Part Three: The Orgasm Cult

Robert finally concludes the tale of OneTaste by describing how it all fell apart and ended in prison for Nicole Daedone. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you're listening to or like watching right now. I think like 10% of the audience watches, but it's impossible to tell because streaming numbers are famously opaque. But you know what's not opaque? Our guest for the podcast today, the great Jamie Loftus, here to help us finish the epic saga of One Taste, a Bay Area orgasm cult that went way too far. Jamie, welcome back to the show.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  So good to be here. I am famously translucent. It is nice to not be opaque.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do wonder who's watching. But usually I feel like if someone is watching, they'll let you know and they'll let you know exactly what looks wrong about you. So I'll get back to you with with the numbers.

• 0:54Robert Evans?

  Good to know. We also have on the podcast today, our producer Sophie Lichterman, who is not showing up through video because you don't need to, you just need to justify that to you, you maniacs watching the show. You don't need to know why Sophie's not going to be on video. She's not. Deal with it.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't need another subreddit about if I'm safe or not, guys.

• 1:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, podcast listeners, you can just continue ignoring all of this.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  It's 2026. I'm not, of course I'm unsafe. What are you talking about?

• 1:24Robert Evans?

  Jamie, are you excited to conclude this epic story? Because we've had a little bit of a break, a longer one than we usually do between the first two parts and the third. So, you know, I expect things have been building up, edging, if you will, as we wait for, you know, the conclusion here.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  I liked, it did feel kind of like method podcasting that you sort of left me hanging on the edge of something thrilling for like 10 days. And now.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm ready to, uh, what, what is like, is enlightenment, this feeling of knowledge coming? Like, what is, if knowledge is coming, what is that? That's enlightenment? Nirvana?

• 2:04Robert Evans?

  It's, it's interesting. They come to, the longer One Taste goes on, the more Nicole Daedone, who is again, like, the leader of all this, gets everyone referring to orgasm as if it's like mana in like a, like a, like a role playing game or something? Like, your orgasm is low or you've got a high level of orgasm, your power, your orgasm's powerful. So like, you're, they refer to orgasm not as like, like a biological thing that, that happens, you know, sometimes, but as like, this, this mana pool that you build up over time, both through like, oh, uming, through like, receiving it, if you have a vagina, or through giving, you know, oh, uming. You build up your orgasm level. And it's almost

• 2:47Robert Evans?

  like this mana pool that helps you gain powers? That's kind of how she talks about it as time goes on?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  And that's sort of what you were doing for us and for them. Okay, I see, I see.

• 2:56Robert Evans?

  That's right, that's right. I wanted to raise your mana, yeah.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  One of my favorite things about cult stories is just like, the moving goalposts. And how you're like, oh, you thought that was coming? Well, actually, there's a secret, different kind of come that there is a huge financial barrier to, to access.

• 3:17Robert Evans?

  It, it's part of this, like, cults have to be all consuming. They have to like, fill every space in your life. Cults don't want you to have like hobbies or, you know, outside stuff going on. So, you know, if you're, if it's a cult like Scientology, where it's supposed to be all consuming, you've got this totally different way of looking at the world and psychology and the mind, that's easier. But if you come in with like, this really narrow focus, like Nicole did, where it's just about, you know, kind of Lingus, basically, you really have to like, you have to get creative to make that all consuming, because most people just, it's not an option to, to, to have oral sex all day, every day, for that to be like, your only behavior. So you really have to work to make. That everything.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you should never, you should never start a cult around something that is free to do.

• 4:07Robert Evans?

  Right, yes.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  It's, it's gonna get difficult quickly if people figure out they can come for free at their house.

• 4:14Robert Evans?

  Although, you know, Jamie, people have always technically been able to come for free, and yet, one of the most reliable ways to make money is assisting them in that, so.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  That's true, that's true. And I will say, you know, say what you will about Nicole, but she certainly has gotten creative with it so far.

• 4:29Robert Evans?

  She's creative, she's creative.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  I have never heard quite of this.

• 4:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

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• 4:41Robert Evans?

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• 6:13Robert Evans?

  So in mid 2006, One Taste used Rob's money. Remember our boy Rob, who's, you know, she's, she's turned into like the figure, the male figurehead a lot of the time of the cult in this period. She uses his money to lease a warehouse and Nicole mandates everyone's got to live together. Now, we're all living in this fucking warehouse. This will be the first of two different warehouses that are like communal living spaces. And initially-

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Are these like nice warehouses? Warehouse could mean so much.

• 6:41Robert Evans?

  They're in the bay, you know? It's, it's off of, uh, what's it, what's it called? It's off of Folsom Street. So it's not like a, it's an expensive area. Like it's fairly expensive real estate.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:51Robert Evans?

  From the videos, it's like a warehouse, but not a bad one. I have spent time in San Francisco warehouses that are living, well, Oakland warehouses that were living spaces. This seems like one of the nicer ones, right?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:03Robert Evans?

  Um, so around, around 50 people move in at first and they have to give up most of their earthly possessions to do so. Once they all live in the warehouse, clothing, basically most things are communal and borrowed or shared. People will like borrow and take each other's clothes. Uh, if you complain that someone's like taking all of your clothes or taking your stuff and that you don't feel like it's equal, you'll be sort of, uh, critiqued or attacked for being too obsessed with attachments. Nicole starts having these, she'll go through a couple of different names, but they're all, there's these various different sort of, uh, uh, group meeting structures that she'll do where everyone sits around in a circle and like critiques each other. This is all downhill from Synanon and the game that they played where everyone gets

• 7:47Robert Evans?

  in a circle and insults each other. There's different versions of this, but it's a way for-

• 7:52Speaker 01

  The radical honesty approach where I think I'm actually, I'm being abusive towards you for your self-improvement.

• 7:59Robert Evans?

  Cause this is-

• 7:59Speaker 01

  That's how a lot of clown classes work.

• 8:02Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:05Robert Evans?

  So people who complain that like, hey, all my clothes have been taken by someone else will be critiqued as being obsessed with attachments. You don't want to be too obsessed with attachments. You know, we're doing this for, for the betterment of humankind, you know? Why, why do you care that everyone's taking your shirts? Everybody sleeps. There's one giant central main room with like a dozen or more beds crammed together. Like, it has to be like 20 beds, 20 something beds for 50 people crammed together. And like between two and three people for a bed, it kind of seems like. I think it's usually couples, but it does, at least from some interviews, it seems like some people are doing, you know, throuples or foursomes too.

• 8:45Robert Evans?

  So again, at this point, you've got a few dozen, maybe around 50, full-time members who have like really devoted themselves completely to the cult. And then a few hundred people in the Bay Area who are kind of taking their courses. Some of these folks are casual, maybe once or twice a year they'll do a thing. Some of these folks are more regular, you know, they're coming in every month or even every week to do a variety. Maybe they're doing a mix of yoga, some OM classes, whatever. And that's kind of how the cult is limping along at this point in time.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  So we've 50 people like full-time in the warehouse.

• 9:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, living together, completely committed. And then a few hundred people who are like paying money. And you wouldn't even call those folks cult members, right? Because the cult has a business side. So it'd be more accurate to say there's maybe 50 or so members and then a few hundred customers, right?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Well, I think that that makes sense for San Francisco.

• 9:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:39Robert Evans?

  Right, right. The cult is not at this point financially self-sufficient, but it is making enough money that Nicole only needs to like donations from rich people to kind of seal the gaps. So periodically, you know, probably a few times a month, she'll be like, okay, we need X thousand dollars. So we've got to find one, two, three wealthy donors who are willing to put in this much money. And generally what she's doing is kind of, hey, you remember you took this last class? We've got another one. It costs like five grand, but I know you're really attracted to this cult member. She'll be in the class. Don't you want to get, right? That's kind of how this is. And that's not quite prostitution, but that's like on the edge, right?

