Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard Ellen Huet (on wellness cults) About this episode Ellen Huet (Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult) is a journalist, startup founder, and author. Ellen joins the Armchair Expert to discuss must-haves versus most-haves in terms of cult sexuality requirements, her hot tips for avoiding cults that are too extractive, and her dealings with Silicon Valley and venture capitalists. Ellen and Dax talk about when she began covering orgasmic meditation startup OneTaste, the OM course to cult pipeline, and the intricacies and systems of manipulation concocted by OneTaste’s leader. Ellen explains unpacking potential power dynamics of sexual abuse, how much status games weigh into human behavior, and why she believes there’s no one invulnerable to indoctrination.
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Transcript 24,426 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dax Shepard and I'm joined by Modest Mouse.
0:05 Speaker 01 Hi.
0:06 Dax Shepard? Uh, today we have Ellen Hewitt and she is an award-winning investigative reporter. And boy, does she have a barn burner of an investigation that we're gonna talk about. She's got a new book out now called Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult. You know, these cults are juicy, juicy, juicy.
0:25 Speaker 01 They're so juicy. You wanna talk juicy, uh-oh, pun intended.
0:29 Dax Shepard? Whoa, better coming out of your mouth. Um, I feel like I should join a cult. I'm so interested in them. I should at least do it for a couple of months.
0:38 Speaker 01 Give it a little try.
0:38 Dax Shepard? Like go live on, you know, some federal land or something. No, I'd be a bad cult member.
0:44 Speaker 01 You'd be so bad.
0:45 Dax Shepard? Please enjoy Ellen Hewitt. We get support from Quince.
0:50 Speaker 01 I have to say, I am so ready for fall. I want sweaters. I've been craving a true crisp morning where I actually need a jacket. I can't wait.
0:59 Dax Shepard? I'm fully there. The second it dips below 70, I'm like, this is my season. Give me the layers, give me the boots, give me a reason to wear something other than a t-shirt. And honestly, that's why I love Quince, because fall is when your wardrobe actually has to show up. And everything at Quince is 50 to 80% less than similar brands. We're talking 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at $60.
1:22 Speaker 01 $60! $60 for cashmere that you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. It's amazing. Gets me every time. It really shouldn't be real, but it is because they go straight to the factories. They skip the middlemen and they just hand you the savings. The stuff isn't trendy. It's the kind of pieces you grab over and over because they work every time.
1:40 Dax Shepard? The 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters for me are it. When I look at Steve McQueen, this man owned a couple of sweaters he wore all the time and he looks iconic.
1:49 Speaker 01 It's a uniform.
1:50 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:51 Speaker 01 And Quince isn't just about the clothes. They have hotel-quality bedding, cookware, bath essentials, thoughtfully-designed furniture. You can really go there and outfit your entire apartment or house. So if you're in need of any kind of fall refresh at home, too, same quality, same attention to detail for every corner of your life.
2:08 Dax Shepard? Find your next fall favorite. At Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. We get support from AG1. Fall is that time when your body and mind are getting ready for the winter. You're settling in, bracing for the cold. Your body's already running a deficit from the shorter days and broken sleep patterns. You don't want a nutrient deficit stacked on top of that, too.
2:44 Speaker 01 That's where your AG1 routine earns its spot. It's not fixing your sleep or your alarm time. It's giving your body what it needs so the dark mornings don't tank you before you even start. One scoop cold water every morning before anything else.
2:57 Dax Shepard? AG1 Next Gen has 75 plus ingredients, vitamins, minerals, pre and probiotics, superfoods, backed by four separate gold standard clinical trials. Key nutrient levels improved with three months of consistent use.
3:11 Speaker 01 That's the part people miss. It's not a one day fix. It's what happens when you stay consistent.
3:15 Dax Shepard? It's an easy, everyday thing. I've added it to my morning routine and I'm going to tell you, I actually love the taste of it. It's like Pavlovian. I drink it and I know I'm going to get that little vitamin buzz.
3:25 Speaker 01 Well, that's also the thing. When you do it first thing in the morning, you already feel kind of self-esteem because you're like, I already did something good for myself.
3:32 Dax Shepard? Yes. Go to drinkag1.com/dax. And for a limited time, get a free immunity bundle, including a bottle of omega-3 fish oil and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/dax. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that Armchair Expert sent you.
4:14 Dax Shepard? Hi, Dax.
4:15 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Ellen.
4:16 Dax Shepard? Hi, Ellen.
4:17 Speaker 01 Oh, that's okay. No, you're good. And I love your shirt.
4:20 Speaker 02 Thank you. That's so sweet.
4:22 Speaker 01 I like red. I'm really feeling...
4:23 Dax Shepard? Tell me more. The color, the texture, the cut.
4:25 Speaker 01 All of it, actually. Every single thing. But also, I'm really feeling red this season.
4:31 Dax Shepard? Aye.
4:32 Speaker 01 Feeling red.
4:35 Dax Shepard? How high are you on the Fashionista? What would you give yours?
4:38 Speaker 02 Low. I got to set a clothing swap.
4:39 Dax Shepard? Okay, great.
4:40 Speaker 01 Wow. You look very stylish.
4:42 Speaker 02 Thank you.
4:43 Speaker 01 Your pants are cute, too.
4:43 Speaker 02 Thank you.
4:44 Dax Shepard? So you got lucky?
4:45 Speaker 02 Yes. Well, I have a good eye, but there was a period of time in my life when I shopped more and it took up not just money, but emotional and mental energy. And I decided to not do it anymore.
4:55 Dax Shepard? To liberate yourself from it.
4:56 Speaker 02 Yeah. So now it's like clothing swaps. But I also live with a lot of people who like to host clothing swaps. So I think unless you have that in your life, it's a little harder for that to be where you get clothes.
5:06 Dax Shepard? Are you currently still with 10 roommates? Or is that in the past?
5:09 Speaker 02 No, I now live with 20.
5:11 Speaker 01 What?
5:12 Dax Shepard? Explain this structure to us. I might be breaking the story about you, which would be fun. It'd be like a baton handoff.
5:20 Speaker 02 At our current... I call it a commune, but I'm mostly joking. It's a communal living compound. The wifi password is notacult. We joke a lot about it. It definitely doesn't qualify in a lot of ways. For many years, I lived in a group house with 10 roommates. That was one house. I lived elsewhere for a bit, and then I moved to a different communal living compound where there are currently 20 adults, including me, and eight children under the age of four.
5:46 Dax Shepard? Oh, my goodness.
5:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:47 Dax Shepard? So obviously, it's coed.
5:49 Speaker 02 Yes. There's a lot of married couples. Most people aren't married.
5:52 Dax Shepard? And is there bed hopping going on? I just don't know how you get that many people together and there's not bed hopping.
5:57 Speaker 02 It's like a lot more trying to fix the ailments of life when you have a young kid. And so imagine, we talk a lot about baby monitor distance. Put your kid to bed 7:30 or 8:00 p.m., and then you can come over and hang out.
6:09 Speaker 01 Hang out. Yeah, it's a villain.
6:11 Speaker 02 Hang out with other people. We have dinner together six nights a week.
6:13 Speaker 01 Oh.
6:14 Speaker 02 Each of us takes turns cooking. So you cook once or twice a month.
6:17 Speaker 01 But for 20 people, that's a lot.
6:19 Speaker 02 Which has been fun. Like, that's a new skill that I now have, which I didn't have before. So that's nice.
6:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, how big are the pots and pans in this house?
6:27 Speaker 02 Very large.
6:28 Speaker 01 Restaurant, great.
6:29 Speaker 02 We have a pot we like to call Mondo Pot, you know, if you're making like a baked soup.
6:33 Dax Shepard? Now, listen, between the 20 of you.
6:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:36 Dax Shepard? First of all, I don't know how that divides by seven, but let's forget about that. So maybe you cook less than once a week?
6:41 Speaker 02 It's a little more complicated than that.
6:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I had a hunch.
6:44 Speaker 02 Half, well, maybe like a third of the people have decided that they would rather pay into a chef than cook.
6:51 Dax Shepard? Okay.
6:51 Speaker 02 And everyone's happy about that because some of those people, if you're not enthusiastic about cooking, you're probably not a good cook.
6:55 Dax Shepard? That's where I was going with this.
6:56 Speaker 01 Exactly.
6:57 Dax Shepard? So there's gonna be nights where it's like, ah, fucking Devon's gonna make cowboy stew again.
7:03 Speaker 02 You're totally right. It was like that for a long time. And that's why they set up this system, which was like a godsend. So that was before I moved in, but I've been friends with these people for a long time. And so it used to be like, oh no, Phil's cooking. No one's happy about this. Phil's not happy.
7:16 Speaker 01 Right.
7:16 Dax Shepard? You almost wake up in a bad mood that day. It's Tuesday, Phil's cooking.
7:19 Speaker 02 Or you make other plans.
7:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
7:21 Speaker 01 Right.
7:21 Speaker 02 Then all of a sudden, it's like no one's showing up for dinner.
7:24 Speaker 01 Can you order in on your own, just like in your bedroom ever if you want?
7:27 Speaker 02 Of course. But then, yes, then we found this wonderful woman named Julie and she comes and she cooks twice a week. And so either you can have a cooking shift or you pay into Julie.
7:36 Dax Shepard? And how often are you in a pinch and you have to bring Julie in?
7:38 Speaker 02 No, no, we plan ahead.
7:40 Dax Shepard? No, you personally.
7:41 Speaker 02 Oh, me. Oh, no, no, no. I love, I love doing the cooking. It takes up my evening. So it's like I tend to set aside three hours for it.
7:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's Thanksgiving you're making.
7:49 Speaker 02 I usually make a big soup or one thing that's on the stove, maybe one thing that's in the stove, salad, and maybe rice or roasted veggies. We eat a lot of tofu. You might not be surprised.
8:01 Dax Shepard? Did you take this structure from the Swedes or somebody, or is this proprietary? And you guys just worked it out over time? Cause they do this in Sweden and in Norway.
8:11 Speaker 02 They're like all over. Basically, my friend Phil.
8:14 Dax Shepard? The shitty cook.
8:15 Speaker 02 Yes, the shitty cook.
8:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah, shitty chef Phil.
8:17 Speaker 02 This is kind of his life's work, is like trying to come up with concepts that allow people to live near their friends.
8:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
8:25 Speaker 02 And with the idea that it makes life easier, happier, better in all the ways that you can imagine. There are different versions of it. He encourages people, obviously the most Involved one, which is hardest for people to do is buying property together with your friends.
8:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:39 Speaker 02 Or you could like rent next to your friend, or you could befriend your neighbor. It started off as a hobby and then it has slowly become a thing for him.
8:48 Speaker 01 So the one that you're in now is not one building?
8:51 Speaker 02 No, it is six buildings.
8:53 Speaker 01 Okay.
8:54 Speaker 02 Yes.
8:54 Dax Shepard? And is Phil charismatic? Do we need to watch Phil? Is he the most charismatic of the group? This is a nod to the definition of what a cult is.
9:01 Speaker 02 His wife, who is one of my closest friends, I mean, I'm very close to Phil and Kristen, his wife. She is my friend who is the most like a cult leader.
9:09 Speaker 01 Wow.
9:10 Dax Shepard? Okay, great. But we think she's benevolent.
9:11 Speaker 02 She is benevolent enough, I think, on a scale. But she is that person who has a vision for like how people should do things and can be kind of pushy. And she's extremely effective. She's like one of the most high functioning people I know. And she's tiny. That's what's funny.
9:23 Speaker 01 They normally are.
9:24 Speaker 02 I know.
9:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, small and mighty.
9:26 Speaker 02 So she's the one to watch out for.
9:28 Dax Shepard? Okay, I'll keep my eye on her.
9:29 Speaker 01 It's hard to not talk about this the whole time. I'm finding this fascinating.
9:33 Dax Shepard? Maybe we will, you know?
9:34 Speaker 01 Sure.
9:35 Dax Shepard? We'll bounce back and forth.
9:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:36 Dax Shepard? Because I'm going to be honest with you. I've thought about this. So during COVID, we kind of potted up with five families. And it kind of became what you're talking about, which is like it was a reprieve for us parents because the kids would be distracted. Someone would host, so we'd fuck up someone's house and then they dealt with it. And then you only got your house fucked up once a week and yeah, you handled food. It was lovely.
9:54 Speaker 01 It was so fun.
9:56 Dax Shepard? There wasn't enough bed hopping, if I have a complaint. Yeah, there's no bed hopping.
10:00 Speaker 02 Were they nearby?
10:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, we never lived on the property, but we would vacation all together.
10:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's really nice.
10:05 Speaker 01 The vacations were really when we were doing that because there were certain ones that were so perfect. Where it was like the pool was in the middle. Do you remember this one? And then there was like surrounding.
10:14 Dax Shepard? The Palm Springs one had that.
10:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, individual rooms.
10:18 Speaker 02 You want individual spaces with a communal space that's at the center, which I argue needs to have a kitchen.
10:23 Speaker 01 Yes, that's what this had.
10:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
10:25 Speaker 02 Because that's where people, you know, you come into graves, you snack, you talk to someone. To me, it's like you could have everything individual, but as long as you had a shared kitchen that is really like a primary kitchen for most of the people, it's going to feel like living together.
10:40 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes, yes.
10:41 Speaker 02 But you don't actually have to deal with sharing. A bathroom, which can be harder for people.
10:46 Speaker 01 What happens if someone becomes annoying?
10:48 Dax Shepard? Oh, which certainly happens.
10:51 Speaker 01 It has to happen.
10:52 Dax Shepard? Or goes through stuff.
10:53 Speaker 02 It can be hard. In my old house, actually, one of the hardest things that we dealt with was there was a moth infestation. Clothes moth. People had very different tolerances
11:05 Speaker 02 for a little bit of clothes moth. And it caused a lot of pain and some people were really feeling not heard. You know, we'd have house meetings and be like, what should we do about the moth?
11:15 Speaker 01 I would be so pissed if you brought moths and then they ate all my clothes off.
11:19 Dax Shepard? But how does one person bring moth?
11:21 Speaker 02 You bring in clothing with moth. They're very hard to get rid of.
11:24 Speaker 01 Yes, they are.
11:25 Speaker 02 Basically, two kinds of people in the world, people who have dealt with a clothes moth problem and those who haven't. And blessed are the second category.
11:31 Dax Shepard? I just discovered a moth hole in one of my items that I hadn't worn for three years. I thought I gave a character. You could pay for that kind of distress.
11:39 Speaker 01 They're close to Kristen's closet. That's not fair to her.
11:42 Dax Shepard? But this is years ago. Let's not get too bogged down in that.
11:45 Speaker 02 The real path is wear your clothes often and you won't have a problem with it. But because it's like if you take them out, move them around, show them to the sun.
11:53 Speaker 01 They don't like that.
11:55 Dax Shepard? Okay, I would imagine it's baked in that we have check-ins. It seems like it really needs check-ins. So what's that schedule?
12:02 Speaker 02 There are a lot of houses like this in San Francisco and they're all kind of in a network. So I have friends who have lived in other ones. Some people do house meeting every week. That's a lot. At my current place, we have them roughly six weeks and we don't need that many. And that's really nice. It's a sign of high functioning phase of the group where we have had a lot of house meetings where it's pretty simple. Two or three agenda items. Let's talk about should we move dinnertime? Because the kids are getting older and they stay up later. How should we handle certain kinds of guests? Like we want to alert people more often.
12:33 Dax Shepard? It does sound really fun.
12:34 Speaker 01 More evolved.
12:35 Dax Shepard? And I don't think they're all super sexually charged. And I think those ones that are probably don't last very long.
12:41 Speaker 02 It's too much drama.
12:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Now, I want to hit you with this theory as someone who's now been studying a specific cult for seven years or eight years. I have this theory and I say it with great respect to my many friends that are in Scientology. I think the fact that L. Ron Hubbard didn't fuck all the parishioners is very telling.
