speaker 2: like a cathartic experience. Right. So people will sit around
Speaker 2: and ask the whole questions and she'll answer them and
Speaker 2: like coach them and say this is what that question
Speaker 2: tells me about you. Right. During one of these sessions,
Speaker 2: she focuses on Sayed, and she asks him, why do
Speaker 2: you think so many of the women here like being
Speaker 2: paired with you? Sayid? And here's how Ellen Hewitt describes
Speaker 2: what happens next. Because I'm willing to violate them, he
Speaker 2: started to say. A murmur of surprise shot through the
Speaker 2: room as Sayid remembers it, and then the students started cheering.
Speaker 2: He was cut off, but he had wanted to say,
Speaker 2: I know how to violate them in ways they want
Speaker 2: to take them to their edge, but I also don't
Speaker 2: make them feel taken advantage of or left empty or
Speaker 2: not held afterwards. All he got to, though, was violate.
Speaker 2: After that, everyone started calling him the violator. Another one
Speaker 2: Taste executives decided she would call him the fucker. That
Speaker 2: says a lot both that they love that term because
Speaker 2: they love the aggression. That's a bigger and bigger part
Speaker 2: of it is that like aggression is good, some violence
Speaker 2: is good.
Speaker 3: Right, sex without boundaries? Yeah, that is I That is
Speaker 3: not how I thought that anecdote was gonna go.
Speaker 2: Nope, that no, it is.
Speaker 3: Really I thought I genuinely thought it was going to
Speaker 3: be people who were becoming uncomfortable interjecting and being like, yeah,
Speaker 3: that is what it feels like, but it's doubling down
Speaker 3: and saying like, so we're just deep enough in at
Speaker 3: this point where it is sexually violent and were and
Speaker 3: I'm shocked at how willing they are to say it.
Speaker 2: They're willing to say it. And the craziest thing to
Speaker 2: me is, at least if this is being reported accurately
Speaker 2: by Hewett and I have no reason to believe it's
Speaker 2: not sure the violator is the one being violated here,
Speaker 2: right because after Nicole here's this, she loves this as
Speaker 2: a branding thing, and she uses Sayid as she starts
Speaker 2: calling him their hook, literally their hook, because he will
Speaker 2: pull women into the company's classes and gatherings and there's
Speaker 2: a lot of women who like our or you know,
Speaker 2: maybe want to explore that kind of thing and maybe
Speaker 2: wants to explore some more aggressive stuff. SAYI doesn't want that.
Speaker 2: Though he doesn't actually like being the violator. He doesn't
Speaker 2: like being called in to do all of these like
Speaker 2: violent and aggressive sex acts in order for Nicole to
Speaker 2: make more money. But she keeps telling him to go
Speaker 2: do go, be the violator again, go do that this
Speaker 2: other that. We've got this other woman who wants it
Speaker 2: and is willing to pay if you'll like spend some
Speaker 2: time with her. Right and Nicole keeps asking him to
Speaker 2: go further and further. She signs him to have sex
Speaker 2: with a one Taste executive named Emma, who thought the
Speaker 2: violator sounded hot, and she starts using him to rev
Speaker 2: her up. Is her words before speaking events, She'll she'll
Speaker 2: make him come in and masturbate her, and then she'll
Speaker 2: go out to give a speech. On another instance, one
Speaker 2: of Nicole's top lieutenant's Rachel, who's also ordering Sayid to
Speaker 2: have sex with her, periodically orders him to have sex
Speaker 2: with another female cult member. He refuses, and Rachel calls
Speaker 2: him an ungrateful, petulant brat and shouts at him and
Speaker 2: gets everyone else in the compound shouting at him until
Speaker 2: he agrees to go upstairs and do it again. So
Speaker 2: he's not forced to have sex exactly, He's just berated
Speaker 2: and mocked and ostracized when he doesn't.
Speaker 3: Right, he is for staves.
Speaker 2: He is to be I would say he is be
Speaker 2: but like but in terms of the people who defend
Speaker 2: this will be like, well he could have left. He
Speaker 2: was a big guy. Why I didn't know it was
Speaker 2: stopping him, right, because there's not a great Yeah.
Speaker 3: It is wild. How I mean, how Nicole is you know,
Speaker 3: doing classics like she's she's going full Darvaux and and
Speaker 3: then like, I mean, like all calls like that there.