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Well, especially.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, she has too much. She has all the power in that situation. And also, I'm assuming that, you know, at least some of the time, she's lying about that.

• 10:35Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so in a way, that is trafficking, isn't it?

• 10:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's definitely trafficking or trafficking adjacent. It's gonna get a lot more direct at this point. It's a little, you know, fuzzy. And she always frames this.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  I'm still enjoying the idea of all of the like hun- like the few hundred people who are just sort of like one toe into the cult. I think we both live in cities where that is the case for about half of the residents. Where I'm like, yeah, I'd probably go to a cult a couple times. Yeah.

• 11:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Couple times a month, I'd probably go to a place that I'm gonna read an exposé about in a couple years. I don't know.

• 11:15Robert Evans?

  Easily. Like I said, I'm not 100% sure. I haven't been to parties with like a bunch of one-taste people.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Look.

• 11:23Robert Evans?

  Cause I got high a lot in the Bay Area around this time.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  I mean, it's like, we're never gonna move into the warehouse, but you know, not out of the question that maybe you've been to the warehouse. You don't know.

• 11:36Robert Evans?

  I've been to a few, been to a couple of warehouses.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  You're an open-minded guy.

• 11:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm an open-minded guy. I love a warehouse, you know?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  I've maybe performed, what have I done, stand up at a?

• 11:49Speaker 05

  Robert Evans. I love a warehouse.

• 11:53Robert Evans?

  I love a good warehouse. I love a good warehouse. Yeah, so, uh, and this is kinda, so, you know, on the, on one side, you've got Nicole reaching out to these folks who are like regular wealthier customers. These are Bay Area tech bros generally who have a good amount of money. So she's got a list of these guys who she's like, okay, we need money. I can reach out to these dudes and maybe that'll bring in five or 10 grand that we need. And then on the other side, within the cult, she frames this often as like a game. Where like she'll go to a specific member and be like, hey, so we're doing a class and it's a high-dollar class. I'll give you a free ticket, but I'm gonna have to partner you up with so-and-so because he really likes you. You know, do you want a free class, right? And she would, she would ask you to do her. Like a favor often for you, right?

• 12:38Robert Evans?

  Or a favor for them. And so even outside of the classes, she's sometimes saying, hey, this guy needs, you know, I want to convince him to sign up. Would you do me a favor? And favor is a handjob generally. Usually when she uses that term, that means like, I want you to jerk this guy off for me.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  So this is just trafficking.

• 12:56Robert Evans?

  And so now we're really, now we're, yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Come on. No, this isn't, the line has been crossed.

• 13:04Robert Evans?

  This is kind of, and from a very early point, 2005, six, she's regularly, it's not always, but she's pretty regularly crossing the line into prostitution, right?

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Well, this like exceeds like certain Epstein tactics to me. It's like, it's not just you're recruiting someone to go to a second location. It's you're being trafficked to go give a handjob to get to a second location.

• 13:30Robert Evans?

  Right, to get them into the class where they'll then be going down on you for an hour or for three days or whatever, depending on the kind of class that they're doing.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Depending on how in the warehouse you are.

• 13:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, how in the warehouse you are. And yeah, that, that kind of over time, this just becomes a major part of how One Taste gets by. Certain moneyed men will pay for group workshops where many of the other seats are taken by other people paying for seats, including women. There are women in the Bay Area who pay for these seats and they get paired up with these guys too. But a decent number of seats and holes kind of, if we haven't sold, oh, there's 24 slots in this. We only found 15 people and most of them are men. So we need to make up the difference with a lot of young females from the cult, right?

• 14:17Speaker 01

  The ratio is off in the cult.

• 14:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  We gotta get the ratio.

• 14:22Robert Evans?

  Right. So by 2008, the constant struggle to keep the lights on in One Taste, because again, they're never quite in the black, has made Nicole, had made Nicole desperate, right? She, she likes the lifestyle, but it's also not quite working. And there's, I think she's aware of the risk. I think she knows I've crossed the line already and we're still not profitable. Maybe I should either leave or try to. Like sell off my position in the cult to a mark, right? So she starts wondering, has this thing run its course? And just as she's wondering, like, do I need to cancel a say? Or do I need to end things? A savior appears and that savior is the New York Times.

• 15:03Robert Evans?

  So one of the reporters calls and here's, I've heard there's this Bay area company. That's, you know, in orgasm classes and they're teaching people how to do orgasmic meditation. Sounds like a great story and Nicole is like, come on by, we would love to have you. Now I've quoted a couple of times in previous, the previous episodes from that New York Times article. And what I really want to emphasize to you is that this is a bad and irresponsible piece of journalism. The Times does not come in.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Wait.

• 15:32Robert Evans?

  There's a couple of lines in there where they're like, some people say this is problematic. And there's a couple of references to, they may be blurring some lines, you know, in regards to sex and stuff.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Times both sizing an issue in which there is a clear right side to be on. That's so interesting.

• 15:50Robert Evans?

  No, they treat this like it's a cool tech company. They treat this like it's between somewhere between that and like a, an interesting new, you know, kind of alternative healthcare thing, like, like cold plunges or something. It's very much written like that. Or like when that dude was talking, doing all those classes on like, I can be submerged in the cold. We did episodes on them for crazy periods. It's like that sort of thing where they're treating it like a fucking Malcolm Gladwell book. Like, oh, she may, you know, yeah, she says, science tells us this about orgasms. You know, they're just trying to be more scientific. Right. That's how it's framed. These are researchers.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  How like, I mean, the New York Times is its whole own set of issues. But how like East Coast journalists often talk about like West Coast trends where they are just like, they're just kooky. They're just weird over there. Check out these freaks. And you're like, no, those are sex criminals.

• 16:47Robert Evans?

  No, this is bad. This is a problem.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Conceive of. Yeah.

• 16:50Robert Evans?

  And so as a result, the, the article winds up at working as an advertisement for one taste more than. Anything else and it even features, they take photos of OM sessions of like women being stroked in and other like otherwise masturbated in these in these different clinic classes that go on. But like really work safe. So you'll just get like Sophie's gonna put one on screen for those that you can see. And it's this like beautifully lit photo of just like the top half of a woman and she's she's like it's it's reversed. So like her head is facing down and so you could just see her head and she's got this like expression of ecstasy. She's wearing like a black shirt or something and has her hands like kind of folded across her chest.

• 17:32Robert Evans?

  And she's lit so that like it almost looks like the her face, just her face is glowing.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  She kind of looks like a vampire coming back to life. Why would you consent to have this picture taken of you? Oh, my God. I mean, it's beautiful.

• 17:45Robert Evans?

  In the article, the framing of it, it's it, the title of the photo is Inner Bliss. At a One Taste Urban Retreat Center, a resident practices orgasmic meditation. Partner not shown.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Partner not shown.

• 17:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So best of all, in in the article, The Times describes Nicole as a literal quote sex diva. And here's Sophie will show you again, there's this photo and Nicole's right in the center. This is her giving a class. She's like, well lit. Sex diva Nicole Daedone, One Taste founder, says women will experience freedom when they own their sexuality.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  God, how proud was the writer who came up with the phrase sex diva that they had to write it down?

• 18:24Robert Evans?

  God, God, fucking quit.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  An interesting photo to choose because it almost looks like a like, like a like a TED Talk.