12:58 Speaker 02 Oh.
12:59 Dax Shepard? I think there's something very interesting there. We don't have an example where the cult leader doesn't fuck everyone.
13:04 Speaker 02 You're totally right.
13:05 Speaker 01 It's really rare.
13:06 Speaker 02 It's true that most cults control their members' sexuality in some way. Whether that's prescribed celibacy, prescribed promiscuity, arranged marriages, whatever. You know, I've heard experts describe this as just an effective tactic because if you manage to control someone's sex life, it's just this very intimate thing about them.
13:23 Dax Shepard? And can be manipulated and leveraged quite easily because it's also the source of shame and embarrassment and insecurity.
13:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, and can be used as leverage or payment, often like payment to the leader. But that's a great point. It's not like a must-have, but I do think it's a most-have.
13:38 Dax Shepard? I'm super fascinated by cults, and that's the only one I've ever been aware of where they weren't fucking everyone.
13:43 Speaker 02 You're totally right.
13:43 Speaker 01 They weren't fucking everyone, but there's blackmail involved in Scientology. So I think he knows about people's sex.
13:50 Dax Shepard? Let's be careful. There's alleged blackmail. I'm not kidding.
13:53 Speaker 01 Well, you just call it. Wait, it's also an alleged cult.
13:55 Dax Shepard? No, no, I said I have an opinion and a theory. So when you say they do blackmail, that's liable.
14:03 Speaker 01 Okay, well, they're probably gonna be mad that we're calling it a cult in general.
14:05 Speaker 02 Someone's had their defamation training.
14:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I just want, you know, I want you to make that point. I just want you to say.
14:11 Speaker 01 Well, there's alleged blackmail that happens.
14:14 Speaker 02 And is it sexual in nature?
14:15 Speaker 01 I think whatever they can get on you can be used, so I'm sure a lot of that is sexual.
14:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the allegations I've heard is you're doing these monitored sessions with the paddles, and you're telling a lot of your history, and that's being recorded. So then the embarrassing aspects of that can be leveraged against you, which of course would include sex a lot.
14:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, probably a lot of that.
14:38 Dax Shepard? If that happens.
14:38 Speaker 01 If it happens. If it's a cult. I mean, we have to say that too. Because I bet on Wikipedia, it doesn't say that.
14:44 Dax Shepard? Well, what's good is there's no definite. You couldn't prove or not for the cult.
14:48 Speaker 02 Obviously, I've spent a lot of time thinking about. How to be careful, legally speaking. And yeah, cult, I think it can be maybe part of an argument, legally speaking, that there has been malice or kind of hitting certain bars of defamation. But I don't think it's something that you can point to on its own and be like, it's defamative.
15:04 Dax Shepard? Well, there's no actual legal issue of being a cult leader. You can't be tried for being a cult leader. That's not in itself a crime.
15:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:11 Dax Shepard? But you'd have to do some other things. Yeah, I'm super fascinated by them. I'm also often in the position, as you probably are living in this communal situation, where you gotta know what the difference is, because I'm in AA. And I'll be the first to admit, we check a lot of boxes, man. But at the end of the day, there's no leader. That must be the quintessential ingredient, because somehow this AA thing has lasted for 80 years.
15:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:31 Dax Shepard? Pretty successfully.
15:32 Speaker 02 The main takeaway is there's no yes or no, cult or not. Like, it's not a binary. It exists on a continuum slash spectrum. Charismatic leader is an important factor, but it can be part of a whole. Or you could imagine if something else checked all these other boxes, and they happen to not have someone who fit that exact definition.
15:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
15:51 Speaker 02 You could still imagine it being pretty harmful. But it's all on a scale.
15:57 Dax Shepard? And then I'll tell you my grossest, deepest thoughts. I hope it's having integrity, which is like, I regularly am trying to make sure I'm not becoming a narcissist. Or cult leader-y, like, because when you have an audience, I think a lot of people have had an audience and not checked in with themselves. And I've watched them all go down a kind of predictable. There's a great podcast about kind of podcasters turned gurus, which is like a well-worn path. I'm constantly thinking of like, okay, well, how do we know we're not narcissists? What proof do we have in our defense? And then, why am I not a cult leader?
16:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:27 Dax Shepard? And making sure I don't ever try to become one, because it's tempting, I think, for people.
16:31 Speaker 02 Yeah. One of the hot tips to avoid being too extractive of a cult is to try to join more than one.
16:38 Dax Shepard? And see how they feel.
16:39 Speaker 02 Yeah. You know, if you're worried, like, Group A in my life is taking too much control, I'm concerned about it. Try to join another that is maybe equally demanding of your time. And if that's an okay coexistence, that's actually probably a sign that
16:54 Speaker 01 It's not.
16:54 Speaker 02 You're okay, or maybe you're not in so much of a danger zone. So you should let people join another.
16:59 Dax Shepard? We encourage people to listen to Revisionist History all the time.
17:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, only that one, though.
17:02 Dax Shepard? Well, no, Elizabeth and Andy.
17:04 Speaker 01 And nobody's listening, right? Yeah, we have like a handful of allow.
17:09 Speaker 01 But it's sanctioned. Yeah, exactly. There's a list on the website.
17:12 Dax Shepard? Like when there's the biker club meetup, these are the groups that can all coexist without. Okay, so you're from Fremont and you went to Stanford.
17:20 Speaker 02 That's right.
17:20 Dax Shepard? You don't sound very financially motivated.
17:24 Speaker 02 Is that because I'm a journalist?
17:26 Dax Shepard? When you think go to Stanford, you're like, oh, great. That's turnkey to 800,000 a year. A lot of people that go to Stanford are definitely financially motivated.
17:32 Speaker 02 That seems fair.
17:33 Dax Shepard? Okay, so and then now I find this communal living thing. So tell me about your relationship with, well, A, how do we major in English and poli sci? And also, what's just your disposition about this stuff?
17:44 Speaker 02 About making money?
17:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you feel unique, especially in Silicon Valley.
17:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, when I was at Stanford, I took English classes. I was really involved in the school newspaper, did all the things that you might expect of a overachieving, letters-oriented, verbal gerbil. And the year that I graduated, a lot of the people who were really looking to get involved in Silicon Valley, working at Google was still kind of a hot job. Now, I gather, you want to be a founder or bust, right? And people are like, the best thing you can say is that I dropped out of Stanford to like, start a company or something. I didn't take a CS class until my last year at Stanford, and it was actually really fun. And one of my only regrets is that maybe I should have done that sooner, but just because it was intellectually stimulating in a new way.
18:26 Dax Shepard? So is this fair to say you fell in love with writing at the paper?
18:29 Speaker 02 I did.
18:29 Dax Shepard? At Stanford, you were the editor.
18:30 Speaker 02 No, I was like a managing editor. But college was the first place where I remember writing a story that I felt mattered, that was like a news story that had to do with, don't ask, don't tell, or something that was controversial. And I was really motivated by that. And that was probably the first time I got the news bug. And then I really wanted to be a journalist.
18:49 Dax Shepard? You went straight to San Francisco Chronicle?
18:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, I almost took another job in marketing. And I went to that job interview and I was like, this sucks. I don't want to do this. And I called the newspaper who I had applied to, and they had not gotten back to me. I called them, I was like, please, please, please hire me. And they said yes. And then I did a tour of a few years of working at the paper and basically working as a general assignment, breaking news crime reporter, which means crime, fires, animal stories, traffic, random things, shootings, homicides.
19:20 Dax Shepard? A cornucopia of fun San Francisco offerings.
19:22 Speaker 02 And you learn a lot about the city. You learn how to call up people who are in a really tough situation, like maybe their child has just died or someone they know has killed somebody. You call them and you're like, hi.
19:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah. What year was this?
19:39 Speaker 02 This would have been 2011 to 2014.
19:42 Speaker 01 I think saying I'm a reporter is a tough line.
19:45 Speaker 02 It is hard, but you gotta do it.
19:47 Dax Shepard? Although it's also exciting. I think for people to be approached by reporters like, my life just got newsworthy in an interesting way.
19:55 Speaker 02 Someone says no, I'm like, great. I won't call you again.
19:58 Dax Shepard? Fuck you and a hang up.
19:59 Speaker 02 Hundred percent. And that has happened. And every once in a while, you call someone and they're like, I'm so glad you called.
20:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:05 Speaker 02 I'd really like to tell you about my brother. I really want to explain to you what he was like. He's not just this news incident that just defined him. He has this whole backstory or I remember experiences like that. So I never feel bad about asking the first time.
20:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah. And do you feel lucky about the timeframe in which you started this job? Because I feel like that's a very ripe time to be starting to report.
20:26 Speaker 02 I'm in the 2010s in San Francisco, and I did eventually migrate to covering business and startups. The 2010s were an amazing time to be doing that. Frankly, a pretty unhinged time. The venture capital boom was funding tech companies. It was like Facebook, Google, all these companies were shooting to the moon. And then you had all this money flowing into venture capital, which then paid for extremely fast growing companies that sometimes didn't pan out in the way that was expected. So I spent a lot of the later 2010s covering WeWork.
20:58 Speaker 01 Theranos.
20:59 Speaker 02 Theranos is a great example.
21:00 Dax Shepard? You have a great podcast called Foundering.
21:02 Speaker 02 That's right.
21:03 Dax Shepard? Won some awards and it was all about the WeWork.
21:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's like a seven part narrative series about Adam Newman and WeWork.
21:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah, what could be juicier? Because I don't know what the ratio is, but a very accepted risk reward proposition in Silicon Valley is like, they know they're gonna bet on 100 companies. They know 84 of them are gonna go bust. But they know the 16 are gonna 100x. And it's a winning strategy. So that's such a novel approach to investing that I can't imagine predated Silicon Valley. That's such a new way.
21:33 Speaker 02 The ability to have 100x, 1000x returns is very much a software era type thing. So there's a reason that people talk about, oh, B2B SaaS companies. The joke is that they're kind of boring, but the truth is they print money. They're not shipping product. Their main expenses are employees and they can sell prescription software. When you think about. The ability to have those types of returns, it's a reflection of the technology that's become available.
21:59 Dax Shepard? Yes, there's so many click-worthy, like, they dumped, um, 600 million into this and it failed. And then the wins are so spectacular, just like all headline fodder.
22:07 Speaker 02 One of the stories that, even though it's not a big story, it's one of the ones I remain more known for is Juicero. Are you familiar with Juicero? I'll try to keep it short, but it was this highly engineered juice press that was connected to the internet. It cost first something like $700 and then the price was lower to 400. It was this beautifully engineered machine. The idea was you buy this juicero and you can get cold-pressed juice at home. The advertisement said things like, "It presses with enough force to lift two Teslas."
22:39 Dax Shepard? I love that they put it in their vernacular too, not to GMC trucks.
22:42 Speaker 01 I'm surprised Kristen didn't have this.
22:43 Dax Shepard? We probably have it somewhere in a basement.
22:45 Speaker 01 You have it, yeah.
22:46 Speaker 02 And the only way that you could get the juice was by buying the machine and then ordering on-demand these packets of freshly cut fruits and vegetables that you would then put in the machine. The machine would squeeze it and cold-pressed juice would come out.
22:57 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
22:57 Speaker 02 But my colleague and I got a tip that you could just squeeze the packets by hand and get the juice out. And you did not need this $400 slash at $1,700 machine. And so we did a story and investigated and literally squeezed bags of juice at the office and made a little video of it. And this company had raised over $100 million from some of the best VCs in Silicon Valley. This was 2017. And yeah, our story was, actually, you don't need the machine. You can squeeze it by hand. And it's very rare that you write a story where you can actually summarize the whole thing in one sentence.
23:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
23:30 Speaker 02 And I think it came out at a time when people were really interested in just having a little bit of schadenfreude towards some of these really overhyped companies.
23:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they somehow have this weird parallel of frivolous lawsuits. There's like, we smell fraud, right? There's something that we all just intuitively go, well, I don't know. How could that thing be worth 200 million? They haven't sold anything or it's not profitable. Then the 10th one hits.
23:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah, what a wild, bizarre period of time.
23:57 Speaker 01 Did you feel any guilt?
23:59 Speaker 02 A little bit.
23:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, because you just like took down a whole company.
24:03 Speaker 02 I don't feel great about, I mean, that's not what I wake up in the morning thinking that, you know, but and at the same time, the public should know.
24:09 Dax Shepard? They should know, you're the fourth estate. Now, did you ever meet a founder? Who you realize the thing was bullshit, but you recognize that they sincerely did believe it. Like, I feel like that's what would make it harder for me to take one down is they actually did believe it.
24:23 Speaker 02 But everyone believes. It's very rare to meet a founder who would be willing to show or admit to you even in private.
24:32 Dax Shepard? Well, the Theranos gal, she knew that thing didn't work. They were using other machines to do it.
24:37 Speaker 02 Yes, and obviously I've never been inside her head, but my guess is that inside her head, she was thinking, we're so close to it working.
24:45 Speaker 01 Exactly.
24:46 Speaker 02 Once I get this other thing going, it's gonna be fine. If we're defrauding someone, or if we're fibbing a little bit in the demo, it's in service of the mission.
24:57 Speaker 01 Yes.
24:57 Speaker 02 Which is that eventually we will have a blood machine that is going to work as well as the others.
25:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, most people aren't monsters. You justify, you figure out ways.
25:06 Speaker 02 Hundred percent.
25:06 Speaker 01 And psychologically, I definitely think she had to.
25:09 Dax Shepard? I have filed her into my, like.
25:12 Speaker 01 Evil?
25:13 Dax Shepard? Well, I don't want to say evil, because I don't believe in evil.
25:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
25:15 Speaker 02 I'm with you. I think she's rationalizing every step of the way, or someone in her shoes. You don't wake up and you're like, can't wait to lie today.
25:22 Dax Shepard? I think I observed the performative nature of her to be a little sociopathic personally. When I watch the videos, I'm like, oh, this person's nuts. They could be saying anything. The packaging to me, I'm sure she's just as earnest as all the others.
25:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, she's copying a lot of other people, Steve Jobs.
25:41 Dax Shepard? But they, but he had the goods.
25:43 Speaker 01 I know, but she must, she, I don't know.
25:46 Dax Shepard? Okay.
25:47 Speaker 01 It's tricky, I think, taking down, we're all happy that she got caught.
25:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
25:52 Speaker 01 And yet, I still am like, ooh, that's still a person.
25:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I don't know why I'm not sympathetic towards her.
25:58 Speaker 01 You need to do some soul searching.
25:59 Dax Shepard? I need to figure out how I can love her. But you make your way to Forbes, and then you make your way to Bloomberg.
26:06 Speaker 02 That's right.
26:06 Dax Shepard? I guess you get pitched. So explain how, when you're a journalist and you're working at Bloomberg, you get pitched story ideas by who?
26:13 Speaker 02 The way it works is every morning, a journalist wakes up and their email inbox has dozens of pitches from, there's a whole industry, PR professionals who send out emails being like, our company's doing this cool new technology, we're gonna launch in a month.
26:27 Dax Shepard? They're hoping you can lift the overall.
26:29 Speaker 02 They're hoping that you'll write a story about them.
26:30 Dax Shepard? Which is how One Touch actually does get its first
26:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
26:33 Dax Shepard? is the New York, sorry, One Taste.
26:35 Speaker 02 Common mistake.
26:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
26:37 Speaker 01 But it could go either way.
26:37 Dax Shepard? It's bad branding, because it's clitorals touching.
26:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, and you're touching with one finger, but One Taste has a Buddhist origin, so that's part of why they picked it. Yeah, just as the ocean has one taste, the taste of salt. So too does the truth have one taste, the taste of liberation. Hence, One Taste.
26:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
26:55 Speaker 01 Wow.
26:55 Speaker 02 Anyway, every morning, you know, you wake up, there's a bunch of pitches in your inbox, and they could be about anything. So in this case, part of why I paid attention to those pitches, I had actually interacted with that PR professional before.