Speaker 3: It seems like a lot of why this is working
Speaker 3: is not only is she preying on you know, probably
Speaker 3: his masculinity, but also that berating is a part of
Speaker 3: the culture, so no one would flinch at someone being rated.
Speaker 2: That is a part of it, and it's celebrated. She
Speaker 2: talks a lot about people needing to have sharp scalpels,
Speaker 2: and that she celebrates that we all have sharp scalpels,
Speaker 2: which means we're good at cutting each other. It's good
Speaker 2: to cut each other. We need to do that. It
Speaker 2: makes it stronger. These are this is Nicole's literal language. Right.
Speaker 3: You just fought like someone in the room to have
Speaker 3: a moment of lucidity and be like, sorry, what is
Speaker 3: the goal? No, why don't we start doing this? It's yeah, God,
Speaker 3: that is that's really I mean.
Speaker 2: It's pretty bleak, yes, yep, So like a lot of
Speaker 2: one Taste cult members say it is also queer. He's bisexual,
Speaker 2: and at one point he admits interest to a man
Speaker 2: to Rachel and she allegedly calls him the F word
Speaker 2: and forces him out of her bed. So again, this
Speaker 2: is a very like queer phobic, anti queer environment too
Speaker 2: for the people living in it. By the late twenty teens,
Speaker 2: One Taste was more profitable than ever and had transitioned
Speaker 2: entirely to depicting itself as a Silicon Valley startup. People
Speaker 2: had once been researchers exploring the frontiers of desire and
Speaker 2: sexual power are now operating a call center, spending days
Speaker 2: at a time awake, struggling to hit aggressive sales targets.
Speaker 2: Nicole successfully convinced many of them that selling and buying
Speaker 2: courses was the infinite game. Talk a lot about games, right,
Speaker 2: This is very much coming out of these other cults, right, yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, and infinite growth because we're in Celebrat.
Speaker 2: Valley, Silicon Valley, and anything was justifiable as long as
Speaker 2: you had to keep the game going. Right. Per an
Speaker 2: article in Bloomberg, Quote, One Taste taught members that money
Speaker 2: is just an emotional obstacle. It encouraged students to take
Speaker 2: out multiple credit cards to pay for courses, and some
Speaker 2: turn to such sites as go fund me and prosper
Speaker 2: funding for help. The first time I didn't cover my
Speaker 2: credit card bill, it broke something in my mind, says
Speaker 2: ruined Mippelaga, who went to his first one Taste event
Speaker 2: in twenty twelve at age twenty four, worked for the
Speaker 2: company for about two years and left owing thirty thousand
Speaker 2: dollars on his credit cards. I was no longer afraid
Speaker 2: of debt, he says. Once you break that barrier, three
Speaker 2: thousand is the same as thirty thousand. At one point,
Speaker 2: Mipelaga complained that he and his coworkers hadn't been paid
Speaker 2: in two months. He says he was publicly shamed for
Speaker 2: having a scarcity mindset.
Speaker 3: Oh every other hot button phrase that's constantly misused.
Speaker 2: Nice love it.
Speaker 1: Three thousand is very different than thirty thousand, very much so,
Speaker 1: my guy, now ten times three thousand, Actually.
Speaker 3: I don't know, soie.
Speaker 2: None of its real money. And you're like in an LLM,
Speaker 2: you're always being told, what, what's the big deal? You're
Speaker 2: gonna pay ten grand? This will make you so much better,
Speaker 2: It will open you up you'll make that much so
Speaker 2: much more money than that give itself fully right, right,
Speaker 2: it's an investment, you know now the art that Bloomberg
Speaker 2: article was published by Hewitt, the author of the book
Speaker 2: Empire of Orgasm, in June of twenty eighteen. She was
Speaker 2: not the first reporter to write critically about one Taste,
Speaker 2: but she was the first to write critically about one
Speaker 2: taste and have it matter. The vast majority of mainstream
Speaker 2: reporting on the company, as it was generally described, was
Speaker 2: bemused but open minded. In fact, if you want a
Speaker 2: really good study in journalism versus pr you should read
Speaker 2: that first two thousand and eight New York Times a
Speaker 2: article the Pleasure Principle, and then Hewitt's article. Now, I
Speaker 2: think the best example of this is how the Times
Speaker 2: wrote about Vic Baranco, the Morehouse founder. That's like one
Speaker 2: of the earlier orgasm cults. This is the guy you
Speaker 2: like to crush women's vaginas with his hands when he
Speaker 2: was in a bad mood. Here's how the described Vic
Speaker 2: Morehouse's founder. Vic Baranco was a former appliance salesman who
Speaker 2: called his philosophy responsible hedonism. By some accounts, mister Baronco,
Speaker 2: who died in two thousand and two, used coercive techniques
Speaker 2: of mind control. It was a huge ego crushing machine,
Speaker 2: as any valid monastic tradition is. Said a man who
Speaker 2: lived at more House more than twenty years and did
Speaker 2: not want to be identified, And like, that's all you
Speaker 2: guys had about More How really, that's all you had
Speaker 2: the New York Times, that's all you needed to say
Speaker 2: about him, you.