• 18:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, great. Sophie, put a pin in that. So the article was a massive hit for One Taste. Suddenly journalists, including a lot of like local TV news journalists in the Bay Area, are crowding in to get the story on One Taste and most of them are covering it in positive ways. They're kind of bemused. Look at this kooky thing. But it's like, good, no, like, these are not generally wondering, is this all like a sex cult that she's just like trafficking her members to rich tech guys in order to keep the lights on? Right? That's not really asked, you know?

• 19:06Speaker 01

  And is she still like playing into the whole, I mean, what has kind of been striking to me about a lot of the marketing we've looked at is that she's getting, uh, she's got the girl boss scam of like making it seem like this is good for women and women centered.

• 19:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is empowering. This is empowering.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Going with it.

• 19:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, cuz this is always framed as like, did you know this very large percentage of women have never had an orgasm or never had an orgasm with another partner, you know? And then from there to like, so that makes this a health issue, right? And that makes this, and then there's all this like, and here's what we've learned about the health benefits of orgasm. And so there's always this like underpinning of actual statistics and actual stuff. And as a result, it gets covered as if it's just part of the broad sort of body hacking, body optimization stuff that's going crazy in the aughts. And so in very short order, One Taste starts picking up some really like mainstream partners. Audible sponsors one of their podcasts.

• 20:04Robert Evans?

  They have like an erotic poetry open mic night and like Audible sponsors turning that into a podcast.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  They always, oh my God, every cult is trying to get stand up comedians in the door, some of the worst people to come in your door. They're, oh, the site, never forget, I came very close. I was nearly persuaded in 2015 to go to a Scientology open mic.

• 20:27Robert Evans?

  Oh, that would have been amazing.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  They have refreshments. They have refreshments. It was really tempting.

• 20:34Robert Evans?

  That would have been awesome. Oh, man.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  I know. My career would be in a better place, I'm sure.

• 20:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that sounds great.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:43Robert Evans?

  So, uh, cult members were very active on social media and specifically like a lot of like local social media, like in the Bay Area. So there's a lot of like posts about like, was at this great house party? Here's some crazy pictures. And you'll see these like giant cuddle puddles of a bunch of young women and like 30% of the cuddle puddle will be like schlubby Bay Area engineer looking dudes, right? These are all very much framed as being like, hey, are you like a nerdy guy with a lot of money who lives in the Bay Area and maybe he's not good with like women? This cult, there's lots of young women who are good to go. All you gotta do is pay to take a class, right? That's very much what the messaging is to these guys. And a lot of new members are drawn in, a lot of new male members in particular are

• 21:28Robert Evans?

  drawn in by posts from residents of the warehouse talking about these wild sex parties and you know, these, we're doing, we've got a party and they'll throw parties like on the beach. Here's a One Taste party on the beach. Come on, like show up. You know, people are being plied with drugs often at these events. They're being plied with sex to get them to pay for and come in and take classes and stuff. I watched an interview with, and I think this actually was from the Netflix documentary. I've watched a couple of interviews, but I watched an interview from one of these members who joins during this period of time. And this is a, like a middle aged nerdy engineer dude who discovered one taste via these posts. And at first assumed, this is, his quote was like, oh, this either has to be fake, or if it's real, they're never, they'll never have me, right?

• 22:11Robert Evans?

  But when he showed up, he found out that he in fact had what they wanted most, a credit card. Quote, "One night I was living on a boat by myself and the next I was living with like 40 people, sleeping in a bed with my research partner. I was like this nerdy tech guy by day and at night I'd go home and be in the middle of this craziness." And that's the appeal. You can keep being, because they want, they don't want you to quit your job if you're like making a lot of money in the tech industry. You can keep being your nerdy tech guy by day, but you don't, you get to actually be cooler than that. You've got a secret life where you're researching orgasm magic with like beautiful young women and living in this like free love compound. And so your life is a lot more exciting than the other fucking engineers at Google or whatever.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  And the fact that all of this is, because it's like the wish fulfillment, uh, like thing is very clear. She couldn't have chosen a better location to find this particular kind of guy.

• 23:05Robert Evans?

  No, perfect.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  But, and also the Silicon Valley, but the Silicon Valley detail of corporate sponsors for the sex cult, um, is moi.

• 23:17Robert Evans?

  It's perfect stuff. And you know what else would be a corporate sponsor for a sex cult?

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Oh, I have a feeling I know.

• 23:26Robert Evans?

  The products and services that support this podcast. Some of them may have been. We've had audible ads before. Like, we've shared at least one advertiser with this sex cult.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Let's go for two more than one, let's be honest.

• 23:39Robert Evans?

  More than one, almost certainly. Anyway.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  God, what if it's, what if it's, what if it's an ad for dick pills? What if it's an ad for dick pills?

• 23:48Robert Evans?

  There's a good chance it will be, and I hope it is.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  I know.

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• 25:30Robert Evans?

  We're back, and we're all hoping that the ad you just heard was for dick pills, because they do, we do have some dick pill sponsors. Wouldn't that be fun? Wouldn't that be a good time, everybody?

• 25:39Speaker 05

  Just because, you know, comedy.

• 25:41Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm, comedy.

• 25:42Speaker 05

  Love it.

• 25:43Robert Evans?

  So Nicole spent the first few years of the Colts' life sharing spaces with everyone else. She's living there initially at the warehouse. But after a few years, around 2010 or 11, I think, is kind of when this starts to happen, she decides there's too many demands on her retention. Now, coincidentally, this is shortly after... She starts sometime around 2006 or '07, off and on seeing and then eventually dating seriously, this Silicon Valley entrepreneur and multimillionaire named Reese Jones, right? Now Reese, when they meet, he's, this guy's pushing 50, he's not in great shape, but he's just sold his company to Motorola for a shitload of money. So this guy has spent

• 26:25Robert Evans?

  the first chunk of his life building up and he finally cashed out and he's like, kinda over the hill and looking to recapture his like youth now that he's got a shitload of money and he stumbles into One Taste for the same reason a fly winds up in a Venus fly trap, right?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 26:43Robert Evans?

  It's made as a trap for this guy.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Reese Jones, excellent name for an insecure multimillionaire. Couldn't have written it better myself.

• 26:51Robert Evans?

  Had to be a Reese, yeah.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Had to.

• 26:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  And just, oh god, they're, yeah, the idea of, conceptually, I feel like we encounter them all the time. A 50-year-old guy that's like, you know, I think I'm ready to settle down. I think I'm ready to.

• 27:06Robert Evans?

  I think I'm ready to.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  I was like, wow, huge, huge. You've really just figured it out, haven't you?

• 27:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think I'm ready to settle down with a building full of trafficked people. Yeah. So Reese, yeah, uh, you know, One Taste is losing money badly during most of this period and Nicole needs a rich mark like Reese to prop everything up. He gives them like a million dollars. He's absolutely critical to their survival during this period of time. So Nicole starts dating Reese and this is going on from like 2006 or so to like 2011 and she's over this period of time spending more and more time with him, less and less time at the warehouse around her members. She's going on vacations with him and she moves out of the warehouse and into a mansion with him because she decides that it's way better to live like a multimillionaire than to live with her colleagues at the masturbation store.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Another, another classic cult moment where you're like, and now the leader has decided that, uh, personal space does matter only for them.

• 28:04Robert Evans?

  For, for the leader, yeah.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:07Robert Evans?

  So from this point on, she no longer lives full-time in the communal spaces with her cult members who are still technically researchers but are starting to look A lot more like her workforce. 2011 was the big shift year for One Taste, where it goes from being a weird self-help culty thing to a Silicon Valley body hacking startup. Nicole publishes, I mean, and this is, there's a couple of big moments that kind of delineate this shift from the past, where One Taste is very much like a descendant of these previous kind of orgasm woo cults that we'd talked about, right? Okay. And there's not much to differentiate her from that until she publishes a book called Slow Sex, The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm.