27:06 Dax Shepard? Yes.
27:06 Speaker 02 On a different story, because she works for different clients. So she was like, hey, just take a look at this. It's about a company called One Taste, and they teach a practice called orgasmic meditation. And look, it's a fast-growing, woman-led wellness startup. And you cover startups, they're based in San Francisco. Maybe you'd be interested in writing about them.
27:23 Dax Shepard? That's very colorful.
27:24 Speaker 02 Certainly catches the attention.
27:26 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
27:26 Speaker 02 And I had heard about orgasmic meditation before. I had read a piece about them a few years earlier. So I was familiar, and I remembered, oh yeah, those are the 15-minute clitoris-stroking people. So I had read a different story about One Taste, and the founder, Nicole DeDon, and I was like, okay, sure, I'll come in and we'll have a meeting. It was easy, because, you know, it's in San Francisco, so I just headed over to their office and met with the current leadership of One Taste, which did not include Nicole, who is the founder, because she had recently sold her shares and stepped down. But she was still involved as the visionary of this company. And so I went in, I got kind of the basic pitch. For those who aren't familiar.
28:07 Dax Shepard? Yep.
28:07 Speaker 02 One Taste is a company that was started in San Francisco in the mid-2000s by this woman, Nicole DeDon. And they sold courses on orgasmic meditation, which was like their central spiritual and sexual wellness practice. Orgasmic meditation is a 15-minute partnered clitoral-stroking meditative practice in which a stroker, usually a man, puts on a glove and some lube on his left index finger.
28:30 Dax Shepard? His right thumb is on her perineum.
28:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:32 Speaker 01 Okay.
28:32 Speaker 02 Yes.
28:33 Speaker 01 So easy, okay.
28:34 Dax Shepard? It's science.
28:35 Speaker 02 It's kind of like this motion.
28:36 Speaker 01 Okay.
28:37 Speaker 02 Not to get too graphic. He strokes her clitoris for 15 minutes in a very prescribed manner.
28:42 Dax Shepard? Rising, falling, rising, falling. We're not trying to reach what we think of as orgasm.
28:46 Speaker 02 Yes, they would call it climax and they kind of look down their noses at it a little bit.
28:50 Dax Shepard? That's not the point.
28:51 Speaker 02 It's a secondary.
28:52 Dax Shepard? Don't be gross. You guys are fucking being immature. It's not about climax.
28:55 Speaker 02 It's more about the journey of arousal. Don't try to like get to any place in particular.
28:58 Speaker 01 Okay.
28:59 Speaker 02 And so during those 15 minutes, the only goal is for both parties to focus on the sensations in their bodies in sort of a meditative way. If you've ever done sitting meditation, it's very similar. You're just noticing.
29:08 Speaker 01 Like body scan.
29:09 Dax Shepard? And what is also unique is that participants who are observing are also encouraged to tell whatever sensations are coming up in them as they observe. So that's the communal aspect too.
29:19 Speaker 02 More public demo. So you could do orgasmic meditation on your own, just the two people. Or there were sometimes these demos in which you might do it in front of an audience, maybe for a course in which you're explaining what orgasmic meditation is. Or investors.
29:35 Speaker 01 Investors? For what? There's no machine.
29:39 Speaker 02 Well, they're selling courses. That's the business.
29:41 Dax Shepard? They're very much ass. We'll get into the history.
29:43 Speaker 01 Do the gloves?
29:44 Speaker 02 They did sell branded One Taste Lube. But that was kind of a like side merch.
29:49 Dax Shepard? You got to. It's sitting right there. You'd be a fool not to.
29:51 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
29:53 Dax Shepard? That's what model they're in, which is the EST model of how she inherited this stuff, basically.
30:00 Speaker 02 Totally. So any group that's selling personal development.
30:03 Dax Shepard? Landmark.
30:04 Speaker 02 Personal transformation landmark, which is a spinoff of EST.
30:07 Dax Shepard? Tony Robbins.
30:07 Speaker 02 Tony Robbins, exactly.
30:08 Speaker 01 Actors way, I think also maybe is course.
30:10 Dax Shepard? Is it a, okay, allegedly.
30:12 Speaker 01 Allegedly.
30:14 Speaker 02 So anyway, orgasmic meditation, they call it OM or OM for short. In an OM session, the only goal is to feel the sensations in your body. And there is no expectation of reciprocation. So this is the other important thing is that the woman receives this sexual touch. And it's all. Just for her to receive. She doesn't owe the stroker anything afterward. It is not meant to be foreplay. It is not meant to be considered sex, even though it's, I think, quite obviously genital touching, so it's quite sexual. But they would argue that it's a meditative practice, not sex.
30:46 Dax Shepard? Great.
30:47 Speaker 02 The idea is that if you do this practice regularly, both men and women benefit from better sex, better relationships, a better connection to your intuition. Yes, better intimacy.
30:56 Speaker 01 Even though it's not supposed to be intimate.
30:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, they would define intimacy broadly. It helps you get in touch with your desire.
31:03 Dax Shepard? And I want to say, so far, I'm in. That's great. People want to lay there and do that. Wonderful. I like the dynamic that the man's pretty much just giving and not receiving. Like, all this, "I'm in so far," and the people participating love it.
31:17 Speaker 02 Also, there's something very radical about it. It's like, oh, radically focused on female pleasure, which tends to be ignored or shunted aside.
31:25 Dax Shepard? So it has the first appearance of being quite matriarchal and empowering for women.
31:31 Speaker 02 Hundred percent.
31:31 Dax Shepard? Now, did they offer you, when you were doing your first chat with them, did they offer, like, would you like to receive it, to experience it, so you know what you're writing about?
31:40 Speaker 02 No.
31:41 Speaker 01 Are you sad about that?
31:42 Speaker 02 I'm not sad about that. I'm not sad about that. I think it's better that I keep my objective journalistic distance.
31:49 Dax Shepard? Maybe I'm just a perv. I'm like, I would be interested if I was a woman.
31:54 Speaker 01 Then you couldn't do it with journalistic integrity. Because what if you started loving it?
31:59 Dax Shepard? But are you not intrigued at all by this?
32:01 Speaker 01 I'm not, weirdly.
32:02 Dax Shepard? Okay, great.
32:03 Speaker 01 I understand why it would be intriguing to some people. I personally don't find it.
32:09 Dax Shepard? I think if your sexuality up until that point had been pitched to you and you found that societally it seemed like you were just in the position of providing service to men so they got what they wanted, and then this totally 180 paradigm hits you, it's like, oh, no, no, girl, this is just about you. That seems...
32:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, but...
32:28 Dax Shepard? I mean, that's why it was successful, yes.
32:30 Speaker 02 There's a few things. First, I think there is something special about when it happens between two people as opposed to, like, touching yourself. So that was part of it, is it can foster this sense of intimacy and connection between two people, kind of this richer, slightly more spiritual experience. And then, research suggests that something like 10 to 15% of American women struggle to have an orgasm. So if you happen to be in that category, I think you hear this pitch and you think, wow, this could teach me something new.
32:54 Speaker 01 Sure.
32:54 Speaker 02 This could help me.
32:55 Dax Shepard? The thing everyone's talking about, my friends tell me about, I've been robbed of-
32:58 Speaker 01 Maybe it'll open me up.
33:00 Speaker 02 And for men who struggle with performance anxiety and sex, I think the goallessness of an OHM session is really appealing for people who are in marriages where they've been struggling to connect sexually. It offered something that was appealing to a lot of people and in particular, something that people want, but have a hard time finding where to look for help.
33:21 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
33:26 Dax Shepard? We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart. Not checking which platform you watch that new show on, so frustrating. 15 minutes later, you've logged into seven apps, reset two passwords and still haven't found it. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Co. and Affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We are supported by Intuit TurboTax. You know that feeling when you drop your taxes off with someone and then nothing? You're just sitting there wondering if they've even started, if there's a problem, if you're getting everything you're owed.
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37:44 Dax Shepard? And I have had the benefit of not just reading the description in your book, but getting to watch in the doc that was on Netflix that you participated in. What was it called?
37:53 Speaker 02 Orgasm, Inc.
37:54 Dax Shepard? What is undeniable immediately is the women are all, in general, pretty young and attractive, and the men are admittedly tech nerds who can't be with girls. Almost everyone they interview cops to that almost immediately. They learned about this and they just thought, wow, I could participate in some sex. That would be better than none. So there's this really weird asymmetry between who's there.
38:19 Speaker 02 I've gone back and forth on this because it is true of some people that there was that dynamic of men who were struggling to connect with women and women who were younger and had sort of sexual appeal. And that was part of what they were able to offer. But they might have other reasons that they were attracted to One Taste. But I hesitate to make that a broad characterization. In general, I would say there were a mix of people. Sometimes it was men who were struggling to connect with women, and that was why they wanted to join One Taste. There were also some younger, hotter men who were brought in and who have talked to me about feeling like they were used as sexual objects themselves. Some of them have described to me being instructed to om with older women
39:04 Speaker 02 who had access to money in the hopes that those women would then buy more courses. So it wasn't all just...
39:11 Speaker 01 Women were getting used and men were...
39:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, there was a mix.
39:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and that's where we get into Nicole's exploiting of this whole dynamic, which is she does end up using these attractive young women to appeal to the investors. And then people who are going to spend 50 grand to watch a demo.
39:29 Speaker 01 Also, remember we had Armchair Anonymous?
39:31 Speaker 02 That's right.
39:32 Speaker 01 Okay, he was not a tech bro.
39:35 Speaker 02 Ruwan. And he's an example of someone who, he's in the book, he's in the documentary. He was in his early twenties, he's young, he's attractive, wanted to have an adventure.
39:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:45 Speaker 02 And joined One Taste. He has spoken about being asked by the leaders of One Taste to go and om with... A woman who had access to money in the hopes that that would then kind of prime her to receive a sales call and say yes to some large purchase.
40:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, take some courses.
40:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, so he has talked about that.
40:03 Dax Shepard? In keeping with you taking that first meeting, you then go and as a good journalist doing your due diligence, you decide, well, I should talk to some ex-members and some ex-employees. And so when does it turn from you think you might be writing this kind of juicy sexy story of a startup and then you're like, oh, no, there's a lot more going on here?
40:20 Speaker 02 I mean, it happened pretty quickly. So I had that first meeting with One Taste leadership. They made the basic pitch to me. They were like, we're the whole foods of sexuality. We're the organic, good-for-you version of sexuality. They were very much like, our practice is wholesome and helps heal people.
40:35 Dax Shepard? Did you have any spicy senses going off during that first thing?
40:37 Speaker 02 Not a ton. I mean, there's so much to be intrigued about. How does it work? What are the benefits? But then I started asking around a little on my own, finding people who had been involved in One Taste and started to hear from people who were former customers, former members. They felt like they'd been exploited by this company. Some people spoke about feeling like they'd been exploited financially. They said that they'd been pressured to take on debt in order to buy expensive courses, which could cost upwards of 30 grand for like an intensive course. And then some of them talked about feeling like they had been exploited sexually, feeling like they had been taught or pressured to have sex with potential customers in order to have those customers buy courses and support the company financially.
41:21 Speaker 02 It's not black and white. For a lot of those people, they also felt like they had learned things of value during their time at One Taste or that it had been this interesting, helpful, sometimes even healing experience, and at the same time, simultaneously harmful. That was kind of the intriguing part of it.
41:36 Speaker 01 That's how all of them are.
41:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they wouldn't grow and expand if they weren't appealing and fun for a period.
41:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, if it was just bad, it wouldn't be interesting.
41:42 Dax Shepard? First three months with the Bawgwan up in Oregon, it looks fucking great. The Rajneeshis are partying.
41:47 Speaker 02 A lot of cults are fun.
41:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
41:48 Speaker 02 You join a cult and it feels like you've discovered a special purpose. You're part of this special group that has a special knowledge about your new mission in life. You're going to change the world. You have these cool new friends. Everyone's really excited.
42:00 Dax Shepard? You've unbridled yourself from society. Yeah.
42:02 Speaker 01 You've declared.
42:04 Dax Shepard? I'm gonna try a different approach to this. So your ego is also stroked by that.
42:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that's how conspiracy theories work too. Same situation where it's like, oh, we're in the special group that knows something most people don't.
42:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:16 Dax Shepard? Now, I want to say, you write a piece in 2018.
42:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:19 Dax Shepard? This becomes a humongous kind of viral thing that really shakes the foundation of this place.
42:25 Speaker 02 Totally.
42:26 Dax Shepard? Let's talk about Nicole and where she comes from because she's attractive, hyperintelligent, seemingly fearless, confident, charismatic.
42:35 Speaker 02 One might say.
42:36 Dax Shepard? Yes.
42:36 Speaker 02 Nicole is the main character of One Taste, of this company, of everything that it stands for. She is the creator, the visionary, the founder. There was technically another co-founder, but let's be real, Nicole is the main person. And she is a fascinating and complicated person. She grew up in the Bay Area. Currently, she's in her late 50s, so I think that she was growing up in the 70s. And she had a really difficult childhood, which is something that we get into in the book, where her father was a convicted child sex abuser.
43:10 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
43:11 Dax Shepard? Single mom from Michigan, and dad's in and out.
43:14 Speaker 02 She was raised by a single mom. Also, maybe her grandmother was in the picture. But in her own retelling slash, as much as I've been able to corroborate with other people who knew her, she really loved her dad, even though he was this somewhat absent figure in her life. He had other families, many other children, several other wives, not at the same time, but he had an itinerant life elsewhere. And she adored him. And according to court records and according to her own retelling, he was a convicted child sex abuser. He went to jail for this at least once when she was younger. And then again, when she was in her 20s. And in that case, he was arrested and charged and then died pretty soon after. So there was never like a conviction for the second one. But one of the alleged victims in that case was his granddaughter.
43:58 Dax Shepard? Not hard to extrapolate that she might have been a victim.
44:00 Speaker 02 What's complicated is, over the years, she has spoken about her father's sex abuse history. But she has often sidestepped the question of whether he ever abused her.
44:13 Speaker 02 And I wanted to treat this subject really carefully and sensitively in the book. But I did find people who knew her when she was in her twenties and around that time, who told me that she told them that he had sexually abused her.
44:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
44:31 Speaker 02 And she does have a piece of writing that was once public and is not anymore, in which not only does she allude to this, but she actually spins it in this very
44:43 Dax Shepard? Oof.
44:44 Speaker 02 complex way where she suggests that she perhaps initiated it. And keep in mind that what is being discussed here is a scenario in which she would have been under 10.
44:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and her public addressing of it evolves. And I want to save to the end as it's unraveling where she ultimately goes with it, which is like, I couldn't fucking believe what was coming out of her mouth. Okay, so she's a competitive little girl. She's a spelling bee person, or at least according to her. She's very bright.
45:11 Speaker 02 She's like an intense person. And she also, I think, liked to play that up in her own retelling of her biography, that she was someone who was inspired by intensity and edges.
45:19 Dax Shepard? Right. So she goes to Temple, but just for a year. Temple University, Philadelphia.
45:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:26 Speaker 01 I didn't know you meant the temple.
45:28 Dax Shepard? Oh, sure. We are talking about spirituality and alms. But she returns to San Francisco after a year.
45:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:35 Dax Shepard? And now she finds herself in some kind of communal living situations. She also loves meth and she loves psychedelics. So she's a psycho nut.
45:43 Speaker 02 Her twenties are a string of what I would describe as intense experiences. According to people who knew her, that involves meth use, copious amounts of LSD, sex work. She has talked about being an escort, a stripper. She also ran an art gallery. So, I mean, some of that was a little bit more pedestrian. But she has described this era of her life, and other people who knew her have corroborated this, that it was quite extreme. She wasn't really living the normal path of getting a job. And she allegedly spent three years or so living in what she later refers to as an acid house, a house with a bunch of other women in San Francisco where they did tons of acid.