Speaker 3: Thought, I mean, the New York Times is stand out
Speaker 3: for this, but it's God, I mean, it's it's a
Speaker 3: lesson that no one ever seems to learn. And even
Speaker 3: I mean, that's amazing that, uh that the article that
Speaker 3: came out eventually did, because that had to probably be
Speaker 3: hard to get through, Like you just have to have
Speaker 3: an editor that actually cares about stuff in order to
Speaker 3: get that done. I don't know, I'm sure we all have,
Speaker 3: Like I have like three Los Angeles cult adjacent things
Speaker 3: that you're just like, well, I guess we'll just see
Speaker 3: if a journalist bandages to get it through at some point.
Speaker 2: But it's that's thankfully one did, right Hwan did you know?
Speaker 2: And not only for this article? She'd get dozens of
Speaker 2: brutal accounts inside life of life inside One Taste accounts
Speaker 2: that The Times could have got some of them, at
Speaker 2: least The Times could have gotten but not only to that.
Speaker 2: She forces One Taste in this article to address the
Speaker 2: worst allegations of abuse. Vlan Vleck, who is the CEO
Speaker 2: of One Taste in twenty eighteen, admitted to her we
Speaker 2: took money from people that we shouldn't have. Right, So
Speaker 2: she even gets just within the article before the backlash
Speaker 2: to it, she gets them to like, oh, yeah, you
Speaker 2: know what, this lady has our number that we have
Speaker 2: to cop to some shit. So by the late twenty teens,
Speaker 2: One Touch had spread to a number of other countries.
Speaker 2: This started with Nicole ordering specific offices opened first in
Speaker 2: New York and then in Austin, La London. But also
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of independent One Taste houses that are
Speaker 2: being established all over the country. Per the book Empire
Speaker 2: of Orgasm, almost five hundred One Taste students would live
Speaker 2: in thirty three different om houses. This informal network mimic
Speaker 2: the way many Silicon Valley tech startups were metastasizing rapidly
Speaker 2: from city to city. Uber Lift, Instacart, and other on
Speaker 2: demand companies prided themselves on blitz scaling and operating with
Speaker 2: little overhead or liability. To avoid getting dragged down by
Speaker 2: employment costs, the startups hired drivers as as independent contractors
Speaker 2: and required them to provide their own cars and equipment. Similarly,
Speaker 2: many of one TAS's sales workers were independent contractors paid
Speaker 2: on commission. It's all the Silicon Valley grift, right, Hey, Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's a classic grift, and it's kind of a creative
Speaker 3: grift in that there is actually no real product, Like
Speaker 3: the overhead couldn't be lower because what you're selling is assault.
Speaker 2: Yeah, speaking of that, when Nicole had established the second
Speaker 2: warehouse commune, you know, they move out of the first
Speaker 2: on folshomen into another one. This is the one that
Speaker 2: has like semi private rooms, which seems like a positive move.
Speaker 2: But when they move into this place, Nicle makes it
Speaker 2: be the rule that none of the bedroom should have
Speaker 2: locking doors. And after this point, all of these om
Speaker 2: house franchises around the country abide by this rule to
Speaker 2: disastrous effect. Now, periodically throughout this long journey, Nicole and
Speaker 2: her top lieutenants would experiment with broadening the curriculum. On
Speaker 2: several occasions, the attempted to create male versions of the
Speaker 2: platoral stimulation workshops right where you're trying to teach people
Speaker 2: how to give a handshob Really well, I guess, and
Speaker 2: this never works out as a business. Nobody, for some reason,
Speaker 2: nobody wants to tell classes.