• 28:52Robert Evans?

  And that happens like right as One Taste is sort of maturing to be more of a service provider and more of like a body hacking thing than a, we're researching, you know, the future, we're researching orgasm magic too. We're selling courses on orgasmic meditation, right? As that shift happens, it's kind of signposted by, she puts out this book that sells very well called Slow Sex. And it's framed as a guide for both men and women and dedicated to, quote, "The orgasm may each of us find ours now." Right? She's kind of talking again of like orgasm like it's magic. One of the book jacket quotes for Slow Sex is by Ian Kerner,

• 29:33Robert Evans?

  a sexuality counselor and New York Times bestselling author of She Comes First. Ian said, Slow Sex is-

• 29:40Speaker 01

  No, dude.

• 29:41Robert Evans?

  No, oh my god. Slow Sex is the real deal on pleasuring a woman for any guy who wants his 15 minutes of sexual fame to Don offers practical and inspired guide to the orgasmic big leagues. What? No. 15 minutes of sexual fame? What?

• 29:58Speaker 01

  The male feminist has clocked in.

• 30:01Speaker 05

  This is why more than one of my female friends has given me a taser.

• 30:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 30:07Robert Evans?

  There's a lot that's like, just the, yeah, it's.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Wow. She comes first. Wow. She comes first. She tazes second.

• 30:15Robert Evans?

  And you get, you, you, you really see a lot in terms of who the real customers are here. Cause it's always framed as we're doing this for women. This is for and by women.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  No, you're not.

• 30:25Robert Evans?

  But that quote is like, yeah, for any guy who wants his 15 minutes of sexual fame. Do you want to feel like a big shot? You know, I feel like you're the best at like sex and pleasure. Right? Like you're a fucking sex god. Like that's what will make you into is that.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Right. It's like.

• 30:39Robert Evans?

  That's really what One Taste is selling.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  This slow, uh, switch to an orgasm is not something that happens for women, but at them. It's this way that feels really like that, uh, I don't know.

• 30:53Robert Evans?

  It's gross.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  It almost like, it feels, uh, reminiscent to me of like a Justin Baldoni playbook of like, I'm, me respecting women, women is a business that I have.

• 31:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  And it is marketed at men, but it's for women. And I just happen to be, uh, financially benefiting from it.

• 31:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, Sophie, I told you to put a pin in this, but the moment that most embodied the evolution of One Taste into Silicon Valley startup was Nicole's TED Talk. Nicole Dodon, Orgasm, The Cure For Hunger. That's the name of this speech. And Sophie's got to play you a long clip from this fucking TED Talk that shows you how Nicole is pitching this to like a mass audience. This is her gearing her pitch to like the biggest possible group of people. Right? So here is like the mainstream focused, look at this.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Okay, sex diva. I just want to give it for the, for the non Netflix watchers. She's wearing what I can only describe as like.

• 31:56Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Peak, like express.

• 32:00Robert Evans?

  It looks like 2011 in there. That's for damn sure.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Express blazer with like, with like a, with like a, ooh, is this a tank underneath in purple? Yeah, it's a, a serious woman would never show her arms. So she's wearing a tasteful blazer. But a little bit of cleave is how, okay, sorry.

• 32:19Speaker 05

  So I figure we're 10 people. We're fast. We're savvy. We're smart. So I'm just going to break the ice first. Okay. My topic is female orgasm.

• 32:31Speaker 07

  Full for a while.

• 32:34Speaker 07

  So that said, I want to thank the people of TEDx for having me on this stage. This has been a dream of mine that I thought was absolutely impossible. That we could have a relevant, intelligent conversation about female orgasm was just a distant dream for me. I just fell in love with this practice. That's what happened for me. I gave nearly 10,000 hours to this practice. That's a lot of hours.

• 33:00Speaker 07

  But I learned some key things in that time that I am bringing to you. The first is that female orgasm is vital for every single woman on the planet. The second is, it's not so bad for the guys either.

• 33:16Speaker 07

  The third, and on a much more serious note, is that it roots our fundamental capacity for connection. It's for this reason that I believe that at some day, at some point, you will hear

• 33:31Speaker 01

  They cut to two women who look so disinterested.

• 33:34Speaker 07

  And orgasm. And you won't hear it, yoga, meditation, and orgasm.

• 33:41Speaker 07

  So in 2004, I founded One Taste Urban Retreat Centers with this in mind.

• 33:46Robert Evans?

  I think that's all I need. Yeah, yeah. I, isn't that great?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yes, girl, give us nothing. Oh my God.

• 33:55Robert Evans?

  I love it. I love it. Oh, that's peak 2011 Silicon Valley hype train nonsense. She's very much, she's doing a Steve Jobs, she's doing a fucking Theranos, she's, she's really trying to thread that needle and doing it very, honestly, very successfully. This, this pivot works great.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  You know what she was giving? She was like, I don't shop at Ann Taylor. I shop at Ann Taylor Lost.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  I, this is your-

• 34:25Robert Evans?

  That's where I shop, Sophie, but-

• 34:26Speaker 01

  I, I really love, this is, I feel like, a common feature of any time I'm like, watching a TEDx talk, for whatever reason, that mentioning at the top, like, "I never thought I would make it here", when I can guarantee you, any garden variety narcissist can get a TEDx talk.

• 34:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  It is not, it is not difficult.

• 34:46Robert Evans?

  I never thought I would email a fucking PR representative and show them, "Hey, look at how many followers I have on social media, can I have a TEDx talk?"

• 34:56Speaker 01

  I never thought, and, oh god, yes you-

• 34:59Robert Evans?

  Like it's an award, and not what every hack and grifter in the aughts and fucking early 20 teens did a fucking TED Talk. Like, I think we can, us olds, remember when there seemed to be some prestige around TED Talks?

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:13Robert Evans?

  But a lot of it was just a con, you know? A lot of it is how a lot of grifters grifted.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Particularly TEDx, which is like-

• 35:20Robert Evans?

  Particularly TEDx, yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, Sophia was reminding me so much of like, how we were encouraged to dress in high school and college, where like, I'll look at a picture of myself at 19 and be like, "Why am I dressed like I'm 50 years old?"

• 35:33Speaker 05

  Why am I wearing business casual to the frat?

• 35:37Robert Evans?

  Why are we all dressed in business casual?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  I, I should've been dressing like a huge slut, and it was just such a missed opportunity.

• 35:46Speaker 05

  I have the exact same regret, Jamie, but you know what? There's always time. We could do that now.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  It's true, we made up for it later.

• 35:52Robert Evans?

  I dressed as a huge slut for that period of time, which means I only wore Ed Hardy shirts. My pants, Ed Hardy shirts. My underwear, Ed Hardy shirts. My Ed Hardy shirts, actually not from Ed Hardy.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 36:05Robert Evans?

  Anyway.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  That's the sluttiest thing a man could do at one time.

• 36:08Robert Evans?

  That is, at one time. So-

• 36:11Speaker 05

  Jamie and I are out here in our Ann Taylor loft.

• 36:15Robert Evans?

  That's right, just like Nicole.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Looking older than my mother. There truly are pictures of me as a teenager where I think I look older than I do now. It's so bizarre.

• 36:24Speaker 05

  I gotta, I'm gonna-

• 36:25Robert Evans?

  It was a weird time for fashion.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  I will find a pantsuit pic, I mean, a, like, a little pantsuit skirt picture that will ruin your day.

• 36:33Robert Evans?

  There was a period of time, yeah, where we just thought that like, everyone was gonna dress like Hillary Clinton, you know? Um, if only, if only that had taken over.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Hillary Clinton wishes she found this outfit that I definitely got from H&M on sale.

• 36:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  You know?