46:18 Dax Shepard? Yes.
46:18 Speaker 02 I mean, this is all a mix of her retelling, and she is so. Someone who is very good at telling stories about her life in a way that supports a point that she's trying to make at the time.
46:28 Dax Shepard? One thing I'll applaud her for is she doesn't really ever take kind of a victim narrative, which of course is a tenet of this.
46:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:34 Dax Shepard? But there's no sense that at any point she was a victim in any of these scenarios. But she meets a dude, Erwan, at a party. And this guy kind of hits her with this notion of, what's it called then?
46:47 Speaker 02 They call it deliberate orgasm. So the way she tells the story is that she went to a party and she met a guy who is sometimes described as a Buddhist monk. Erwan had lived at an ashram for some point. I don't know if he considered himself a monk, but whatever.
47:00 Dax Shepard? He's in his twenties, good looking, a little younger than her.
47:02 Speaker 01 His name is Erwan?
47:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, not Erwan like the, not the grocery store. It's spelled E R W A N.
47:08 Speaker 01 Oh, okay, got it.
47:08 Speaker 02 But in the retellings, he supposedly comes up to her at this party and says, "I'd like to introduce you to a sexuality practice." And she says yes. I don't think they do it right then and there. I believe they met up later. He shows her this meditative clitoral stroking practice and he talks about how like, "Here's what's gonna happen. I'm gonna stay clothed. You're gonna remove your clothing from the waist down."
47:28 Dax Shepard? It's 15 minutes as well, right?
47:30 Speaker 02 15 minutes, probably. And they like to use the word pussy, so I'm gonna use it. Within One Taste, for a period of time, they preferred to use the terms pussy and cock to describe female and male genitalia, in part because it had charge to it.
47:45 Speaker 01 Right.
47:45 Speaker 02 Because it was this provocative word.
47:47 Speaker 01 But again, I'm so confused by this because it's like, it's supposed to be-
47:50 Dax Shepard? Hey, what's a program, Monica? Jesus.
47:53 Speaker 01 You're not supposed to climax. It's supposed to be just meditative. And then it's also like the most sexually charged thing possible.
48:00 Speaker 02 I would say the way to think about it is, what One Taste was eventually selling was courses on orgasmic meditation, which is a pretty fringe and provocative idea, right? Like, most people are not going to be like, "Great, sign me up. You might need a little convincing." So in order to do so, they did try to make it quite safe seeming, clinical. That's why it's like the 15 minutes, the prescribed script, all these safe-
48:22 Dax Shepard? And they don't want you to not climax. They just are saying it's bigger than just the climax.
48:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, they're like, climax, sure, but there's more. But then when you get deeper inside, that's where- Some of the stranger things come up. So if you're sensing a discordance, you're like, it doesn't line up. It's probably because the outer pitch was a little bit more buttoned up, or as buttoned up as you could make clitoral stroking. And then for those who became more deeply involved, like they worked for the company, they lived in a communal residence with other One Taste people. They made this company and this lifestyle their whole life. That's where you get into some of the, there are layers, unsurprisingly.
49:01 Dax Shepard? Okay, so she has this experience. She describes it as quite transcendent. And for her, it's the highest level of intimacy she's ever experienced. And so she's converted from that one experience.
49:14 Speaker 02 As she tells it, it's a pivotal moment in her life. She experiences this thing. She even likes to say that she was about to join a Buddhist monastery and then threw out that plan and was like, just kidding. Yes, just kidding, I'm gonna pursue this meditative clitoral stroking practice.
49:28 Dax Shepard? And now this guy, Erwan, he is working under another guy who has broken off from yet another organization that started much earlier in the 70s.
49:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's a little complicated, but essentially the origins of what becomes orgasmic meditation was these two other groups that had a relation to each other. One was a spinoff of the other. And they taught a practice called deliberate orgasm. And both of those groups were less business oriented than One Taste. They were a little bit more insular. And they were both run by men. And deliberate orgasm was like a little bit more freewheeling. It wasn't 15 minutes, it didn't have as many guardrails. So Nicole ends up going with Erwan to become part of one of these groups. And what essentially happens is she learns how to run a community like this, and she learns the basics of this practice.
50:22 Speaker 02 And after that, she's there for a couple of years. And after that, she decides, I want to do this on my own.
50:27 Dax Shepard? It has the same trajectory as like some of the Christianity movements in the country where it's like, there just keeps being these schisms that break off into their own. And they all need a little bit of a proprietary approach to justify why they're a different thing. But it's all pretty much the same.
50:42 Speaker 02 I mean, what's interesting is, yeah, they all share this lineage. And if you want to trace it far enough back, there's even many shared lineages back to EST and what is now Landmark Forum. And there's probably a connection to NXIVM. You know, it's like this tree, essentially, of personal development, personal transformation groups. They often have a tie to each other. So if you wanted to like map out that genealogy.
51:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you have Asilin in there. You have all these, it's a perfect area to be in.
51:08 Speaker 02 And you'll see that certain ideas that were popular at One Taste show up in some of these other groups as well. For example, taking 100% responsibility for your experience. I have friends who have taken leadership seminars where that is a big tenet. There's actually a lot of value to that idea. And it can be taken too far and used to gaslight people into thinking that everything that happens to them is their fault.
51:29 Dax Shepard? It's impossible to be a victim. Someone jumps out of an alley.
51:32 Speaker 02 The victim narrative is a really central part of understanding this. And you know what you said earlier about Nicole never seeming like a victim? We can come back to it. But that is a key thing because it is both empowering and it can be used to convince people, well, if they're feeling harmed or if they're feeling like someone has been hurting them, that's their problem. To be a victim is to have such a small-minded mentality, or it's only for the weak-minded to think of themselves as the victim. And that can be really convenient. You know, if there's no victims, then there's no perpetrators. So, oh, how nice.
52:04 Speaker 01 Exactly.
52:05 Dax Shepard? Nice, clean setup. Just though, I think it's interesting to say that there were 100 Morehouses at one point. A lot of these are really successful. I just watched the Synanon you talked about a little bit in the book. But I watched that doc and I was like, it's crazy how big Synanon was. It's huge. They're all kind of borrowing from each other. They all kind of little lace with some Buddhism.
52:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, Morehouse, we won't spend too much on it, but basically, yeah, they had this network of houses across the US that were all painted purple and they all had this philosophy about living with like more pleasure, more fun.
52:33 Speaker 01 Is that a different one or is that connected?
52:35 Speaker 02 That's one of the two groups that taught deliberate orgasms.
52:37 Dax Shepard? That's where the orgasm thing kind of started.
52:40 Speaker 02 But every once in a while, when you mention that, there's someone who's like, oh, I know someone who lived in one of those purple houses. Or I know, they're sometimes called the purple people.
52:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Okay, so she breaks out on her own. She's having kind of middling success. She gets a warehouse in San Francisco and invites people to live in it.
52:56 Speaker 02 Yes. So when she starts One Taste, they start off by having a center in San Francisco where they have like a yoga studio and they start offering classes. And this is in 2004 or so. And pretty quickly, within a couple of years, they also rent a warehouse down the street, and that becomes the first communal residence of One Taste participants. And that starts the whole history of One Taste people living together and having that be kind of the inner experience, kind of like, once you get more involved.
53:29 Dax Shepard? Then you're living it.
53:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, so for a lot of people who get involved in One Taste, you might join and just take a few classes and be like, great, I learned what I needed, see you later. And then there's other people who join, and then they're like, I want more, I want to be more immersed in this world. And the path that a lot of those people end up following is they would quit their old job and start to work at One Taste, usually on their sales team, selling courses to other people. They would move out of their old home and move into one of the One Taste communal residences. And they would gradually stop spending as much time with their friends and family, who didn't understand their orgasmic life.
54:07 Dax Shepard? Those squares.
54:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, start spending all their time with people at One Taste. And that is how it can advance for certain people.
54:14 Dax Shepard? Okay, so it takes off, she decides to start franchising and selling more and more, and it starts growing into a pretty good size.
54:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, they start in San Francisco, but they end up with offices in LA, San Diego, Austin, Boulder, New York, London, Australia.
54:32 Dax Shepard? Now, here's a tough question. How much do you think the news and media bears some responsibility? Because this was like a fledgling nothing. She does a demo in 2008, and the New York Times reports on it. And that's when the explosion happens. How much responsibility should news and media take for kind of promoting these terrible ideas? Where's the integrity there?
54:54 Speaker 02 It's a little complicated. Some of the more egregious things that happened at One Taste happened in maybe the 2010s, mid 2010s. So, in defense of the New York Times, I think, they wrote their story that came out in like 2009. So some things hadn't happened yet. As a journalist, like, I feel a lot of compassion for other journalists who are just trying to find a story, find something interesting to say, do a reasonable job, file it, and move on. And there's so much to write about orgasmic meditation that's interesting to begin with. What is it? How does it work? Where did it come from? Wait, what happens in it again? You know, it took me six or seven months to report that first story about these cult allegations. It takes... Time and resources. And so if that's not available to you as a journalist,
55:39 Speaker 02 you know, you might just write the story that's like, here's this interesting thing. It's hard to say.
55:43 Dax Shepard? It is hard to say because obviously Synanon, that's what it benefited from most. No one had a game plan for junkies, which was a big issue at the time. Where they failed in their integrity, I think, is where's kind of the follow up? What's eight months down the road? Who's someone who's used this system for four years? That's where I think, I don't know, there can be some laziness.
56:04 Speaker 01 That's a broader question about journalism, reporting the news, all of it.
56:08 Speaker 02 How much resources does it take to hold people accountable? It's expensive.
56:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. And that some things can get out, like even, obviously, we have to report on a school shooting. But if you report on it, then people see it and then other people do it. It is complicated.
56:23 Dax Shepard? It is.
56:24 Speaker 01 I don't know what the answer is, but it can create contagion effects.
56:29 Speaker 02 Frankly, some of the other things that helped One Taste get mainstream success were also endorsements from influential people such as Gwyneth Paltrow.
56:38 Dax Shepard? Tim Ferriss.
56:38 Speaker 02 Tim Ferriss, Khloe Kardashian.
56:40 Speaker 01 Two out of three friends of the pod.
56:44 Speaker 02 And I don't necessarily blame them either. I think Tim wrote about One Taste in The Four Hour Body. And so it was like a little bit more about the stroking practice. Those were markers that could quickly signal to someone who was like, wait, orgasmic meditation? What is this? It's like, oh, well, Nicole Daydon has appeared on the Goop podcast or she has spoken at a Goop conference.
57:03 Dax Shepard? She did a TED Talk.
57:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, TEDx.
57:06 Dax Shepard? TEDx, okay. I don't know the difference. What's the difference?
57:09 Speaker 02 There are people who care about the difference. TED is, there's only one TED and there are many TEDx's.
57:14 Dax Shepard? Oh.
57:15 Speaker 02 I think it's fair to say TEDx is like a regional. But the truth is, her TEDx talk has been viewed like millions of times on YouTube. It's hard to want to critique orgasmic meditation because again, it was this commendable thing. It was like raising up female sexuality and it just sounds like a good idea.
57:32 Dax Shepard? From all your years of being immersed in it, do you see turning points for her? Like, when does it get more and more corrupt? Is it just the expansion and the money that's making her want to use these parishioners as allure for these people's money? Like, when does it turn? It gets crazy. We're not gonna get there.
57:49 Speaker 02 So I think there's a few categories. First is in the early years of One Taste. The company was not bringing in enough money on its own to. Turn a profit. They were losing money every year. And the way that Nicole was able to support the company and keep it going was by striking up this relationship with Reese Jones, who is Silicon Valley investor, who she met in roughly 2006. And the two of them began dating. You know, he's interested in One Taste, he's interested in supporting it. And he ends up paying for business expenses and giving loans to the company, according to court testimony and many, many people I spoke to.
58:33 Speaker 02 As part of the arrangement, he was promised a sexual handler. And that ended up being a job that certain employees of One Taste Women were asked if they wanted to do. And to be Reese's handler meant sometimes living at his house, which was like in Russian Hill in San Francisco, taking care of his dog, maybe fetching his groceries, tidying the house, and usually giving him some sort of sexual service every day.
58:58 Speaker 01 Oh, boy.
58:59 Speaker 02 Whether like a hand job or something similar.
59:01 Dax Shepard? Sure.
59:01 Speaker 02 And it's really complicated because there are some employees of One Taste who had this job for a while and who, I think, considered it an honor.
59:13 Dax Shepard? No complaints.
59:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, no complaints. And there are some people who, again, testified about this at trial and talked about this in detail with me and who feel like it was this exploitative setup in which they were taught certain psychological lessons that prepared them to want to say yes to this. They were taught that it was an honor. They were taught that helping and serving Nicole and the company was this great way to help the mission of spreading orgasmic meditation to the world. And they were also taught certain philosophies within One Taste about, for example, that it was sexually powerful if you could have sex with someone that you were not attracted to.
59:52 Dax Shepard? Well, this is one of the greats.
59:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
59:54 Dax Shepard? Particularly if you had beef with, you didn't get along with somebody.
59:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, if you had an aversion to them, is how they would describe it.
1:00:00 Dax Shepard? It's like you slowly realize you hate this person. And they go, well, you guys got to go in a room and fuck.
1:00:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:00:06 Speaker 01 And you're evolved if you're able to do that.
1:00:08 Speaker 02 But you can see how... The teachings of a group could start off with the beginnings of a good idea. Like, oh, maybe it's good to like, get out of your comfort zone. Try things that you might be a little unsure about. But then it can quickly expand into a rationale for pressuring people to do something that they don't want to do. And then making them think that actually they did want it. Yeah. And that it was good for them. And in general, many of the things at one taste were pitched as the ultimate goal is more personal growth. And so it's like, well, maybe you were experiencing something painful or uncomfortable or emotionally difficult.
1:00:50 Speaker 02 But you might be also told that staying with it is going to lead to more personal growth. And people really wanted personal growth. And so you'd be surprised at how frequently that can end up being the reward that is suggested. And then the means to get there could be something that actually ends up being quite harmful.
1:01:08 Dax Shepard? And she has this incredible tool she's devised where their line of questioning is all about getting down to your base desire. Right? That's kind of the premises. You have all these distracting desires, but if we can get to the core base desire and address that, then there'll be some growth as well. So as she would question you, you would intuit eventually what her base desire was. And so this woman's talking and she's like, and we got to it, oh, my God, I want a child. I want a baby. And she feels this elation of finally getting down to her base thing. And she's like, no, but there's something lower than that, was deeper than that. And it was, of course, I need more orgasms was a deeper base desire than.
1:01:52 Speaker 02 Than wanting a child?
1:01:53 Dax Shepard? Than wanting a child, yeah.
1:01:54 Speaker 02 Oh, my God. I mean, to me, that's an example of something that shows up a lot in groups that you could call alleged cults. Which is they foster this belief that the leader knows better than you what you want. Or that they possess wisdom and knowledge that you do not have access to. And when people hear that, sometimes their first reaction is like, oh, that's so sinister. But one thing I learned after talking to so many of these people that I appreciate now is that often for people who are looking for solution or help or something in their life, it can feel like a relief to find someone who claims to have knowledge and wisdom that is going to help you. And you then want to hand over your autonomy to them.
1:02:39 Speaker 02 In fact, it feels good to do so. You feel like this person is going to help me. It doesn't always feel like this sinister, extractive thing. And so there are many small anecdotes of people who described turning to Nicole in some sort of lecture or class and asking her, what's next for me? They would ask her for guidance and she would often say like, oh, I think you should do this or that. And even within some of the One Taste residences, she would often give out assignments, which you didn't have to do them, but people wanted to do them because they thought that, again, doing the assignment would help them with their personal growth. And so it's this gray area. It wasn't like you must do this thing, but she would suggest to people like, oh, your
1:03:23 Speaker 02 orgasm feels a little stuck these days. I think you would benefit from having sex with 30 different people in the next 30 days. That would be a typical assignment, again, according to people who witnessed this.