Speaker 3: It's just so that really funny.
Speaker 2: It's funny. No one interested at all in the dick
Speaker 2: version of this. If you tried to tell people that, like, no,
Speaker 2: the penile orgasm is actually a sacred and magical get
Speaker 2: the fuck out of here, Get the fuck out of here.
Speaker 3: No, it's God.
Speaker 2: You can't sell that. I'm sorry, nobody's No.
Speaker 3: That's too free, that's too free. You cannot.
Speaker 2: Dudes are so screwed up. You want me to make money,
Speaker 2: and that ways is to make people stop coming. Like
Speaker 2: you can convince people there's magic and never coming, right,
Speaker 2: but you can't convince people that, like a dick is magic.
Speaker 3: It's not. If it was, we would know by now,
Speaker 3: we would certainly know.
Speaker 2: God, Okay, it's very funny to me. And the reason
Speaker 2: Hewitt gives for I like these classes never take off
Speaker 2: is that one touch is a to recruit young women,
Speaker 2: both to pay for classes and to provide the sexual
Speaker 2: labor crucial to the organizations. Focusing doesn't work, they're less interested.
Speaker 2: If there's also hand job classes, that makes this seem
Speaker 2: like something else. If it's all focused on just people
Speaker 2: with vaginas being massaged, right, and if that's the only
Speaker 2: thing that's happening, you can convince yourself this is like
Speaker 2: really women led and like women positive. If like there's
Speaker 2: also jerkoff classes that doesn't work, that's just not a
Speaker 2: good self.
Speaker 3: And so the jerkoff classes being completely unprofitable is incidental,
Speaker 3: super funny, that's so good.
Speaker 2: So a lot of like a lot of these people
Speaker 2: are comfortable being massage taking an om because they're being
Speaker 2: told the men are not getting any sexual gratification out
Speaker 2: of this, right, So if you add any kind of
Speaker 2: male sexual gratification classes in there, even though a lot
Speaker 2: of men are getting gratified, that's kind of how the
Speaker 2: money is being made. You have to hide that stuff.
Speaker 2: So earlier in the episodes, we talked about a guy
Speaker 2: named Ken Blackman. He was a former member of the
Speaker 2: Welcomed Consensus Orgasm cult who once punched a lady because
Speaker 2: he had been taught that violence was a kind of
Speaker 2: honest communication. Nicole eventually recruits this guy as a teacher
Speaker 2: because she knew him at the Welcomed Consensus and because
Speaker 2: she's reintroducing a lot of these Welcomed Consensus curriculum about
Speaker 2: like violence into the one Taste curriculum, and she changes
Speaker 2: the way they frame it and her words. The way
Speaker 2: she describes this, The term she likes to use is
Speaker 2: skillful violation, and skillful violation means that you know it's
Speaker 2: better for someone to push through their boundaries even if
Speaker 2: they say no, so you don't listen to the no.
Speaker 2: You violate them even though they say no, because you're
Speaker 2: skillful enough to know that they actually need to have
Speaker 2: their boundaries violated. Right, Curia is.
Speaker 3: What your opinions are on this, Like, is why is
Speaker 3: it escalating towards such absurd word violence?
Speaker 2: Because there's nowhere else for it to go, right, it's.
Speaker 3: Just escalating it to like how can I retain control?
Speaker 3: And eventually it just becomes fear tactics.
Speaker 2: That's right. If you're honestly trying to help people be
Speaker 2: more sex positive or like teach them kink stuff, there
Speaker 2: is a point at which, and it's a pretty quick
Speaker 2: point which people are just kind of good to go
Speaker 2: on their own. You know, they don't want to go
Speaker 2: to like parties or events or like take specific technical
Speaker 2: classes on how to use whatever whip or a fucking
Speaker 2: Saint Andrew's cross or whatever. But they don't need to
Speaker 2: keep paying money to a group. They need to keep
Speaker 2: listening to a guru. You kind of give people a
Speaker 2: basic and they're good to go. If you're not gonna
Speaker 2: do that, in order to keep them following, you have
Speaker 2: to constantly have more new curriculum, and eventually that's going
Speaker 2: to wind up in some really dangerous directions. Right, and
Speaker 2: for one taste, it ends in skillful violence. And she
Speaker 2: Nicole justifies skillful violation being a thing by teaching that
Speaker 2: only twenty five percent of human communication is verbal, right,
Speaker 2: trained OMXP learn how to read the non verbal seventy
Speaker 2: five percent of communication, which I'm sure you.