• 36:49Robert Evans?

  So while Nicole was absent from the two different warehouses that her cult members lived in over the years, she was always present in spirit. And by that, I mean Nicole picked who slept in each bed. She had like a seating chart for beds in the commune spaces, and she would decide who was sleeping with who and paired with who as a research partner. And for all that Nicole, over the years, she would sometimes date women and she would portray herself, and One Taste is very queer positive because it's the aughts and the 20 teens and the bay and you have to. Despite all that, One Taste's teachings and practice were very heteronormative and very much like anti queer in a lot of ways.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Well, even what, how she was talking about sex and orgasms felt just, yeah, like, because she's ultimately, her customers are men.

• 37:43Robert Evans?

  Right. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So, well, not, I mean, there are, like, she, she does have to get a certain number of, like, female, like, customers buying in and getting into the cult because she needs to use their bodies in order to further the business. So it is true that, and we've talked about this, right? Like, in the last episode, I showed you, this was kind of the pitch that she's making it to a lot of these, these women. But it is, like, the, the money part of the cult is entirely focused at selling to men, right? She has to sell One Taste to women to get the workforce that she then basically traffics to get the money from the, the guys, right? So there is kind of a two-part aspect of it, I guess, which is important to see.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  The, the name never gets easier to hear, I have to say.

• 38:31Robert Evans?

  No, it's, it's always upsetting. So, as I was saying, men, it is very heteronormative, like, the actual cult's teaching. And Nicole is like, kind of, really anti queer past a certain point. Men and women are always pretty much paired together, as far as I can tell. And Nicole would even break up existing queer relationships when people joined the group in order to pair them with opposite sex partners. Because she doesn't think queer relationships- Relationships are real. The bleakest example of this is probably the story of two One Taste members, Jamie and Caitlin. They are a lesbian couple.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Stop.

• 39:07Robert Evans?

  Who were drawn.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Wait, hold on.

• 39:09Robert Evans?

  Look, I know what to tell you.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  This is triggering.

• 39:12Robert Evans?

  I think these are fake names. I think these are fake names.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  I'm just saying.

• 39:18Robert Evans?

  Because I found this account from Ellen Hewitt's book, Empire of Orgasm. I think she's using pseudonyms for these people, right?

• 39:24Speaker 01

  I think she's a Bectocast fan.

• 39:26Robert Evans?

  Or she's a Bectocast fan.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Hater.

• 39:29Robert Evans?

  Or hater.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  If she wants to do this.

• 39:32Robert Evans?

  These are pretty sympathetic people. So Jamie and Caitlin, this Jamie and Caitlin are a lesbian couple who get into One Taste. They're like teenagers, they're young adult, very young adults, and they're broke. And so they're both obviously interested in female pleasure because they're lesbians, but they also don't have any money. And so being able to live for free in the bay in this warehouse seems kind of rad. As soon as they move in, and again, they move in as a partnership, as a unit, Nicole tells them, well, this hall is about exploration. We're all trying to grow. And you're not going to grow if you just stay with like the partner that you like. And you're not going to grow as a queer woman. You can't grow by just having sex with the people you're attracted to.

• 40:15Robert Evans?

  You can only grow by having male partners. That's the only way to grow as a queer woman, right? And so you should, you need to experiment with your sexuality by letting men OM you, right? And eventually by having sex with men. Now, in public, OMing is all that One Taste is about. And in public, OM is described in almost asexual terms because they really want to avoid the allegations that they're just trafficking in sex. But within the actual commune, people aren't just OMing two times a day in the morning and two times at night. They're being commanded by Nicole to have intercourse, right? When she's pairing people up for beds, those aren't just your OM partners. You're ordered to fuck them.

• 40:58Robert Evans?

  And so Caitlin and Jamie are paired with dudes in the cult, often with dudes, you know, maybe who have some money that Nicole wants to make sure stay, right? But they're told they have to fuck dudes to level up, basically. In order to like gain XP in this cult system, in order to make your orgasm more powerful, you have to do these things that you're physically uncomfortable with because you're not into guys.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  And at this point. Well, at this point, are Jamie and Caitlin as an ally to both? Are Jamie and Caitlin paying for this? Or are they quote unquote, being paid in free logic? Like, how?

• 41:37Robert Evans?

  They're being paid, I think, mostly in free life. Because a lot of members do pay, but a lot of the ones who don't are the women, especially the younger women. And these two are broke. So I don't think they, now, it may be because they are getting some money when they're working for the company, but it's very uneven. And one taste will switch up what you're being paid at the last minute. And often, you're feeding that right back into the company. So to that extent, maybe they're being given money that they then have to, yeah. I'm not sure how it works for every individual person. It's kind of different for everybody, depending on your position and what Nicole is getting out of you, right?

• 42:17Robert Evans?

  But to quote from the book Empire of Orgasm, Jamie said that in courses, she heard a repeated message, "All women are hungry for cock. If you're not feeling cock hungry, you're not connected to a part of yourself." Right? This is very anti queer. Now, eventually, both women start having sex with male members of the group. And this is psychologically devastating to Jamie, who started to feel like her desire for her girlfriend, the woman, because they've been broken up forcibly by now, but the person who had been her girlfriend was wrong. She convinces herself to push on because Nicole keeps teaching her resistance is key to growth, and she really admires Nicole, and she also needs this place to live. "Experiences," Nicole tells Jamie, "aren't good or bad for you. Experiences aren't good or bad at all.

• 43:01Robert Evans?

  You choose the meaning." So, you are, if you're deciding that this is an unpleasant sexual experience, that's because you made a choice. You could choose for it to be a good one. Why aren't you choosing for it to be a good one? Right?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:14Robert Evans?

  See how fucking abusive this logic is?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  This is just like, yeah, and all under, and it still sort of falls under the like, early 2010s definition of like, being pro woman is, I mean, you could even extend this to like Sheryl Sandberg logic of like, it is your fault that you are feeling oppressed and abused, and it is on you to behave the right way to be accepted in this environment.

• 43:39Robert Evans?

  Yep. And there's bits of all, there's bits of the secret in there, right? You just have to change your attitude and you can change reality. And you can see both how people don't necessarily pick this out as poisonous initially, but also how Running with this logic, the obvious end state of this is that like, there's no such thing as rape, ever. If experiences are not bad or good, there can't be such a thing as rape. You are choosing to be raped, if you're raped, because you're choosing to interpret that as a bad experience. This is directly, in those words, what Nicole will eventually be teaching her followers, right?

• 44:14Speaker 01

  And that is so empowering.

• 44:15Robert Evans?

  I know that's really bad.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  That is, yeah, that's fucking horrific. It's so...

• 44:21Robert Evans?

  It's really, really horrific.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  It's, oh god. And it's like that even in the way she's like, the number of like, pressure points she's attempting to attack is like, she's sort of telling people to dissociate, but also telling them that like, the failure to do so, or the failure to feel pleasure, where pleasure doesn't exist because it's abuse, is a personal failure. But it also sounds like she's like, well, if you don't like it, then just pretend you're a person who likes it.

• 44:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, pretend you're a person who likes it. Why can't you do that? And it's, you'll, we'll, I mean, yeah, we'll keep talking. So, in time, Jamie becomes a coach, and she starts to see success in the organization. And this success, the fact that she's moving up the ladder, so to speak, validates, is like, the first, she, because again, this is a young queer woman who doesn't have a lot of life experience, who I think had a pretty rough background. And so this is like, the first validation she's gotten as an adult person. So she becomes extremely loyal, even though this is, she's been horribly abused by this cult, which is a common cult story, right?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah.

• 45:27Robert Evans?