1:03:36 Speaker 01 Having sex, not doing this 15 minutes separate.
1:03:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, so again, it's like orgasmic penetration is kind of the front door. And they did do a lot of oming, even if you were more involved. But if you became more deeply involved, other sex acts became part of the arsenal.
1:03:50 Dax Shepard? And they tried men for a while, but they jettisoned that.
1:03:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, there was a brief period where they did study and try to incorporate om for men, which is kind of the gender-flipped version of orgasmic penetration. It's basically a hand job. A woman strokes a man's penis for 15 minutes.
1:04:06 Dax Shepard? Good luck.
1:04:07 Speaker 01 I know, exactly.
1:04:09 Speaker 02 The idea was basically like, the existence of this as a possibility created too much of an incentive for like tit-for-tat. And the whole point of orgasmic penetration is that you're supposed to be able to ask for an om and like not have to. So they tried it briefly and then, you're right, they put it to the side.
1:04:25 Dax Shepard? This doesn't work with you.
1:04:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:04:28 Dax Shepard? Okay, now. This is where it takes this really wild turn, in my opinion, which is she starts speaking more and more about honoring men's predatory nature.
1:04:41 Speaker 02 The beast.
1:04:42 Dax Shepard? Inviting the beast, not shaming the beast, accepting the outcome of the beast, somehow being empowered by being abused by the beast. There's like a route to that.
1:04:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:04:53 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:04:54 Dax Shepard? This is where it gets crazy. I mean, I think it all ends with this speech she gives about her dad, but just how did that evolve?
1:05:00 Speaker 02 So basically, the idea of the beast within One Taste, and it's possible that One Taste would dispute this, but again, according to people who were there, the idea of the beast was that inside of most, or maybe all of us, there is an aggressive, primal nature that has often been stifled, judged, shamed.
1:05:21 Speaker 01 Repressed.
1:05:22 Speaker 02 Repressed. And that there is value and enlightenment to being able to express this freely. And within One Taste, there's a pretty insular community, especially if you were, again, more involved. And so they wanted to experiment with social norms. And that sometimes looked like condoning expressions of the beast. And so what people have described to me about how that played out in practice is that there were sometimes couples who would hit each other within One Taste, and that this was often allegedly justified as an expression of the beast.
1:05:59 Dax Shepard? And that rape is also potentially on the table.
1:06:02 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:06:03 Speaker 02 It gets really complicated. Going back to what Nicole had said about victimhood. They taught within One Taste that having a victim mentality was looked down on. And it goes hand in hand with this idea that it is empowering to take full responsibility for your life and your experience. And again, there's a lot of value in that. I think having an attitude in life where you feel like you have agency, actually with the NXIVM, they would often talk about being at cause and at effect. So being at effect means the world is
1:06:34 Dax Shepard? Happening to you. Yes, yes.
1:06:37 Speaker 02 And that can feel disempowering. Being at cause is a way that you can carry yourself and move through the world where you believe that you have agency in the world around you.
1:06:45 Dax Shepard? Which is largely true, again.
1:06:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, totally. That's what I found fascinating about this whole idea is they have these ideas that have this really valuable kernel and it's hard to know when it goes too far. So anyway, there's this idea that, you know, you should take agency and responsibility for everything in your life. The flip side of that is having a victim mentality is bad. Many people in One Taste described to me how this was a lesson that was taught broadly. And because they were also teaching about sex and Nicole also liked to make provocative statements about sexual relations, sexual dynamics, there are video clips of her lecturing in courses where she talks about, I want to make sure I characterize this correctly, you know, at one point she makes a joke to a course where she says like, "We should
1:07:31 Speaker 02 make t-shirts that say, 'I got raped and all I got was a victim story,' or, 'I raped someone and all I got was a perpetrator story.'"
1:07:40 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
1:07:41 Speaker 02 And she has also spoken about, she said something like, "Women who have experienced sexual assault were recovered emotionally faster if they took responsibility for their role in the experience," something along those lines. She also made a statement once that was like, "The true way to deflect rape is to turn on 100%." They often talked about turning on within One Taste. That one's a bit trickier because turning on had arguably a more holistic meaning to them rather than a strictly sexual arousal meaning. Regardless, a lot of people described to me an attitude within One Taste that was sort of like, if you feel like you were assaulted or sexually assaulted.
1:08:23 Speaker 01 That's on you.
1:08:24 Speaker 02 Kind of, yeah. And it is very complicated. And for a lot of people, that's really horrifying.
1:08:32 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
1:08:38 Dax Shepard? We get support from Scottsdale, Arizona. Monica, with summer ending or heading into fall, I've been researching a nice, quick getaway location, and I keep coming back to Scottsdale, Arizona.
1:08:49 Speaker 01 Ooh, Scottsdale's good. What's drawing you to it?
1:08:51 Dax Shepard? Well, first of all, I have this wonderful memory of going there as a kid when I'd go see my stepdad when he was working out there. The weather is perfect in fall. Warm, sunny, no humidity. And you can really do whatever you want with your time there. I want to do a sunrise hike through the Sonoran Desert, be surrounded by Saguaro, and then at the same afternoon, just completely melt into a spa treatment at one of their luxury resorts.
1:09:16 Speaker 01 Oh, that sounds amazing. I want to do that. Also, I was there visiting my brother once, and I loved Old Town Scottsdale. It's so walkable. They have galleries and cute little restaurants and shops. The food scene alone is worth the trip.
1:09:30 Dax Shepard? What I keep reading is that it's luxurious, but not stuffy. There's no pressure to do it a certain way. You can explore public art, check out the architecture, go off-roading in the desert, or just sit and watch a sunset.
1:09:42 Speaker 01 It really is the perfect fall reset.
1:09:44 Dax Shepard? Learn more about all Scottsdale has to offer at unwindinscottsdale.com. Thank you to our presenting sponsor, HP, for supporting this episode. Their HP Smart Tank printer is the last printer you'll ever need. Oh, here we go, Monica. With a refillable ink tank and up to three years of ink included, so you get thousands of pages of cartridge-free printing. Hallelujah. To learn more, search for HP Smart Tank. We get support from Superhuman. Look, I love what I do. The conversations, the ideas, the creative stuff. But there's this whole other layer of work that eats my day alive. The inbox that never ends. Docs I need to get through, threads I'm behind on.
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1:11:10 Dax Shepard? So do yourself a favor and try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com. We are supported by Walden University. You know that feeling when you've been thinking about making a move, going after the degree, the promotion, the thing you keep telling yourself you'll get to someday? Walden University is built for that moment. For over 50 years, Walden has helped working professionals get the W, the knowledge, the skills, and the confidence to create real change in their careers and communities. Their programs are designed around your life, not the other way around. With Tempo Learning, available in select programs, there are no rigid schedules or set weekly deadlines. You move at your own pace.
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1:12:25 Dax Shepard? Well, there's a story in the book, Back to Morehouse, and a male practitioner being also encouraged to embrace his primal side. He gets in a fight with his wife and punches his wife in the face.
1:12:38 Speaker 02 Close.
1:12:39 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:12:40 Speaker 02 So at the, at the welcomed consensus, which was again, a spin off of Morehouse.
1:12:44 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:12:45 Speaker 02 You're totally right, and I forgot this, so thank you for bringing it up. Part of the origin of this idea, again, of the violence. Maybe being an expression of the beast. It gets even more complicated and gendered because within the welcome consensus, which was a predecessor to one taste, a different group where they taught deliberate orgasm. According to people who were there, they had a belief that women were all powerful.
1:13:06 Dax Shepard? With their emotions.
1:13:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, with their emotions, that they were able to emit something that they called call, which was like an emotional signal to men. And that men received this call and only responded to it. And they drew a parallel between that and, I guess, the mammalian pattern of like a female in estrus. Emitting some sort of.
1:13:30 Dax Shepard? Sexual signal.
1:13:31 Speaker 02 They would argue that anything that a man does in response to a woman.
1:13:36 Speaker 01 She wanted.
1:13:37 Speaker 02 Exactly, that she has put out a call for this and that he is merely responding. On some level, you can be like, wow, what an interesting philosophy that really makes women into this powerful actor. And at the same time, it's obviously quite troubling because it suggests that men have no responsibility for the actions that they take.
1:13:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:13:56 Speaker 02 One of the ways that this shows up in an anecdote from that era is a man who was in the welcome consensus gets in an argument with a woman and he feels the sudden urge to hit her. And even though he has never hit a woman before, he hits her in the face as hard as he can.
1:14:16 Dax Shepard? He's been kind of encouraged to.
1:14:18 Speaker 02 He described this to me and he said, like, I know it sounds horrifying and you have to understand that on some level, based on the philosophies that we believed at the time it made sense, he believed that violence was a form of emotional expression and that everything that he felt called to do was actually like in response to a woman's initiative. But yes, that is a very complicated way of also saying basically like she asked for it.
1:14:43 Dax Shepard? Well, most importantly, she goes to the leader and says, this guy punched me in the face and he said, you need to find out what you did that caused that, or I'm gonna give you 10 times worse what he gave you.
1:14:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:14:55 Speaker 01 What if he was like, congratulations, that's what you wanted.
1:14:58 Dax Shepard? Good news.
1:14:58 Speaker 01 I mean, that's what they're doing psychologically, like, you might not know that you wanted it, but your body knew and it told him and he did it.
1:15:05 Speaker 02 Again, it comes back to this central idea that. Nicole is someone who I think believed that pushing herself to her edges gave her spiritual growth and insight and evolution.
1:15:20 Dax Shepard? Enlightenment.
1:15:20 Speaker 02 Her pursuit of intensity brought her enlightenment and she believed that it would do the same for other people.
1:15:27 Dax Shepard? Also, money's in the mix now because there's a point where this thing has generated 12 million dollars.
1:15:32 Speaker 02 Totally. There's a shift roughly around 2012, 2013, when Reese, the original investor, actually suffers some financial misfortune, is no longer able to be supporting the company. And he asks for a repayment of his loan. And this puts a lot of financial pressure on Nicole, on the leadership of the company. And they start to try to think about strategies for how to pay Reese back. And this came up at trial. There were even emails that we saw at trial about him being like, I can't pay my bills.
1:16:00 Dax Shepard? How much did they owe him?
1:16:01 Speaker 02 Roughly a million dollars. What happens around the same time is the company makes a decision to really start spinning up selling more expensive courses. So they start pushing harder to sell, for example, the coaching program, which was a program that they had that lasted anywhere from six to 10 months, in which people get trained to be a certified orgasmic meditation coach. And the coaching program became this big thing that could cost anywhere from 10 to 20 grand. And you would take this training and it was really like your immersion in the One Taste Way of Life.
1:16:35 Dax Shepard? And they're introducing new stratas all along too. We introduced a notion of a priestroker.
1:16:39 Speaker 02 Yeah. So first there's courses, it's like the coaching program, the Nicole De Don Intensive Membership, which was basically a way to take any course you want over the course of a year. And then the priests and the priestesses, those appeared in 2015, maybe 2014, when One Taste held this immersive course called Magic School.
1:16:59 Speaker 01 What is happening?
1:17:00 Dax Shepard? Now we're getting into the occult, Monica. They make videos that look like seances. It starts getting really occult. I'm asking you kind of to psychoanalyze or maybe you don't have enough of the deets. What it's like, was the drug use picking up? Was it the money? It is coming off the rails. We're getting this religious strata, the occult practices.
1:17:18 Speaker 02 I can only speculate, but my sense is as the company got bigger, she...
1:17:25 Speaker 02 Felt able to explore things that might have felt a little too risky earlier.
1:17:31 Dax Shepard? She's getting more confident.
1:17:32 Speaker 02 I think that's probably fair to say.
1:17:34 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:17:35 Speaker 01 This is how it happens across the board with people doing things where you're like, how are you thinking that now? It's a slow sliding scale.
1:17:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, it doesn't happen overnight.
1:17:44 Dax Shepard? The boiling frog.
1:17:45 Speaker 01 It is, the boiling frog. It's like you start out being like, oh yeah, I want to have more empowerment over my body. And that's normal. And then all of a sudden, you're in magic school.
1:17:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:17:55 Dax Shepard? And you're going to some geriatric's house.
1:17:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:17:58 Dax Shepard? A handsome young man.
1:17:59 Speaker 01 I have compassion for the fact that, because it sounds so insane, but I think it's these little tiny baby steps. And all of a sudden, you're there.
1:18:07 Dax Shepard? There's also a pragmatism to it, which is you have to keep offering more and more insular and more high level training to get more money. It can't just be the thing. It's got to evolve.
1:18:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, you can't finish. It has to always keep going.
1:18:19 Dax Shepard? It's got to be a daily practice and you got to add in things all the time.
1:18:22 Speaker 02 So at magic school, it's a four or five day immersive program. And at the first magic school, they had, at the end of the course, a ceremony in which they ordained something like seven priests of orgasm and seven priestesses of orgasm in this elaborate ceremony where there was a group OM demo in front of all the students who had participated. People were in robes.
1:18:49 Dax Shepard? Can we add to, Nicole's a great performer. So she steps in a lot of times to put on these one hour demos.
1:18:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:18:55 Dax Shepard? Where she has this orgasmic trip through the cosmos and you all watch. She's also a performer.
1:19:02 Speaker 02 And what's interesting about that is in the early days, she would participate in an OM demo as the woman who was being stroked. And then later on, she actually replaced herself and she would make herself the stroker. She would stroke a different woman on stage. And so in 2013 and 2014, One Taste hosted these big orgasm conferences in San Francisco. And the big headliner event would be Nicole stroking one of her like deputies, basically.
1:19:27 Dax Shepard? Lucky subjects.
1:19:28 Speaker 02 Yeah. And I think that's really interesting because she probably, look, I don't know. It's a speculation, but my guess is at some point she realized like, she's the CEO of this company. She can't be the one. On the table, it's a pretty vulnerable position to be in. And so she kind of elevated herself out of that.
1:19:44 Dax Shepard? OK, so is it that or, OK. There's even a piece with the Morehouse founder, which is like, it's an interesting trajectory for the man to go, no, I just want a service. That's already interesting. We haven't seen that historically. Because there might be something interesting.
1:20:01 Speaker 01 Power dynamics, you mean?
1:20:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, there's something powerful about being in control of that. That can be its own satiating journey.
1:20:10 Speaker 01 Like, I have this impact on somebody.
1:20:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:20:12 Dax Shepard? Well, this is where you get into the trauma. And again, I don't know how much I want to reveal.
1:20:16 Speaker 01 Oh, I see, yeah.
1:20:17 Dax Shepard? If you have a guaranteed pleasurable outcome that you can access with somebody.
1:20:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:20:24 Dax Shepard? And you are afraid of people's emotions otherwise. And this is a way you know you're fucking safe. This person will be receiving pleasure, they'll be grateful, they'll like you. I get it, is what I'm saying. And the fact that her trajectory goes there, I'm just curious, what is at play?
1:20:41 Speaker 01 Well, also, when your sexual autonomy is taken from you at a young age, to regain that or feel that you've then reclaimed power over it is of course going to seem appealing.
1:20:52 Speaker 02 Yeah. Broadly speaking, when you talk to people who are experts on the long-term lifetime effects of child sex abuse, it is often something like that. They will say that people who experience this as children will often, not always, but will often find ways. Sometimes it looks like acting out sexually, but it's a way to try to reassert agency over something.
1:21:16 Dax Shepard? And be in control.
1:21:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, be in the driver's seat where it was taken.
1:21:19 Dax Shepard? That's probably what I relate to.
1:21:20 Speaker 02 Yeah. What drove her to move from being the strokey during these demos to the stroker? I truly don't know. It's inside her head.
1:21:27 Dax Shepard? I just think there's something really juicy there.
1:21:28 Speaker 02 Yeah. And it's possible that she was also just trying to rise to a form of leadership by taking over the man's role, which is kind of a 2010s-era women in power move.