Speaker 3: Don't even realize what you think or what you want.
Speaker 2: So a skillful violator is someone who's been trained enough
Speaker 2: to be able to read someone's real desires and then
Speaker 2: be able to force them to experience those Right. At
Speaker 2: their annual conference OMX one year, one, TAY staff wore
Speaker 2: shirts with penetrate written on the front. No great stuff. No.
Speaker 2: In twenty thirteen, a member of an OM house in
Speaker 2: Austin posted on oem hub, the colt's internal social network,
Speaker 2: and claimed that a man had repeatedly entered her room
Speaker 2: and sexually harassed her because again, the doors don't lock.
Speaker 2: This blows up internally. This is like a causes problems.
Speaker 2: People are saying, shouldn't we be able to lock doors?
Speaker 2: Who was this guy? Should he even have been there?
Speaker 2: This seems like a problem. And initially Rob comments internally
Speaker 2: and apologizes and says like we'll get right on it.
Speaker 2: But after that a bunch of holes. Lieutenants come in
Speaker 2: and I think this is actually racial. Who comes in
Speaker 2: and is there do damage control? And one of her
Speaker 2: lieutenant's posts as a woman, the easier thing for me
Speaker 2: to do is say I was violated that way, I
Speaker 2: don't have to look at my part in it.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, okay, your part?
Speaker 2: She was in her room that won't lock. What was
Speaker 2: her part?
Speaker 3: Like? It is insane? How regressive? Again? Yeah it guess okay.
Speaker 2: Now. By this point, Nicole has added a section to
Speaker 2: her coaching program lecture where she claims to have seen
Speaker 2: a twenty thirteen study from somewhere, which researchers studied, in
Speaker 2: which researchers studied rape victims to see how they'd healed afterwards,
Speaker 2: and Nicole claimed the women who recovered were the women
Speaker 2: who took responsibility for the action, right right, Okay, so
Speaker 2: this is part of what she's teaching. Now. This becomes
Speaker 2: an increasingly important message for the colt because in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 2: a sales meeting was called and one of Nicole's representatives
Speaker 2: told the company, it's really important that we not break
Speaker 2: any prostitution's laws while selling courses, and attendees say like, oh,
Speaker 2: that was a moment where I realized they're kind of
Speaker 2: telling me to prostitute myself, but just not to talk
Speaker 2: about it that way. Otherwise they wouldn't have brought that
Speaker 2: up at all. Now, Nicole increasingly lectures about how sexual
Speaker 2: trauma is the result of not wanting sex enough, and
Speaker 2: as she taught, if you change your mental state to
Speaker 2: ones that accept one that accepts sex as always a
Speaker 2: positive thing, you literally can't be raped. And while she
Speaker 2: gave these courses, she would talk about how she was
Speaker 2: sexually abused as a child and explain, the only way
Speaker 2: I healed is that I accepted I had actually caused
Speaker 2: that situation by coming on to him, and also that
Speaker 2: it was a good thing right, that it made me
Speaker 2: more powerful. Likewise, if someone expressed a fear or a
Speaker 2: phobia related to sexual trauma, the solution was to embrace
Speaker 2: that trauma and find a way to enjoy it. People
Speaker 2: are encouraged, slash forced to participate in rape and bondage
Speaker 2: play because they'd been raped or subjected to intimate partner violence.
Speaker 2: As Nicole said, the places you hate are your practice.
Speaker 2: They're actually your biggest gift. They're the places where you
Speaker 2: get free.
Speaker 3: This line, it's deeply fucking depressing because it's like not
Speaker 3: only practicing dissociation through being actively abused, but again going
Speaker 3: back into like all of these she's capitalizing on these
Speaker 3: popular narratives about kink and by like suggesting that you
Speaker 3: would only be interested in this if you've experienced extreme
Speaker 3: trauma and enjoyed associated like it's just so, it's such horseshit,
Speaker 3: This is so dangerous.
Speaker 2: It's really bad. Yeah. Twenty sixteen, the company made nine
Speaker 2: point four million dollars. Gwyneth Paltrow praised them openly. They
Speaker 2: do some like goop stuff Chloe Kardashian.