  So then, in 2012, Nicole calls Jamie and Caitlin in for a little one-on-one. And she informs them she's breaking up with Reese, the Silicon Valley millionaire who had kept the cult alive through its bad years. But she still owes him a lot of money from all the, you know, because he's calling in basically, you know, the loans he'd given them.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  The amount of like, discarded One Taste guys at this point could like, unionize.

• 45:54Robert Evans?

  And it, she hasn't, I don't fully understand the financials here. She does not discard him. Some reports I've said suggest that she repays him by 2012, that she's repaid him for like the million dollars that he loans the cult. But that's when this is all happening. And that doesn't entirely line up with this because this suggests she's still getting some money from him in 2012. I don't fully know, and I don't claim to know at which point was Reese giving the cult money? Which point was Reese receiving money? But whatever the case, at this point in 2012, she still wants to keep Reese in the fold, even though she's breaking up with him, right? Because she tells Nicole, I'm not gonna, I have to move to Los Angeles because I have important work to do there, which is she's trying to find more rich guys, right?

• 46:39Robert Evans?

  But Reese needs a handler and I've been his handler for the last, you know, several years. And in my place, I need you two to be Reese's handlers so that I can move on to Los Angeles. And here's how Ellen Hewitt describes what happens next. Jamie paused. Everything she learned up to this point had primed her to say yes to the position and to do so willingly, idolizing Nicole, becoming accustomed to having sex with men and to having sex with any kind of man, getting off on any stroke, being told that she should provide anything to help the company. Plus, being asked to be Reese's handler felt like an honor. Jamie knew that only a few women in One Taste's history had held the same position. They were often Nicole's confidants, an admired group. She also knew the unspoken threat.

• 47:21Robert Evans?

  The consequence of saying no is that you would be ostracized, ignored and stripped of all your power in that world, Jamie said. So I want to be clear, that last bit, the fact that if you, if you displease Nicole, if you like wind up on the outskirts, you'll be kicked out, you'll lose everything that you've gotten from this world. That is something she directly tells people during lectures. After everyone has experienced orgasmic meditation, when folks are in, you know, this powerful cathartic afterglow, she will tell them, this is a direct quote from one of her sessions. That's why this place is called One Taste. Once you've tasted being inside of yourself and knowing yourself, there is some part of your soul that will always crawl to get back. The truth is, if you get kicked out, your soul will never relax again.

• 48:06Robert Evans?

  She's very direct about this.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and she's also like just describing chasing a dragon.

• 48:13Robert Evans?

  Chasing a high. And one of the things when this becomes a cork, people will say, no one was ever forced to have sex with anyone. No one was ever forced to stay. And they weren't. They were just heavily coerced and basically told that life will be like a gray, colorless hell of an experience if you get forced out of this group because you want to fuck this rich guy, right?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Right. You're like, well, yeah, maybe then in that case, we should expand the definition a little bit.

• 48:38Robert Evans?

  So by 2012, One Taste has totally come around to becoming like seen as a tech startup, to fashioning itself that way. Her followers and public face and communications are talking less about all the crazy parties and a lot more about how Nicole is like a philosopher, but also like a Steve Jobs figure, right?

• 48:58Speaker 01

  What is she selling, though? Like, what is the product exactly?

• 49:02Robert Evans?

  Orgasms, power, magic.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  God, okay. I guess, I guess it's, at least we're not having children overseas manufacturing your orgasms.

• 49:13Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 49:15Robert Evans?

  So in the years after 2012, uh, you know, One Taste finally gets into the black, right? It had been struggling. It had been utterly reliant upon these like infusions of cash from these rich dudes. And that's not really the case. I mean, kind of after 2012. It's profitable after 2012. The money is still coming from like rich guys who are paying for sex, right?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 49:37Robert Evans?

  But now it's Not one rich guy and not her saying, hey, I need a loan. And it's her instead selling courses to these guys, right? So it's no longer loans. Like, it is a profitable business after this point. In fact, a quite profitable business. One Taste not only repays reest, but it starts to succeed on its own, raking in millions a year. And they do this. They make this switch in large part by copying something Nicole had seen from the yoga industry. So during the first part of the 21st century, a lot of yoga studios begin offering teacher training. Now, this qualifies somebody to teach a different kind of yoga. Most attendees who do teacher Training, don't become yoga teachers because there's not that many yoga teacher jobs. And so it's often they're doing it for self improvement.

• 50:22Robert Evans?

  It's being pitched as like, oh, well, you take to teach your class because it makes you that much better. Right. And these are expensive and there's, and I'm not, if you do, if you like, that's, that's fine. Right. Whatever. There are some cults within yoga, but also it's fine to pay money to get better at a thing that you like to do. Right. I'm not, I'm not shitting on it. I'm just saying.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  It's nice to receive a gentle touch from a beautiful woman. This is what I mean when it's like, we all got our toes in the cold.

• 50:44Robert Evans?

  Right. A little bit piece. And so she takes that idea and moves it over to one taste. So she starts selling teaching courses and this is like, this will certify you to teach OM and to do classes of your own. Right. And there's often more advanced because there's, there's endless layers and endless. Every teacher always wants to be, you have to be up on the latest thing. So every year there's a new class about the stuff that you have to get to stay certified. And it's another five to $10,000. Right. These are multi day courses. Again, these are, a lot of these are hugely expensive.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  And I'm assuming that the teacher, the teacher training also includes abuse?

• 51:23Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, I mean, yes, like that, that like, sure, yes. Now Nicole had offered a coaching program since 2012 and this is, takes off. It's successful. They make money of it. So increasingly one taste pours all of its efforts into either hosting coaching classes or selling them. Right. They recruit a huge crop of students in 2012. And eventually they are going to license or whatever, more than 1,300 people as OM coaches, each of whom have paid probably well in excess of 10 grand to get to that point. Right?

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 51:54Robert Evans?

  In some cases, much more. The company starts turning a profit in 2013. And before long they are making a surprising amount of money. Nicole begins bringing in celebrity guests to provide a sheen of legitimacy. They start doing cult events. They have these like one taste mastery, which are like these big, you know, they're these like conferences and stuff for the one taste family, for all the people who work coaches. Cause now there's one taste houses in different states. They're starting to fill up and people are doing classes outside of the Bay area. So they're doing these courses and they're, she's hiring celebrities to like. Talk to everybody at the start of these like three day and five day events. For one event in 2013, she hires Dr. Jocelyn Elders, the former Attorney General, who tells students, "You are part of a new sexual revolution."

• 52:39Robert Evans?

  Great, thank you, Jocelyn.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 52:41Robert Evans?

  I'm sure she just cast the check.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  In a way, it is always wild hearing these celebrities that you, that, that cults manage to bad for things like this. It's, it's a good, it's a good reminder that people are desperate for attention and refuse to do even a basic level of research.

• 53:01Robert Evans?

  Of course not. That's offensive. So I want to show you guys an example of an ad for One Taste's mastery program, which is one of their like really advanced certifications. So Sophia is going to play that for us now.

• 53:13Speaker 05

  Looks like the masterclass logo.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, yeah, this is a very tech logo.

• 53:19Robert Evans?

  Masterclass, master something else.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  I'm gonna let it slide.

• 53:25Speaker 04

  This is a course in how to open your sex life. It's a way for you to research what your actual boundaries are.

• 53:33Speaker 05

  I thought that lady was asleep.

• 53:35Robert Evans?

  I like to make sure that my whole mouth, my whole tongue, my whole throat. Sex without boundaries on the screen is the wording there. That's upsetting. And it really takes sex to a whole new paradigm. I learned how to slow down and actually feel everything that's happening versus constantly being in my head. This is something I've never done before?