1:21:38 Speaker 01 Very, yeah.
1:21:39 Dax Shepard? No, I love this whole story because it's comforting to believe that just power and money makes everyone an asshole. We don't have a monopoly of men on it. So, I mean, there's some part of it that's comforting to me. That's like, oh, yeah, you put a woman at the top of a cult and guess what, she'll be a terrible person at the end of it. OK, so it all leads to what I think is the darkest and most interesting speech she gives that's caught on camera, which is she's discussing her father.
1:22:05 Dax Shepard? And ultimately, and I'll botch it, and this is paraphrasing, but she basically says her father was operating on this fourth dimension. And that when he would try to lock back into this third dimension, it was a little scrambled and that the people here didn't really understand his kind of basically enlightenment. So she is on record and out loud, basically saying it was the other people's fault. My dad really is fine.
1:22:29 Speaker 01 Not only fine, he's special.
1:22:31 Speaker 02 He's enlightened, yeah. She calls him expansive.
1:22:33 Speaker 01 It makes me so sad.
1:22:36 Dax Shepard? So I think that is at the core of this whole thing. And the wanting to embrace and forgive the beast is all an attempt to, as Sedaris says, "All of my books have a singular goal of making you love my mother as much as I did." That's what every story is about. That's what every book's about. And I think there's some bizarre version of that at play here.
1:22:58 Speaker 02 I think that's really insightful. She says something like, "I never took on the idea that my dad was a bad person. I just believed that he was too expansive for the arbitrary laws of our third dimension." And instead, on the fourth dimension, he was this wonderful person and...
1:23:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah, dude, that's fucking...
1:23:17 Speaker 01 It's so sad because that's so human. Kids cannot wrap their head around being hurt by their parent. It's too not connected to anything that's supposed to be. It's not the reality that we know. And so in order to make sense of it, people do all... It's destabilizing. It's the not the natural order of things. Your parents are supposed to protect you, not hurt you.
1:23:39 Speaker 02 It's deeply, deeply confusing to a child.
1:23:42 Speaker 01 Yes, they spend their whole life trying to figure out how to make that make sense. And this is how she did it, I think. That's so sad.
1:23:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I couldn't believe that part. I was like, okay, here we go. We're at the base of what's happening here. That she's even taking the time in this other ceremony to even be talking about him is already weird.
1:23:59 Speaker 02 I will never know for certain exactly what happened between Nicole and her father. But I think to look at a statement like that...
1:24:11 Speaker 02 It would be impossible not to feel this human compassion for, you can imagine like a little girl.
1:24:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:24:18 Speaker 02 Who is trying to, yeah, when you said it's deeply human.
1:24:20 Dax Shepard? You only get one and she wants that one to have been a good one.
1:24:24 Speaker 02 Of course.
1:24:24 Dax Shepard? And somebody hook or crook.
1:24:25 Speaker 01 Have you seen the doc, what's the doc that came out earlier this year? The girl's mom was sending her all these horrible texts.
1:24:33 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
1:24:33 Speaker 02 Yes, I know that story.
1:24:35 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. And at the end, she's reconnecting with her mom. And it's just an example of this. Kids are not supposed to feel that their parents are dangerous. And they often just don't. They have to avoid it. Your brain can't handle it.
1:24:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:24:52 Speaker 01 It's so upsetting. It's too much.
1:24:54 Speaker 02 And other people who have studied Anna Nicole have described to me that she also put forth theories like, there is no such thing as pleasure, or pain, or good, or evil. It's just all variants of sensation. Again, there's a hint of some of that in sitting meditation, mindfulness, this idea that no feeling is necessarily like good or bad.
1:25:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's kind of Buddhist.
1:25:18 Speaker 02 But you can also see how that type of idea might have served this part of her that wanted to make sense of her dad. What kind of thinking is going to allow her to say, I never thought of my dad as a bad person?
1:25:30 Dax Shepard? Well, I think at the very, very core, if you distill it down, it's that all of our deepest fears would be that we're unlovable. And then you're assigned to people that are supposed to love you no matter what. But if they have behaviors that would suggest they didn't love you and they were trying to hurt you, it has the risk of confirming your ultimate fear, which is like, I'm so unlovable, my own parents didn't love me. They abused me. So anything's worth attempting to avoid that conclusion.
1:25:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:25:54 Speaker 01 Let's say he didn't hurt her or abuse her. The fact that it's known that he abused other children still causes the same reaction.
1:26:02 Dax Shepard? You're still supposed to love your kids enough to stay out of jail for them. So even if it was for other people, he should have stayed out of prison for her.
1:26:08 Speaker 01 But knowing that your father, who you love, could cause so much damage is just not something a kid can reconcile.
1:26:16 Speaker 02 It doesn't compute.
1:26:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, it won't compute.
1:26:18 Dax Shepard? So how did she get brought down? Obviously, your article played a huge role in that because right after it was published, the FBI started looking into her.
1:26:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, I don't know for sure what prompted the FBI to start. It's possible they could have started before that story ran. But basically, that story ran in mid 2018. A few months later is the first time I heard from some of my sources. They were like, the FBI is showing up at our doors, asking us about what happened at One Taste. I knew the FBI was investigating, but that's all I knew for many years. That's all anyone knew for many years. And five years later, after much investigation, they charged Nicole and Rachel Cherwitz, who was her second-in-command, with forced labor conspiracy, which is a federal crime. And then two years later, there was a criminal trial this summer in Brooklyn and went on for five or six weeks.
1:27:09 Speaker 02 And in the end, the jury unanimously decided that both Rachel and Nicole were guilty of forced labor conspiracy. And so they had been out on bail. The next day, both women were taken into custody, and they have been in a federal jail ever since. They are waiting sentencing.
1:27:27 Dax Shepard? All the way to next September?
1:27:28 Speaker 02 No, it was supposed to happen this September. It's gotten delayed, and so it could happen later this year or maybe more likely early next year.
1:27:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Whoa. So what are your conclusions after all of this exploration? And I think that was the thing that I found most shocking about the NXIVM doc was it went counter to who I would imagine would be susceptible to such a thing. Almost without exclusion, all the NXIVM followers were incredibly bright, industrious, motivated, conscientious, dream employees. And I think a lot of us think you'd have to be stupid to fall for this, but I think you definitely have the goal in the book of pointing out, really, this could happen to anyone.
1:28:08 Speaker 02 A lot of people have that thought, I would never join a cult, or people who join cults are stupid. I completely understand why people have that thought because it's very comforting, and it really makes you feel safe, and it really makes you feel in control, which is something that every human wants. And at the same time... You know, when I started reporting on this group, it's not like I was a cult expert. Now, I feel like I've done a lot of research and I kind of understand both this group and then broad patterns generally. And I think I would say that it's not about smarts. It's about your yearning and your seeking. And everyone has something that they are looking for. And if that right match finds you at the right time in your life,
1:28:51 Speaker 02 when you are maybe having just gone through some sort of life transition, or you moved to a new city, or you went through a divorce, or anything like that, you are at heightened vulnerability. So I think that some people are more vulnerable than others. But I do not agree that there are people out there who are like totally immune to this risk.
1:29:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, I agree.
1:29:09 Speaker 02 And I think having some humility about that is actually probably protective. Because if you assume that this will never happen to you, you might not recognize it when it does. And cults look different now than they did 40 or 50 years ago. I don't mean to be like fear mongering, but it's just more about understanding that by nature, humans are searching for things. And I think if someone promises an answer, that's like a very tantalizing thing. One of the major things that I found interesting about researching and understanding One Taste is just how much status games play a role in why people did certain behaviors within the group. All of a sudden, if you become really emotionally invested
1:29:52 Speaker 02 in a fairly tight knit social circle, with unusual rules and a very clear hierarchy and a pretty clear norm of what's accepted and approved of behavior and disapproved of behavior, you are going to make decisions that are in line with that set of social pressures, rather than your own moral compass. Your moral compass goes out the window.
1:30:19 Dax Shepard? Well, your moral compass was set by your peers already.
1:30:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's no objective. You know, observers will look at some of the choices that people made when they were inside One Taste. And they might judge, and they might say, I would never do that. I would never agree to that kind of arrangement. Or I would never stand by while my friend was being punished for something. But again and again, I spoke to people who said, I did it because... I knew it was going to get me approval. I did it because people who were higher status than me in the group told me that that's what I needed to do. I did it because I knew they would like me more if I did it. I didn't say anything because I was afraid I would get punished if I spoke up. Guess what? That's why.
1:31:02 Speaker 01 We do everything.
1:31:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's why you do everything. That's exactly right. Might I be tricked into a cult? Set that aside. That is an interesting lesson to try to like reflect on. But more so than that, it's like in your daily life, it is interesting to try to be aware of how frequently you are making decisions based on wanting approval status or avoiding disapproval or pain.
1:31:22 Dax Shepard? We're all really super susceptible to our context and we act in accordance with whatever our chosen group is.
1:31:30 Speaker 02 And what's interesting is I read a book. The author has passed away, but she wrote this kind of seminal book about cult behavior. One of the things that really stuck with me is she said, we're such finely tuned social creatures that we don't even need to be told what the rules are. We are so good at looking around and just inferring what we should be doing. And within one taste, Nicole rarely commanded. She would just praise someone in a very targeted way if they did what she wanted, or she would ignore or look poorly on someone who didn't do what she wanted. That is more effective than telling someone, you need to do this thing.
1:32:09 Dax Shepard? And that's where it gets so tricky criminally for all these different things because everyone's consenting in whatever broad definition you have of consent.
1:32:17 Speaker 01 I mean legally, they're consenting.
1:32:19 Speaker 02 At the trial, the defense attorneys would often cross-examine witnesses and ask them questions like, maybe they didn't use these exact words, but the suggestion was, was someone holding a gun to your head? Were you locked in a room? Or could you have walked away? What they're suggesting there, in my opinion, is that implicit pressure doesn't exist.
1:32:39 Dax Shepard? Look, it's a tricky one because we all want liberty.
1:32:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, of course.
1:32:43 Dax Shepard? We got to draw these really. Tenuous lines.
1:32:46 Speaker 02 Someone at trial said something that I think sums it up really well. This was like a former One Taste member. And he said on the stand, if you can't freely say no, then you can't freely say yes, and therefore you can't consent. So that is one framework to think about it, which is that if someone said yes, but the environment is such that a reasonable person would agree that there was not room to say no, is that still yes?
1:33:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:11 Speaker 02 I don't know that as a society, we've come to a clear conclusion on that. But that's a central question that was coming up at trial. That's been on my mind.
1:33:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah. But then you get into like, OK, then what's the line? So a guy who joins a gang and it's pretty implicit, not stated, you should kill members of the opposing gang. Does that person not have any responsibility? Because they were... So that's why it's murky. And that's why it's really hard. That's why these can exist, because we all do want liberty.
1:33:35 Speaker 02 Like many things, there's not an easy answer.
1:33:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Have you ever sat down face to face with Nicole?
1:33:41 Speaker 02 There is a scene at the end of the book where I meet her for the first time and we have our only conversation. I had, at that point, studied her for many years. I'd spent hours talking to people who knew her. I had watched hours and hours of video of her lecturing. But we had never met. We had never talked.
1:34:00 Dax Shepard? Is it fair to say she hated you?
1:34:02 Speaker 02 I don't know.
1:34:03 Dax Shepard? OK, again, you were never in her head.
1:34:05 Speaker 02 She had just been indicted and I happened to be in New York for work. She had a procedural court hearing. And I went to the courthouse in Brooklyn. And I walked in. And if you've ever been inside a federal courthouse, there's a lot of security. You have to hand over your phone to the security guard. You put all your stuff through a metal detector and a scanning thing. So I went through that and I was standing in the lobby with my notebook. I knew she would show up, I just didn't know when. And she shows up with this whole entourage. So it's her and her co-defendant Rachel, their attorneys, probably like close to a dozen One Taste supporters, some of whom I recognize their faces. And they're going through the security line and Nicole spots me. She immediately smiles and waves.
1:34:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:34:46 Speaker 02 And she calls out, hi, Ellen.
1:34:48 Speaker 01 Oh, these leaders are good.
1:34:50 Speaker 02 They're good. She's very good. She makes her way through security. The rest of her entourage is still handing over their phones. And she approaches me. I ask if I can shake her hand and I shake her hand. And then she kind of hangs on for an extra second and she goes, we have strange intimacy.
1:35:05 Speaker 02 And I was like, oh, yeah. I'm sure I said something really dumb. And then I kind of was like, it's great to meet you. I'll see you in the courtroom. And that's our only conversation. It was just a moment and I don't need to make it more than it is. But it is true. She's a charmer and I think she really knew how to describe our strange relationship.
1:35:27 Dax Shepard? It's fucking powerful.
1:35:29 Speaker 02 And another thing that I learned from a different cult researcher is people often talk about charisma in cult leaders. And sometimes it falls flat because some people will look at a cult leader and be like, that person's not charismatic at all.
1:35:40 Dax Shepard? Keith, when I watch that doc, I'm like, this is your dude?
1:35:43 Speaker 02 So what this researcher says, and it has made a lot of sense to me, is she's like, I prefer to think of charisma as descriptive of a relationship between two people. So there's charisma that exists in a connection between two people. So between a follower of NXIVM and Keith, the charisma's off the charts. But someone from the outside might look at him and be like, it's totally lacking.
1:36:04 Dax Shepard? This guy's a volleyball champ and a judo champ?
1:36:06 Speaker 01 More like chemistry then.
1:36:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, or you know, maybe it describes like one way. I forgot about how much volleyball there is in NXIVM.
1:36:12 Dax Shepard? Oh, he thinks he's like an Olympic volleyball player?
1:36:15 Speaker 02 He loves volleyball.
1:36:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:36:17 Speaker 02 But anyway, there were people who looked at Nicole and like became entranced. And then there were some people who looked at her and they're like, this woman does nothing for me. That existence doesn't negate the pull that she had on these other people. Or the spell that she was able to cast on them. That helps also give people more compassion for like, someone might be having a different experience of this person than I am.
1:36:37 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, people describe having worked with her and then looked through the delivery window of the food and caught a minute of her eye contact and felt more connected to her than anyone else they'd ever.
1:36:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:36:49 Dax Shepard? I, of course, was just like, oh, I want to meet her as like a challenge. I wanted to see.
1:36:52 Speaker 01 Just out of curiosity.
1:36:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I wanted her to try to like woo me.
1:36:55 Speaker 02 Then, when I was covering the trial, I saw her every day, but we didn't talk. And instead, I would be sitting in the courtroom, you know, for hours at a time. You can't bring in any devices, so you're just there with your notebook. It's very meditative.
1:37:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:37:07 Speaker 02 And what I would do is I would also watch the people in the courtroom. You're watching the One Taste supporters who's showing up on the other side every day. And the lawyers and the jurors and then mostly I would watch Nicole. It was funny because Rachel, her second in command, who was also a defendant, not very expressive, would look straight ahead and neither of them testified. So, you know, she wouldn't really talk very much and Nicole was the opposite. Anytime someone entered the courtroom, she would turn around and like be like, who is it? And then she recognized them, she would put her hands on her heart. After the trial was over, I interviewed a few jurors and all of them said to me, they were like, Nicole kept looking at us.
1:37:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:37:42 Speaker 02 And trying to make eye contact.
1:37:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:37:45 Speaker 02 She would often smile, she would sometimes laugh, she would whisper to her attorney. Like, she's a very animated person. She's very alive.
1:37:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:37:51 Speaker 02 You know, you're around her and you're like, whoa, this person has a lot of energy.
1:37:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:37:54 Speaker 02 So, yeah, I would observe her. I mean, I'm not sure I came away with deep conclusions, but it was fascinating to watch her even as she's not in a speaking role.
1:38:02 Dax Shepard? Still exude.
1:38:03 Speaker 02 Try to like project kind of her energy out to the people around her.