Speaker 3: Talks about it took her that long.
Speaker 2: Tim Ferriss does like a podcast thing about them.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: At the most advanced stage of the Grift, one taste
Speaker 2: was breaking into the mainstream, or at least the mainstream
Speaker 2: part of the WU self help world. While the public
Speaker 2: facing part of the company was very much in line
Speaker 2: with the body modification self optimization Bay Area culture of
Speaker 2: the era, that's not what's actually going on internally and
Speaker 2: inside there are ongoing experiments that are like verging on
Speaker 2: a cult nonsense. At one point, Nicole starts initiating priests
Speaker 2: of om and selling like fifteen thousand dollars classes where
Speaker 2: rich guys can participate in these like drug drenched sex
Speaker 2: magic rituals and get like certified as priests. And I
Speaker 2: think Nicole's idea, because this is this never fully turns
Speaker 2: into anything. I think the idea at one point was
Speaker 2: that if this is successful enough, if enough guys are interested,
Speaker 2: if this proves to have legs, maybe we can apply
Speaker 2: for tax free status and call ourselves a religion. Right.
Speaker 2: I think Nicole was like exploring and just doesn't quite
Speaker 2: get the chance to live this Grift out.
Speaker 3: I mean, she is committing enough sex crimes, I think,
Speaker 3: to qualify as a religion. Yeah, yeah, as well at
Speaker 3: that point she's she's committed enough crimes to be a religion.
Speaker 2: Yep. So she is getting much more reckless with everything
Speaker 2: as the years go on. I found at least one
Speaker 2: account from a former member who claims Nicole applied these
Speaker 2: rich tech guys with drugs at these high dollar classes,
Speaker 2: and you know these are not only are they basically
Speaker 2: paying to get into an orgy, but like at one point,
Speaker 2: this one member says, Nicole specifically doses a dude with
Speaker 2: a bunch of LSD to try to convince them to
Speaker 2: donate another two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the company. Right,
Speaker 2: so that's part of what she's doing.
Speaker 3: I'm honestly shocked because of how modern this story is
Speaker 3: that there is no it doesn't seem like any member
Speaker 3: of the cult who has that there's been no significant
Speaker 3: whistle blowing incident by this point, not.
Speaker 2: Yet Peace of Surprise have come out. But yeah, that's
Speaker 2: not going to happen until twenty eighteen when Hewitt puts
Speaker 2: that article out. But because the men with money are
Speaker 2: so core to everything, happening here. Nicole's teachings trended towards
Speaker 2: explaining how it was good for men to be angry
Speaker 2: and controlling to women. She called this letting out your
Speaker 2: beast and praised it. Everyone was increasingly encouraged to be
Speaker 2: brutal towards each other, to cut each other up with
Speaker 2: their skillful scalpels. Nicole also praised intimate partner violence, most
Speaker 2: of which seems to have been man on women. Women
Speaker 2: who were beat by their partners were told that they
Speaker 2: had caused the situation by goading his beast or not
Speaker 2: understanding his beast enough. If they sought to escape abusive situations,
Speaker 2: they were insulted from fleeing it from his beast rather
Speaker 2: than meeting it with love. So these om priest classes
Speaker 2: and orgy sessions could net as much as a million
Speaker 2: dollars for one taste for a five day class. These
Speaker 2: are the real top dollar things. And the guys in
Speaker 2: these they are just paying to get into an orgy
Speaker 2: with a bunch of young women, right, and they have, but.
Speaker 3: It has to seem like school as well.
Speaker 2: It's got a right right and this you know, this
Speaker 2: works for years without them get in trouble, but it
Speaker 2: couldn't last forever. By twenty seventeen, there's a couple of
Speaker 2: pending lawsuits, and there's some like rumblings that bad press
Speaker 2: might be coming, right, and Nicole decides to separate herself
Speaker 2: legally from the group in the hope of gaining some
Speaker 2: sort of plausible deniability. So she sells the company for
Speaker 2: twelve million dollars to like her wealthiest followers, and this
Speaker 2: is framed as the company maturing. Right. Nicole's still going
Speaker 2: to be the spiritual and intellectual leader, but One Taste
Speaker 2: is going to be run like a normal company, with
Speaker 2: like a CEO and a normal business chain of command
Speaker 2: right now. Initially it seems like maybe this will work.