• 53:53Speaker 01

  And I said, yes. It is something I've not done in one sex life, you know, where it's a place it was part of.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 54:05Robert Evans?

  Great. Looks great. I love, I love that one of their quotes is.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Sex without boundaries?

• 54:13Robert Evans?

  Now.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  There's at least three phrases present in the advertising that could plausibly describe assault. Energetic sex also feels kind of like a line. Also with all of these, I mean, I guess something that like feels like a big, other than like the techification of this sex cult, it's like Ben. Decades since this has been accessible to anyone who doesn't have an insane amount of disposable income. Because like the original like-

• 54:43Robert Evans?

  Or is going to be trafficked, right? Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Right, where it's like the, the, the earlier sex cults were like, at least, you could be, you could be trafficked as someone who doesn't have a lot of money laying around. Yeah.

• 54:56Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the cuts to rooms full of white people with bad haircuts really does kind of pull it all into focus of like, what's going on here?

• 55:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  God, that's so bleak.

• 55:07Robert Evans?

  It's, it's really, yeah. Yeah, isn't that remarkable? It's so MLM-y, it's so, yeah, I, I, it, it's, it's really upsetting to me. It's upsetting, like, again, coming out of like the sex positive, you know, community, the kink community, like, the idea that anyone could hear the phrase sex without boundaries and not immediately be like, whoa, wait a second, what are you talking about? What do you mean by that? Because that's a, that's a dangerous phrase.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Right, and it feels so, that's why it, like, going back to the New York Times article, like, it's so clearly preying on people who don't have basic, a basic understanding, and it's just how they imagine, like, non-vanilla sex to work.

• 55:56Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Non-vanilla sex to work.

• 55:58Speaker 05

  That video really, really, really reminded me of NXIVM.

• 56:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it, it very similar, and I, I didn't catch this until right now, but honestly, that's part of what's most upsetting to me about all of this, is that she's almost set this up to be like a fly's web in between people who like, are, know that they want more out of like sex than they're getting, know that like, maybe what, they weren't educated, you know, they didn't get a good enough education, like what sex could be, they want more out of like their relationships than they feel like they're getting. And there is like a sex positive, a kink community, where people like, aren't trying to like, just take your money and abuse you, where you can like, learn stuff like that, if, if you're into that. And she's created like the spider's web in front of it to ensnare people,

• 56:46Robert Evans?

  but in a way that is very much different, because like, if you were to, like, every kink commu-, every kink event that I have ever been to- Starts and a lot of like education that starts with boundaries and boundary setting and the importance is not sex without boundaries. The important is knowing what your boundaries are and having ways to make sure everyone else knows them and that you're communicating them and that you can like, that's what's important. Like the, the, it's so fucked up to create this thing that is meant to almost like stand in between that and people who are curious in order to ensnare and hurt them. That's very much what's happening.

• 57:28Speaker 05

  Hey, Jamie, is Barbie naked behind you?

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Is Barbie naked behind me? No, she's wearing a painted on bodysuit.

• 57:37Speaker 05

  Oh, okay, great. I was just making sure.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  I used to use her on stage, but she does have a bodysuit painted on the doll.

• 57:48Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 57:49Speaker 05

  Great.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Thanks for checking in.

• 57:52Speaker 05

  Robert, Robert, now that I've checked in on Barbie, it is time for an ad.

• 57:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we should do an ad break.

• 57:58Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 58:01Speaker 06

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• 59:34Robert Evans?

  All right, and we're back. So.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  I just, just sort of closing the loop on talking about kink, where like, I feel like truly kink communities are our best communicators. Like, and it makes me really sad, like you're saying, to see people who are seeking something out and then very likely getting scarred to the point where sex at all is going to be indefinitely traumatizing.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  But at least they were parted with $10,000 in the process.

• 1:00:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, at least that happens, right?

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:08Robert Evans?

  So, um, as the most expensive courses went from thousands, tens of thousands of dollars, and the big money started rolling in, much of what the early members had loved about life in the cult changed. The clitoral massages were still a part of life there, but members now were not called researchers. In fact, there's like a big announcement that like, you're no longer researchers, you're now employees. And now, in fact, most of you are salesmen. Most of you are like doing calling, right? Like, your job is to call people and try to get them to take classes, right? Like, that's the new business, is selling and teaching classes. You're no longer, we did the research, we figured it out, right? The experiment's over.

• 1:00:49Robert Evans?

  So they moved to a new warehouse, which has semi-private rooms. And yeah, everybody's salespeople now. In order to justify this change, Nicole tells her followers, "The universe is made of love. Sales is love. Therefore, the universe is made of sales."

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Okay. Honestly, based on the level of cruelty and evil she's capable of, she's half-assing it with this one.

• 1:01:14Robert Evans?

  She's half-assing it. That's lazy. That's lazy? I'm sorry.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  If sales is love and love is...

• 1:01:21Robert Evans?

  Huh. Really, Nicole? That's what we're going with, huh?

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  God.

• 1:01:25Robert Evans?

  It's a measure of her charisma that no one leaves on the spot after hearing that.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:01:32Robert Evans?

  So, one of Nicole's most valuable members and employees during this period is a young man named Said, who first gets drawn into the group because he was in love with somebody. He goes to like a class and he falls in love with someone who lives at the warehouse named Maya. And he basically tells Maya, "Hey, I've got a crush on you." And she's like, "Well, if you're into me, the best way for us to hang out is for you to take more classes here." And eventually, he winds up moving in. Now, Said is a really conventionally attractive guy, right? And he starts being used by, as a lure by Nicole and Rachel, who's like her head of sales, this woman Rachel, and like the other people running the cult. Said, both as like maybe a way to get off themselves, but also here's a really hot guy.

• 1:02:13Robert Evans?

  We can use him to bring in both hot women that we want to work and join the cult, but also maybe older women who have money to spend on expensive classes. And they want to be paired with this hot dude, right? So, a separate part of internal One Taste culture, as I've said before, these like circular meetings where people will, you know, one way or the other, the purpose is for you to get insulted and mocked and derided and have like a cathartic experience, right? So, people will sit around and ask Nicole questions and she'll answer them and like coach them and say, "This is what that question tells me about you," right? During one of these sessions, she focuses on Said and she asks him, "Why do you think so many of the women here like being paired with you, Said?" And here's how Ellen Hewitt describes what happens next.

• 1:02:57Robert Evans?

  "Because I'm willing to violate them," he started to say. A murmur of surprise shot through the room as Said remembers it. And then the students started cheering. He was cut off, but he had wanted to say, "I know how to violate them in ways they want, to take them to their edge, but I also don't make them feel taken advantage of or left empty or not held afterwards." All he got to, though, was violate. After that, everyone started calling him "The Violator." Another One Taste executives decided she would call him "The Fucker." That says a lot, both that they love that term because they love the aggression. That's a bigger and bigger part of it is that like aggression is good. Some violence is good, right?

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Sex without boundaries.

• 1:03:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  That is, I, that is not how I thought that anecdote was gonna go.

• 1:03:41Robert Evans?

  Nope.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  That is really, I, I thought, I genuinely thought it was going to be people who were get, becoming uncomfortable, interjecting and being like, yeah, that is what it feels like. But no, it's doubling down and saying like, so, so we're just deep enough in at this point where it is sexually violent and we're, and I'm, I'm shocked at how willing they are to say it.

• 1:04:03Robert Evans?

  They, they're willing to say it. And the craziest thing to me is at least if this is being reported accurately by Hewitt, and I have no reason to believe it's not.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:04:11Robert Evans?