1:38:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:38:07 Speaker 01 Oh, man.
1:38:08 Dax Shepard? Wow. Well, the book is called Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult. I love when journalists who write mostly in short form write books because the pace is so fucking good. It's like reading just a super compelling article. The information's coming so quick and concisely and cleverly worded and it's just a very exciting read. Yeah, it's a great book. I hope everyone checks out Empire of Orgasm. Ellen, this has been delightful.
1:38:38 Speaker 02 So fun.
1:38:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, thanks for coming.
1:38:39 Dax Shepard? Who are you gonna take down next? Who's next?
1:38:41 Speaker 02 Oh, man. I...
1:38:43 Dax Shepard? Do you get an email about me? Just ignore it, okay?
1:38:47 Speaker 02 I promise I won't look too hard. But you gotta find out if you ever had a Juicero.
1:38:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, on the fact check, we'll get down to the nitty gritty on the Juicero.
1:38:56 Dax Shepard? There's just so many devices in the house. I don't know.
1:38:59 Speaker 01 I would honestly not be surprised.
1:39:01 Dax Shepard? No, I wouldn't be surprised.
1:39:02 Speaker 01 She just loves her wellness.
1:39:04 Speaker 02 The juice was good. I tasted the juice. No one's arguing the juice was not delicious.
1:39:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:39:07 Speaker 02 Fresh.
1:39:08 Dax Shepard? But that's just a smoothie pack of delivery, really. That's a different business. Also, sorry, I gotta one second on it. The mad grab to make all companies a tech company during that era was so funny. It's like, it's a juice company. That's not a tech company. You're gonna try to make it a tech company?
1:39:22 Speaker 02 You're totally right. It's like, why does this need to be? This huge engineering feat. They were selling like a juice subscription. The juice machine was wifi connected in a way that was absolutely not necessary. They argued that it meant that they could scan the QR code of each juice pack and alert you if there had been a recall.
1:39:40 Dax Shepard? Okay, safety.
1:39:42 Speaker 02 But again, you could just squeeze it with your.
1:39:44 Dax Shepard? The big three around this time was like, we ought to stop thinking about these as car companies and think about them as tech companies. I'm like, no, you don't. I need this motherfucker to drive me to.
1:39:53 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:39:53 Dax Shepard? I don't need a subscription on the.
1:39:55 Speaker 01 I don't like the screen.
1:39:56 Speaker 02 Well, but you know why, you know why there's this incentive? It goes back to what we were saying earlier about so much money in VC giving heightened valuations to companies that could call themselves conceivably tech companies.
1:40:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:09 Speaker 02 As soon as you can call yourself a tech company, you're going to get a valuation that's 5X, what you could have gotten if you were just consumer goods.
1:40:16 Dax Shepard? GM's never gonna 100X in the next 20 years. It's just not gonna happen.
1:40:20 Speaker 02 So there's a pretty big financial incentive to want to do that, even if it was a bit of a stretch.
1:40:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Well, Ellen, what a delight.
1:40:26 Speaker 01 This was so fun.
1:40:27 Dax Shepard? I hope you'll read another book and come back to us.
1:40:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:29 Speaker 02 Yes, thank you.
1:40:32 Speaker 04 We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.
1:40:40 Speaker 01 Hello.
1:40:40 Dax Shepard? Hello. How are the?
1:40:45 Speaker 01 Good. It's almost the weekend.
1:40:48 Dax Shepard? I'm very pumped about the weekend.
1:40:49 Speaker 01 Hmm.
1:40:49 Dax Shepard? It's been a very big week.
1:40:51 Speaker 01 Hmm.
1:40:52 Dax Shepard? Very, very big week. Lots and lots of episodes and I filmed this week.
1:40:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:57 Dax Shepard? Which meant going to Long Beach. I was on the west side, which I never am.
1:41:01 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:41:02 Dax Shepard? And I've been meaning to go look at the Palisades in Malibu.
1:41:06 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:41:07 Dax Shepard? Have you been?
1:41:08 Speaker 01 No, I haven't. Well, no.
1:41:10 Dax Shepard? It's a crazy drive just because I have, you know, I've driven Sunset to the beach so many times in my 10 years of living in Santa Monica. So like, I know. How it's supposed to feel. And I know how the PCH is supposed to feel leaving Santa Monica and driving up to Malibu. And it's also was, it was, it was interesting to me how much of it all you log without knowing, right? Like your subconscious knows, like, as you're driving, you know where you're at based on all these kind of markers that you're not really paying attention to that you know. I kept going like, I don't know. Cause just like the entire side of the PCH on the left side is gone. There's none of those houses are there.
1:41:50 Speaker 01 So crazy.
1:41:51 Dax Shepard? It's so crazy.
1:41:52 Speaker 01 Are there, is there like, construction happening? Did you see?
1:41:55 Dax Shepard? So in the Palisades, it's insane how many houses are framed there already.
1:42:01 Speaker 01 Oh, there are, okay.
1:42:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think I had this very pessimistic fear that like, given the restraints of building permits and stuff in LA, which can be brutal.
1:42:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:42:11 Dax Shepard? I'm like, when will they, and will people even try?
1:42:14 Speaker 01 Right.
1:42:14 Dax Shepard? And there's just houses everywhere, like.
1:42:17 Speaker 01 So you are seeing them even though it's like.
1:42:19 Dax Shepard? They're mostly just framed or they're, you know. I was thinking, as you would know better than anyone, I was like, it's so deceptive when, if you build a house, when you see it framed, you're like, oh, I have a house. I'll be in this in 10 minutes. And you're like, oh no, you're, it hasn't even begun.
1:42:36 Speaker 01 I know.
1:42:37 Dax Shepard? And they frame these houses, they frame them in a few days. It's like insane how quickly they build the physical wooden structure of it. And then you're just years out from before that final piece of tile goes in.
1:42:48 Speaker 01 I know. Speaking of that, I'm coming real, I'm close. I'm close, everyone.
1:42:55 Dax Shepard? Tickety tock.
1:42:56 Speaker 01 To moving in. I mean, I'm like.
1:42:58 Dax Shepard? Like what's left?
1:43:00 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:43:01 Dax Shepard? What pretty necklaces you have on today?
1:43:03 Speaker 01 Thank you. I have two necklaces on. Um, I'm like, less than two weeks out.
1:43:08 Dax Shepard? No way!
1:43:09 Speaker 01 Yes. And it's really exciting. Callie, um, came to visit me yesterday and she was telling the designer, she was like, you know, Monica and I built our, you know, we had to design our dorm room. And now, this is where she gets to live and she was very proud and happy for me. I'm lucky and I'm excited and I also though, I keep having nightmares.
1:43:39 Dax Shepard? Oh wonderful, what type of nightmares?
1:43:41 Speaker 01 And I don't know, I'm not a big nightmare gal.
1:43:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:43:45 Speaker 01 I don't really have many, but I've been having a lot more lately and I, I think, it, I assume, has to do with this big, huge transition that's coming, that I, again, I'm so grateful
1:43:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:43:59 Speaker 01 to be able to do and so lucky.
1:44:01 Dax Shepard? But you have change anxiety, as, as we've well documented.
1:44:04 Speaker 01 Yes, change isn't my, um, it doesn't come that easy to me. The nightmares are like murdery and, and stuff like that.
1:44:14 Dax Shepard? Oh, like you're afraid to be in the new house?
1:44:15 Speaker 01 By myself.
1:44:16 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:44:17 Speaker 01 So, I think I already, it was, that's been lingering a little bit for a long time, like, ew, like, it's, that's a big house, you know? And now it's coming, like, I'm about, it's, and, and it feels a little, it's so exciting, but it is a little scary, there's so many, I feel like I shouldn't even say this on here, but there's multiple entry points.
1:44:39 Dax Shepard? Well, it's a home, I think they might have concluded there's not a single entrance. What if you had to leave your front door under the street and then walk around to get on your deck?
1:44:48 Speaker 01 That'd be great.
1:44:48 Dax Shepard? Or go to your pool.
1:44:49 Speaker 01 I feel like I should, I should lock up the rest of, I should make it hard. Yeah.
1:44:54 Dax Shepard? Why don't you have, um, young Jess come stay at your house the first week or something?
1:44:58 Speaker 01 I know, I'm thinking about that, I'm thinking about trying to do the, you know, kind of ease my way in and have some people stay. Um, I just, then, then they leave and there will be a day, or maybe I'll be ready by then, I don't know, but there'll be a day that'll be by myself.
1:45:18 Dax Shepard? My prediction is you'll be shockingly comfortable very quickly.
1:45:21 Speaker 01 I hope so.
1:45:22 Dax Shepard? I think you're, yeah, that the unknown of it and the thought of being in that big house by yourself is quite scary, but I think. I think very quickly, I cause even I had that moving from our old house to this house.
1:45:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:45:34 Dax Shepard? You know, it's just like a new thing and I, the threats are all the same, by the way. It doesn't matter if you, you have, you have two doors in your current apartment. People get killed just as much as in apartments as they do houses, you know?
1:45:45 Speaker 01 Well, yes and no. I, they probably don't because they, I bet robbery is much higher in a house and in an apartment because the items.
1:45:54 Dax Shepard? But robbers don't kill people.
1:45:55 Speaker 01 Well, if they're in there.
1:45:57 Dax Shepard? No, robbers aren't killers. Robbers come to rob stuff. They hope they're not interact with.
1:46:02 Speaker 01 They hope to, but sometimes when they do.
1:46:04 Dax Shepard? So if you don't go confront them and try to stop them, they're not there to kill anyone. Those are killer. People who are in the market to murder someone are much different than people who want to go steal shit.
1:46:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, I understand you think that's helpful to say, ah, ah, but, but it's not. I, I, I don't want to be robbed.
1:46:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, of course not.
1:46:24 Speaker 01 And I don't want to be robbed when I'm in my house.
1:46:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:46:27 Speaker 01 Or when I'm not.
1:46:28 Dax Shepard? It's very scary, the thought of being robbed, but if you read a statistic that robberies never end in murder, unless the homeowner confronts the assailant, if you read that statistic, would it comfort you at all or no?
1:46:39 Speaker 01 But can, but like can, if they come in my room and I'm in my room.
1:46:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:46:44 Speaker 01 I didn't go confront them. I, I don't know.
1:46:47 Dax Shepard? It's in the trying to stop them where they think they might get arrested where you have problems.
1:46:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, um, yeah.
1:46:53 Dax Shepard? But they're not like, I want to go murder someone. They're like, I want shit so I have money so I can get the thing I'm trying to get.
1:47:00 Speaker 01 Right.
1:47:00 Dax Shepard? And murder's not gonna help them in that at all.
1:47:02 Speaker 01 I agree. I think there's this sense of like, in my apartment, if I scream, people can hear me. They're like above me and next door and they'll be able to hear my screams.
1:47:13 Dax Shepard? But you also have an alarm at your house, which you don't have at your.
1:47:15 Speaker 01 Exactly. That's right. And a lot of security. Yes, I, I am definitely more protected.
1:47:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:47:22 Speaker 01 In the house, but it's just new and um, I do remember when I first moved into my apartment. That first night, I all, I slept at Callie's.
1:47:32 Dax Shepard? You did. You left your apartment, went to Callie's.
1:47:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, I couldn't do it. So it'll, but it'll be great and it's um, and it's a big, big old change on the horizon.
1:47:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'm excited for you.
1:47:49 Speaker 01 Thank you. Me too.
1:47:52 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
1:47:58 Dax Shepard? We are supported by HP. My mental to-do list is already full. Uh, fix something around the house, refill prescriptions, remember to text someone back, keep track of a million little life things. The last thing I want on that list is, oh, don't forget printer ink.
1:48:14 Speaker 01 No, it's horrible.
1:48:15 Dax Shepard? It's the bane of everyone's existence. What if you could just take that off your list for years?
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1:49:05 Dax Shepard? HP Smart Tank.
1:49:13 Dax Shepard? Dr. Mike's coming over tonight.
1:49:15 Speaker 01 Oh, that's fun.
1:49:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah, he's in town, so he's gonna join us for a family dinner and then Frankenstein, which I haven't seen.
1:49:22 Speaker 01 Ooh, I haven't seen it either.
1:49:24 Dax Shepard? And I've gotten my children willing to watch what is on the surface a scary movie because Jacob Elordi's in it.
1:49:30 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:49:32 Dax Shepard? Thank, God bless his handsomeness.
1:49:33 Speaker 01 I know. It'll buy you a lot.
1:49:35 Dax Shepard? It will. I think they'll be willing to get through anything. I also heard it's not, have you watched it?
1:49:39 Speaker 01 No, I, no, I want to.
1:49:40 Dax Shepard? I've heard it's not as scary as you might think.
1:49:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, I want to see it.
1:49:44 Dax Shepard? I also didn't know that was a Guillermo del Toro movie, and I see all of his movies, and he's a genius. So that also sounds like, why haven't I seen this movie?
1:49:51 Speaker 01 Yeah. Um, I saw a movie that I want to shout out, Eternity. It is Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller and Callum Turner, and it's a rom-com-ish, uh, and it's so good and so sweet and heartwarming, and I just loved it.
1:50:15 Dax Shepard? Oh, good.
1:50:16 Speaker 01 I really recommend if you want like a feel-good.
1:50:19 Dax Shepard? Where did you stream it?
1:50:21 Speaker 01 I rented it.
1:50:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:50:23 Speaker 01 I think soon it will be out to stream.
1:50:25 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:50:26 Speaker 01 It was just out in theaters like in November or something. But I highly recommend it if you want something that makes you feel good.
1:50:35 Dax Shepard? Optimistic.
1:50:36 Speaker 01 Cry, but in a happy way and a sad way. And but also a happy way. Um, I recommend that.
1:50:44 Dax Shepard? I have a recommendation too. And it's kind of a funny circuitous route to this recommendation, which is I had dinner with Malcolm.
1:50:52 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:50:53 Dax Shepard? Who was in town, which is great. And I had remembered that he is, he kept going to Alabama to do a story on a murder.
1:51:00 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:51:00 Dax Shepard? The last time I had seen him in New York. And I said, hey, how's that story coming? And he said, he said, oh, my God, it's so good. It turned out so good. It's out.
1:51:10 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:51:11 Dax Shepard? And I go, it's out? And I said, oh, my God, this is my problem with your show because you're not weekly. I don't ever know when a new season comes out of revisionist history.
1:51:21 Speaker 01 You gotta subscribe.
1:51:22 Dax Shepard? I do subscribe.
1:51:23 Speaker 01 Oh, then it should pop up on your Spotify.
1:51:26 Dax Shepard? It doesn't. Uh, maybe I'm not using it correctly.
1:51:28 Speaker 01 Okay, okay.
1:51:30 Dax Shepard? Suffice to say, I, I was unaware of it. So I knew I had to drive to Long Beach. I'm like, oh, perfect. I'll start Malcolm's murder, murder show.
1:51:39 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:51:40 Dax Shepard? So I go and I see like the most recent revisionist history and I start it. And the first episode is about, um, genius and the two different kinds of genius, which is fascinating. There's like, there's, there's distinctly two types and one is the, the archetype is Picasso, which is like, he explodes on the scene at 20 years old and he's doing something no one else is doing. And he's just so fast and he can rip these things out and it's so impressive. And then there's Cezanne, who's also the master of all masters. And his paintings, the ones you've seen have been redone sometimes like eight, nine times. And they've taken years.
1:52:19 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:52:20 Dax Shepard? And then he uses this parallel to talk about Leonard Cohen and his music and like hallelujah. He wrote that song for 10 years and he made like four or five failed versions of it before it becomes. The one that we know, but even more interestingly, we really know the Jeff Buckley version, right? So it's like, it's then Jeff Buckley's interpretation of this thing that is now really, everyone that's doing it now is doing.
1:52:51 Speaker 01 His.
1:52:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so it's just like this complicated
1:52:54 Speaker 01 Iteration.