Speaker 2: In twenty eighteen, thirty five thousand people had attended One
Speaker 2: Taste events in cities around the world, and hundreds of
Speaker 2: members lived in om houses in multiple countries, oeming twice
Speaker 2: in the morning and twice in the evening, and often
Speaker 2: quitting their careers to sell courses. But that same year,
Speaker 2: Bloomberg published Hewitt's first bombshell article about the cult, which
Speaker 2: described it as looking like a prostitution ring. That article
Speaker 2: quoted former employees saying stuff like Orgasm was God and
Speaker 2: Nicole was like Jesus. And I want to quote from
Speaker 2: an article in the Times about the fallout from this article,
Speaker 2: One Taste went quiet. It shut down all centers and courses.
Speaker 2: A group of about thirty senior practitioners, including the coal
Speaker 2: retreated to the land, which is like a chunk of
Speaker 2: land that they're starting a compound on. Right then came
Speaker 2: a BBC podcast, The Orgasm Cult, a Netflix documentary, Orgasm Inc.
Speaker 2: A Device documentary, and a Playboy investigation. In June of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three, the FBI stormed the land to Done
Speaker 2: and shure Wits that's Rachel, were arrested. The company has
Speaker 2: spent about fifteen million dollars on legal fees since twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: suing the BBC, suing Netflix, suing a former member, being
Speaker 2: sued by another member for alleged sex trafficking, and fighting
Speaker 2: the criminal trial. And yeah, and it's one of those
Speaker 2: things where they were committing these crimes the whole time.
Speaker 2: It's as soon as that article comes out, the FBI
Speaker 2: is like, oh, I guess we got to look into this,
Speaker 2: and there's just immediately tons of shit to make charges
Speaker 2: on Rachel is like. She's accused of targeting vulnerable people
Speaker 2: by advertising that the companies like classes could fix sexual trauma,
Speaker 2: telling people to take on debt to pay for classes,
Speaker 2: with holding wages from employees, isolating people by demanding absolute commitment.
Speaker 2: She's accused of participating an abusive employment practices, subjecting members
Speaker 2: to economic, sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse, surveillance and doctrination
Speaker 2: and intimidation. And to Doane is accused of, you know,
Speaker 2: participating in or of sexually trafficking people, of a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of bad stuff, right, And there's a lot. We
Speaker 2: don't need to get into everything that happens in the
Speaker 2: court case. You know, just a few weeks ago, earlier
Speaker 2: this year, to Doane was sentenced to nine years in
Speaker 2: federal prison. She is convicted, so is Rachel, and they
Speaker 2: are sentenced both to prison sentences. Nicole again gets like
Speaker 2: nine years.
Speaker 3: Which, as always seems.
Speaker 2: Low, seems low, seems low. Judge Gujarati says that Cole
Speaker 2: caused long lasting, if not a reparable, harm to former
Speaker 2: One Taste employees. What she was doing wasn't about enlightenment
Speaker 2: or operating in a different dimension. It was criminal. Dudoan
Speaker 2: has not accepted any wrongdoing, neither has one taste. The
Speaker 2: people currently leading things still stand by her and basically
Speaker 2: say she's the fucking best there apparently, like at least
Speaker 2: the way they're framing it is, we're waiting for her,
Speaker 2: you know, as soon as she gets out, you know,
Speaker 2: we'll be able to get back to the important work.
Speaker 3: Jesus Jesus famously returns. That is, what does she end
Speaker 3: up getting convicted on. I'm curious.
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, let's get the exact list up here, because
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously part of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so because every time I hear about a
Speaker 3: case like this and then you hear the actual conviction,
Speaker 3: it does sound like she was able to probably get
Speaker 3: out a lot of consequences by being able to argue, well,
Speaker 3: technically there was a degree of choice, even though people
Speaker 3: were so psychological fucked that I would argue that's not true.
Speaker 2: I mean, we'll see how much that help. But she
Speaker 2: does get like it's a forced labor conspiracy, Like it's
Speaker 2: conspiracy to commit forced labor that she gets in trouble
Speaker 2: with and gets convicted of. Like forced labor conspiracy, like
Speaker 2: is like the actual crime she's convicted on is forced
Speaker 2: labor conspiracy alongside a little under nine hundred grand in
Speaker 2: restitution and two years supervised release. And it's just so
Speaker 2: far seven victims confirmed, right, that's based on this. The
Speaker 2: only accomplice who goes down with her is Rachel. Obviously
Speaker 2: a lot of other people were complicit and still are.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I don't think one taste is gonna have
Speaker 2: the juice to survive until she's done.
