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