1:52:55 Dax Shepard? Iteration to perfection. And I'm fascinated. It's great. I love listening to it. It's a lot about Elvis Costello. It's very cute because you hear Malcolm was such a music nerd as a kid.
1:53:05 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, he loves music.
1:53:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's very cute. And I'm going, when will he seamlessly integrate a murder
1:53:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:53:12 Dax Shepard? plot line into this? And then the next episode starts and it is about sad songs. And then on the Rolling Stones top 50 songs of all time, he goes through them. It's saying there's almost no sad songs on this list.
1:53:26 Speaker 01 Weird.
1:53:27 Dax Shepard? And then he goes into this whole thing about country, how country is really fearlessly explores sadness like no other genre. And the hits in country are often like their alcoholism and their death and their divorce. And they're all these topics. The thing that was so fascinating about it is like, he then references this other guy who put the 1500 songs into this algorithm he created that would, what it would do is it would basically, it could listen to the song and then tell you what percentage of the lyrics are unique and which percentage are repeated. Does that make sense? Like through chorus or whatever, their repeating stanzas, whatever.
1:54:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:54:04 Dax Shepard? And so it turns out like that rock is like, I want to say it was like 60% is new. And then 40% of all the lyrics are repeated.
1:54:12 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:54:13 Dax Shepard? And then in country, oh, and the other point he had made before he makes this point is that the heartbreak, he compares Wild Horses, this sad song by the Rolling Stones, to this country song. And, and he says the reason this country song is so much more heartbreaking is, is the specificity of it. It's like emotion coupled with specificity really results in this emotion. And country music has far less repetition.
1:54:39 Dax Shepard? Then he goes through this fascinating thing where he reads a list of like the top hundred country songs ever written.
1:54:44 Speaker 01 Hundred, lucky he gets to do that.
1:54:46 Dax Shepard? He doesn't go through the whole, he knows better.
1:54:48 Speaker 01 Oh, him and I need to have a podcast where we just read hundred lists.
1:54:52 Dax Shepard? But he didn't, but he didn't go through the whole list.
1:54:53 Speaker 01 Okay, but he wanted to.
1:54:54 Dax Shepard? What he immediately shows you is that almost every single one of the songs was written by someone from either Arkansas, Texas, or Kentucky, maybe Tennessee.
1:55:04 Speaker 01 In the country list?
1:55:05 Dax Shepard? In the country, top one hundred of all time.
1:55:07 Speaker 01 Okay, okay.
1:55:08 Dax Shepard? They're all written by Protestants. They're white Protestant Southerners from almost just three or four states. The entire list. If you look at the list of all the top rock songs, it's people from everywhere in the world.
1:55:22 Speaker 01 Right.
1:55:23 Dax Shepard? And he said, so rock as a genre is way more diverse, which is why rock iterates way faster. Rock changes a lot more than country has changed.
1:55:32 Speaker 01 Right.
1:55:32 Dax Shepard? Because of all these diversity of viewpoints. He said, but the price it pays is rock can't be specific because it's not speaking a language everyone listening already speaks, which is so interesting. So the country people, they don't have to bury it in metaphor or repeat it. They give you the specifics because they assume everyone listening already speaks the language and knows all of it. And he said, the only other genre that does that is hip hop.
1:56:01 Speaker 01 I was about to say rap does it.
1:56:02 Dax Shepard? Yes, and he said, again, it's written by, he reads that list. The top list of those is like Brooklyn, Brooklyn, South Central, Bronx, South Central, Brooklyn, Brooklyn, right? It's all from, it's very concentrated and everyone already speaks the language. They're not going to dumb it down for anybody.
1:56:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's interesting.
1:56:20 Dax Shepard? And I have always been saying those two genres to me are identical genres. It's like the white version and the black version. And my explanation was like, it talks about socioeconomic struggle. That was why I thought they were so similar, which I still maintain is part of it. But to hear this other explanation, which is so fascinating is it's no, it's the specificity that's only being written by these handful of people for other people in that community is really cool.
1:56:44 Speaker 01 That's very cool. Yeah. I mean, I definitely think we've, I've said this a lot, like, the more specific you get, the more universal you get.
1:56:54 Dax Shepard? Hmm. Yeah.
1:56:55 Speaker 01 Which is counterintuitive, but it's true.
1:56:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:56:58 Speaker 01 So that applies here.
1:56:59 Dax Shepard? All to say, I'm like, wow.
1:57:01 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:57:02 Dax Shepard? Where is the mer- now I, now with this whole education on country music and all these singers, songwriters, I'm like, how the fuck is he gonna get a murder in Alabama in this mix? Thing, oh, country, maybe.
1:57:15 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:57:16 Dax Shepard? So then somehow my phone fucks up and it sends me now back to the main page. Like it doesn't auto load the next one, whatever it is. And now I realize when I opened up revisionist history the first time, that was what was the most recent. But now when I'm back on the page, I'm seeing the shit that he's, that is not his stuff that's in his normal feed. And then I see murder in Alabama. I mean, that is the name of the series. Then I started murder in Alabama because then I was driving around so much looking at, uh, Palisades and Malibu.
1:57:45 Speaker 01 That's funny. Okay. That makes sense. Cause I was like, wow, he's really taking his time.
1:57:50 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:57:51 Speaker 01 And that's, that's hard to do in a podcast.
1:57:53 Dax Shepard? And then the other thing that was tripping me up, and I, I'm not saying anything, I said this directly to him. I sent him a voice memo, which was the music one was really good. But I was also like, wow, he thinks this is the best thing he's ever done.
1:58:09 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
1:58:09 Dax Shepard? It's really good, but it doesn't feel head and shoulders above anything else I've listened to of his. So I wonder, and then I get more fascinated with why, what about, what did he get out of his heart and his mind in this one that is, he feels so proud of?
1:58:22 Speaker 01 Right.
1:58:22 Dax Shepard? But I wasn't even on the right fucking one.
1:58:24 Speaker 01 I see. Wow. Okay.
1:58:26 Dax Shepard? I could make a little up on my pedestal point. I've been thinking a lot about lately.
1:58:29 Speaker 01 Okay, let's hear it.
1:58:31 Dax Shepard? I think no one likes paying taxes.
1:58:36 Speaker 01 You think?
1:58:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so I think that it's safe to say no one likes paying taxes. And I think the assumption, and I can relate to this, is like, hold on, I went out and made this money. Why do I have to give half of it to you? And then you start thinking about where's that money going and this and that. But I think what you don't think about is you were able to make that money because this is a place that enforces the laws, that has highways that you can transport goods on.
1:59:07 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:59:08 Dax Shepard? That, you know, all of the stuff. I think we all, it's the same condition we all suffer from where we think we got ourselves to where we're at. We don't acknowledge everyone else who got us here. It's like, you can't make money unless you have this really robust system in place that allows you to do it in the first place.
1:59:25 Speaker 01 Also, if you're-
1:59:25 Dax Shepard? That's what you're paying for, is the, is a place where one can be prosperous.
1:59:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, and if you have a good or a service, the people around you need to have money to be able to buy your service or your product. So it benefits you for everyone to have stuff and have, have money and have some abundance so that you can keep your thing up. Like, it's all connected.
1:59:51 Dax Shepard? Even the service or the product, right? You have a product and the reason you can profit on it is because if someone tries to make the same product and sell it under the same name as yours, you can take them to court. There's a system in place that will allow you to profit from the thing that you created.
2:00:06 Speaker 01 Right, right.
2:00:06 Dax Shepard? You're safeguarded, yeah.
2:00:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, when we had Walter Isaacson on, we talked so much about this. I thought it was great, where he talks about the commons and, and the way that this country was built is, is because of the common goods.
2:00:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:00:26 Speaker 01 And that's what taxes go to, and we wouldn't have a country like this if we didn't have that.
2:00:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, like, people like to make a big deal out of the fact that Elon did successfully move Tesla to Texas.
2:00:36 Speaker 01 Right.
2:00:37 Dax Shepard? But it's a little unfair because it's like he couldn't have made Tesla there.
2:00:41 Speaker 01 Exactly.
2:00:41 Dax Shepard? But now that it is what it is, he can take it there and just pay way less taxes.
2:00:45 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
2:00:46 Dax Shepard? But it's quite unfair because it's like you could, you should kind of give back to the system that allowed you to make the thing in the first place. It's like a second, you can be independent from it to some degree.
2:00:56 Speaker 01 Where you were able to innovate it.
2:00:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
2:00:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is, that's a good, I like that, that's a good soapbox. I read, I, I read a quote, I posted it because I thought it was nice, that's very in keeping with what you're saying. That said, I was supposed to say about Veronica Mars, it's on Netflix, people should go watch Veronica Mars on Netflix.
2:01:15 Dax Shepard? Oh, just got there?
2:01:16 Speaker 01 Yes, it's very exciting, one of my favorite shows of all time. Okay, so thinking today about the park ranger in Mirror Woods on Thanksgiving Day 2025, who told us that redwoods distribute water to other trees and plants that surround them because they know that if they hog all the water from themselves and let everything else go dry, they're at greater risk of burning in a wildfire. I don't think that story was just about trees.
2:01:40 Speaker 01 So, same concept.
2:01:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's nice.
2:01:42 Speaker 01 Same concept.
2:01:43 Dax Shepard? I like that.
2:01:44 Speaker 01 Um.
2:01:45 Dax Shepard? Let's do some facts.
2:01:47 Speaker 01 Ellen Fax, Ellen Fox.
2:01:51 Dax Shepard? It's something that could be a name, Ellen Fax.
2:01:54 Speaker 01 It could.
2:01:54 Dax Shepard? Like a news reporter. Some of these reporters, you know, they like to give themselves a name that seems really on brand with what they do.
2:02:01 Speaker 01 Oh, it's true.
2:02:02 Dax Shepard? Dallas Raines, you know, meteorologists seem to do this more, but.
2:02:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, I agree.
2:02:07 Dax Shepard? You could be Ellen Fax, you could change your name to Monica Fax.
2:02:10 Speaker 01 Moths. She had an issue with moths. And they are the bane of my existence.
2:02:20 Dax Shepard? Of sweater collectors.
2:02:20 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. Now, it says to get rid of closet moths, deep clean the closet by vacuuming and wiping surfaces. Treat infested clothes by washing or freezing them to kill eggs and larvae. I hate the word eggs and larvae. And use natural deterents like cedar and lavender. My, my closet has so much cedar all over it.
2:02:42 Dax Shepard? Do you have those little cedar sticks that hang on the hook?
2:02:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, and like balls.
2:02:45 Dax Shepard? I noticed those were in my closet. Nashville. I get taken care of, but I don't even know sometimes. Sometimes it flies over my head, but I did notice, oh, someone had the foresight and kindness to put one of those in my closet.
2:02:54 Speaker 01 You need it along with pheromone traps to break the breeding cycle. I hate the word breeding cycle. And prevent reinfestation. I hate moths.
2:03:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:03:05 Speaker 01 Okay, now, um.
2:03:07 Dax Shepard? You might need to publish a list in descending order of fear. Your most hated animals down to moss. I do, I of course want to know our moss above or below dogs.
2:03:20 Speaker 01 Right.
2:03:20 Dax Shepard? Snakes.
2:03:21 Speaker 01 Oh.
2:03:22 Dax Shepard? There's so many of these animals that you hate, mice. Where, we need a comprehensive.
2:03:27 Speaker 01 Are we going hate or scared of? Cause those are actually different.
2:03:30 Dax Shepard? Hmm, but break that down for me.
2:03:32 Speaker 01 So I don't, I'm not, I'm not scared.
2:03:35 Dax Shepard? Of a moth.
2:03:36 Speaker 01 Of a moth, exactly, but I hate them.
2:03:39 Dax Shepard? Isn't it crazy when you kill them? Have you ever killed moss with your hand?
2:03:42 Speaker 01 Um, I've tried.
2:03:43 Dax Shepard? Or with a fucking object?
2:03:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:03:46 Dax Shepard? They just turn to powder. They're, they're like made of powder.
2:03:49 Speaker 01 Well, okay, so there's moths and then there's these tiny guys that kind of look like moss, but they actually come out of your rice.
2:03:55 Dax Shepard? Oh.
2:03:56 Speaker 01 And those are disgus- they're so easy to kill that it's actually like, it's so disgusting. And then they do, they just like, they're just like nothing.
2:04:05 Dax Shepard? They turn into a little pile of, uh, cotton dust.
2:04:08 Speaker 01 It's, it's like.
2:04:09 Dax Shepard? It's clear that they've been eating cotton.
2:04:11 Speaker 01 What the seahorse is. It's like, that dust gets made into a seahorse.
2:04:16 Dax Shepard? Returns back to a powder.
2:04:18 Speaker 01 Ew! Ew, Rob!
2:04:22 Dax Shepard? They're kind of pretty.
2:04:23 Speaker 01 No!
2:04:24 Speaker 05 The pantry moth.
2:04:25 Dax Shepard? A pantry moth.
2:04:26 Speaker 01 Those are the ones that get in the rice. Ew, I don't want to look at that anymore.
2:04:30 Speaker 05 It's stuck on the TV.
2:04:31 Speaker 01 Rob!
2:04:33 Dax Shepard? On the TV.
2:04:35 Speaker 01 Okay, so for venture capitalists, what percentage of companies do VCs count on succeeding? VCs count on a few big home run successes to cover many failures, which estimates suggesting up to 75% of VC backed startups fail. While only a tiny fraction, around 9%, generate all the industry's profits. Most VCs expect only 1 in 10 funded companies to be truly successful. Okay, is the actor's way, is it courses? Yes, 10 Lessons Holistic Online Acting Course. Okay, Arowan.
2:05:06 Speaker 01 I wrote down Erawan. I don't know why I wrote that down.
2:05:09 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:05:09 Speaker 01 But, um, oh, because his name was Erwan or something.
2:05:12 Dax Shepard? Oh.
2:05:13 Speaker 01 And we thought it was Erawan.
2:05:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:05:14 Speaker 01 And I just wonder if people even know that Erawan is nowhere spelled backwards.
2:05:19 Dax Shepard? I did not know that.
2:05:20 Speaker 01 That's what it is.
2:05:21 Dax Shepard? That's intentional?
2:05:21 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
2:05:22 Dax Shepard? Do you like that?
2:05:23 Speaker 01 This is very stupid.
2:05:24 Dax Shepard? Okay, okay, okay.
2:05:25 Speaker 01 But I like Erawan.
2:05:27 Dax Shepard? I'm just gonna keep my opinion to myself if you are super gung ho about that.
2:05:30 Speaker 01 No, it feels so pretentious, but I do like Erawan. I have to be honest about that.
2:05:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:05:37 Speaker 01 And I know it's like absolutely ridiculous. It's ridiculous. Like, it's so expensive, but I like it in there.
2:05:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah, people do. People like travel here to go.
2:05:45 Speaker 01 And I like their pre-made. They're like, pre-made food is good.
2:05:49 Dax Shepard? Uh-huh. Well, you get what you pay for.
2:05:52 Speaker 01 And you, and, yeah.
2:05:54 Dax Shepard? And you don't get upset.
2:05:57 Speaker 01 Get what you pay for and you don't get upset.
2:05:58 Dax Shepard? My adage. I have that tattooed on my small, my back.
2:06:02 Speaker 01 Oh, I really liked this, what she said, a definition of consent. I really liked this. If you can't freely say no, then you can't freely say yes.
2:06:10 Dax Shepard? Mmm.
2:06:11 Speaker 01 I really liked that a lot. I checked to see if Kristen had a Juicero. She did not.
2:06:17 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:06:18 Speaker 01 So that's a feather in her cap.
2:06:19 Dax Shepard? Now I know what to get her for her birthday. From July.
2:06:23 Speaker 01 Exactly. Um, that's all for the facts.
2:06:26 Dax Shepard? All right. Love you.
2:06:27 Speaker 01 Love you.
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