Speaker 3: But we'll see, Lord, I know, truly, let's I hope not.
Speaker 3: I hope not. But usually with something like this, unfortunately,
Speaker 3: there's just gonna be another grifter that innovates in the
Speaker 3: field of you know, taking advantage of people.
Speaker 2: So yep, yep, yep, holy shit.
Speaker 3: Well, well, holy shit.
Speaker 2: Robert, has this influenced any of your thinking on how
Speaker 2: to create your own cult? Jamie?
Speaker 3: Look the colt uh, this was a truly horrific one.
Speaker 3: I feel like she really did find a way to
Speaker 3: incorporate almost every grift of the last twenty years.
Speaker 2: It really is impressive.
Speaker 3: A single there's an element of false feminism, there is
Speaker 3: an element of capitalizing on male loneliness. There's a class
Speaker 3: element to it. There's indentured labor, there's force labor. There's
Speaker 3: a tech element. I mean, it really does kind of
Speaker 3: run the gamut. And and she almost became a religion.
Speaker 3: I think that really would have been the bingo right,
Speaker 3: is to rebrand as a religion.
Speaker 2: That's what I will do eventually when I finally best
Speaker 2: this with a cult that's about the opposite of orgasming.
Speaker 2: I'm going to teach people how to poop right. You know,
Speaker 2: I think that that's the.
Speaker 3: Next drift well, and I think that's also I mean.
Speaker 2: You're doing it wrong.
Speaker 3: Poop right. There's actually a good name.
Speaker 2: If you get better at it, there's magic. It'll make
Speaker 2: you immortal.
Speaker 3: Look, media literacy isn't an all time low. I think
Speaker 3: you should call it poop right. Get to the point,
Speaker 3: poop right.
Speaker 2: Call it one day.
Speaker 3: I had to think too hard.
Speaker 2: And like, by three years on, I'll be teaching people
Speaker 2: that like if you're if you're not eating an all
Speaker 2: grape diet, like God is going to kill your children
Speaker 2: or something like that. It'll go crazy after a while,
Speaker 2: but up to that point, we'll have a lot of fun,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you'll sell so many supplements.
Speaker 2: So many supplements. It's it's basically, oh my.
Speaker 3: Gosh, she wasn't selling supplements. That's a big that was
Speaker 3: as she wasn't.
Speaker 2: Actually, you're right, that was an error.
Speaker 3: That was there should have been a useless product.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were so many things she could have sold
Speaker 1: on the one daste name.
Speaker 3: Oh fuck it, God, I guess when I'm when I'm
Speaker 3: signing over my twenty thousand dollars check, I hope I'll
Speaker 3: remember to withhold it when you're like, Actually, the best
Speaker 3: way to poop is uh to punch your spouse before.
Speaker 3: That's the only way to really release is to assault
Speaker 3: someone immediately before taking the healthiest of your life.
Speaker 2: I would never do that. But the key to pooping
Speaker 2: is to live on a boat for several years, like
Speaker 2: robbing merchant vessels for me in order that I can
Speaker 2: like sell the proceeds. That's that's how you do it.
Speaker 3: That's kind of brilliant to sell a poop only you
Speaker 3: could you could take.
Speaker 2: That's right, That's right. Okay, Well this is a good.
Speaker 3: Thing, I think. Yeah, this is I feel good about
Speaker 3: great stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we're on our way here, Jim, you've
Speaker 2: got any pluggables here?
Speaker 3: Oh? Man? The usuals? I I I have a book
Speaker 3: coming out next year that there's no link for uh.
Speaker 3: So I'll let you know when there's a link for it.
Speaker 3: But for the now, listen to the Bechdelcast every week.
Speaker 3: Listen to We the Unhoused every other week, both on
Speaker 3: Thursdays and Tuesdays, respectively. And uh and yeah take it.
Speaker 3: Take a healthy ship for free at your house tonight.
Speaker 3: Do that? Do that for me?
Speaker 2: Yep?
Speaker 3: All right, everybody, I'm trying to undercut your business.
Speaker 2: Yeah wow, yeah, thank you. All right, everyone, We're done,
Speaker 2: go away bye.
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