  The violator is the one being violated here, right? Because after Nicole hears this, she loves this as a branding thing and she uses Said as, she starts calling him their hook, literally their hook, because he will pull women into the company's classes and gatherings. And there's a lot of women who like are, you know, maybe want to explore that kind of thing and maybe wants to explore some more aggressive stuff. Said doesn't want that though. He doesn't actually like being the violator. He doesn't like being called in to do all of these like violent and aggressive sex acts in order for Nicole to make more money. But she keeps telling him to go do, go be the violator again, go do that this other,

• 1:04:54Robert Evans?

  that we've got this other woman who wants it and is willing to pay if you'll like spend some time with her, right? And Nicole keeps asking him to go further and further. She assigns him to have sex with a One Taste executive named Emma, who thought the violator sounded hot. And she starts using him to rev her up, is her words before speaking events. She'll, she'll make him come in and masturbate her and then she'll go out to like give a speech. On another instance, one of Nicole's top lieutenants, Rachel, who's also ordering Said to have sex with her periodically, orders him to have sex with another female cult member. He refuses and Rachel calls him an ungrateful, petulant brat and shouts at him and gets everyone else in the compound shouting at him until he agrees to go upstairs and do it.

• 1:05:37Robert Evans?

  Again, Said's not forced to have sex exactly. He's just berated and mocked and ostracized when he doesn't, right?

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  He is forced to have.

• 1:05:46Robert Evans?

  He is be, I would say he is be, but like, but in terms of the people who defend this will be like, well, he could have left. He was a big guy. Why didn't like, no one was stopping him, right? Cause there's not a, yeah.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  It is wild how, I mean, how Nicole is, um, you know, doing classic, like she's, she's going full Darvo. And, and then like, I mean, like all cults, like that there, it seems like a lot of why this is working is not only is she preying on, you know, probably his masculinity, um, but also that berating is a part of the culture. So no one would flinch at someone being berated. That is a part of it.

• 1:06:24Robert Evans?

  And it's celebrated. She talks a lot about people needing to have sharp scalpels and that she celebrates that we all have sharp scalpels, which means we're good at cutting each other. It's good to cut each other. We need to do that. It makes us stronger. These are, this is Nicole's literal language, right?

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  You just want like someone in the room to have a moment of lucidity and be like, so wait, what is the goal here?

• 1:06:43Robert Evans?

  No.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  What, what, why did we start doing this? It's, God, that is, that's really, I mean.

• 1:06:50Robert Evans?

  It's pretty bleak.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:52Robert Evans?

  Yep. Uh, so like a lot of one taste cult members, Said is also queer. He's bisexual. And at one point he admits interest to a man, to Rachel, and she allegedly calls him the F word and forces him out of her bed. So again, this is a very like queer phobic, anti queer environment too, for the people living in it. By the late 20 teens, one taste was more profitable than ever and had transitioned entirely to depicting itself as a Silicon Valley startup. People who had once been researchers exploring the frontiers of desire and sexual power are now operating a call center, spending days at a time awake, struggling to hit aggressive sales targets. Nicole successfully convinced many of them that selling and buying courses was the infinite game. She talks a lot about games, right? This is very much coming out of these other cults, right?

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the infinite growth, because we're in Silicon Valley.

• 1:07:40Robert Evans?

  Cause it's Silicon Valley. Right. And anything was justifiable as long as you had to keep the game going, right? Per an article in Bloomberg, um, quote, one taste taught members that money is just an emotional obstacle. It encouraged students to take. Out multiple credit cards to pay for courses and some turned to such sites as GoFundMe and prosper funding for help. The first time I didn't cover my credit card bill, it broke something in my mind, says Ruin Mipalaga, who went to his first One Taste event in 2012 at age 24, worked for the company for about two years and left owing $30,000 on his credit cards. I was no longer afraid of debt, he says. Once you break that barrier, 3,000 is the same as 30,000. At one point, Mipalaga complained that he and his coworkers

• 1:08:21Robert Evans?

  hadn't been paid in two months. He says he was publicly shamed for having a scarcity mindset.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Oh, another hot button phrase that's constantly misused. Nice.

• 1:08:33Robert Evans?

  Love it.

• 1:08:33Speaker 05

  3,000 is very different than 30,000.

• 1:08:37Robert Evans?

  Very much so.

• 1:08:38Speaker 05

  My guy, it's 10 times 3,000, actually.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's scarcity mindset, Sophia.

• 1:08:46Robert Evans?

  None of it's real money and you're like in an LLM. You're always being told, what, what's the big deal? You're going to pay 10 grand. This will make you so much better. It will open you up. You'll, you'll, you'll make that much, so much more money than that. Like, once you really get self fully. Right, right. It's an investment, you know? Now, the art, that Bloomberg article was published by Hewitt, the author of the book Empire of Orgasm in June of 2018. She was not the first reporter to write critically about One Taste, but she was the first to write critically about One Taste and have it matter. The vast majority of mainstream reporting on the company, as it was generally described, was bemused but open-minded. In fact, if you want a really good study in journalism versus PR, you should read

• 1:09:29Robert Evans?

  that first 2008 New York Times article, The Pleasure Principle, and then Hewitt's article. Now, I think the best example of this is how the Times wrote about Vic Baranco, the Morehouse founder, that's like one of the earlier orgasm cults. This is the guy who liked to crush women's vaginas with his hands when he was in a bad mood. Here's how the Times described Vic. Morehouse's founder, Vic Baranco, was a former appliance salesman who called his philosophy "responsible hedonism." By some accounts, Mr. Baranco, who died in 2002, used coercive techniques of mind control. "It was a huge ego-crushing machine, as any valid monastic tradition is," said a man who lived at Morehouse for more than 20 years and did not want to be identified.

• 1:10:10Robert Evans?

  And like, that's all you guys had about Morehouse? Really? That's all you had? The New York Times? That's all you needed to say about him, you thought?

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  I, I mean... The New York Times is stand out for this, but it's, God, I mean, it's, it's a lesson that no one ever seems to learn. And even, I mean, that's amazing that, um, that the article that came out eventually did, because that had to probably be hard to get through. Like, you just have to have an editor that actually cares about stuff in order to get that done. I don't know. I think I'm sure we all have like, I have like, three Los Angeles cult adjacent things that you're just like, well, I guess we'll just see if a journalist manages to get it through at some point, but it's, that's.

• 1:10:56Robert Evans?

  Thankfully, one did, right? Hewitt did, you know? And not only for this article, she'd get dozens of brutal accounts inside life, of life inside OneTaste, accounts that the Times could have got, some of them at least, the Times could have gotten. But not only to that, she forces OneTaste in this article to address the worst allegations of abuse. Vlán Vlek, who was the CEO of OneTaste in 2018, admitted to her, "We took money from people that we shouldn't have," right? So she even gets, just within the article, before the backlash to it, she gets them to like, "Oh yeah, you know what? This lady has our number enough that we have to cop to some shit." So by the late 20 teens, OneTouch had spread to a number of other countries. This started

• 1:11:38Robert Evans?

  with Nicole ordering specific offices opened, first in New York, and then in Austin, LA, London. But also, there's a bunch of independent OneTaste houses that are being established all over the country. Per the book Empire of Orgasm, "Almost 500 OneTaste students would live in 33 different OM houses. This informal network mimicked the way many Silicon Valley tech startups were metastasizing rapidly from city to city. Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and other on-demand companies prided themselves on blitzscaling and operating with little overhead or liability. To avoid getting dragged down by employment costs, the startups hired drivers as independent contractors and required them to provide their own cars and equipment. Similarly, many of OneTaste's sales workers were independent contractors, paid on commission."

• 1:12:22Robert Evans?

  It's all the Silicon Valley grift, right?

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a classic grift, and it's kind of a creative grift in that there is actually no real product. Like, the overhead couldn't be lower, because what you're selling is assault. Yeah.

• 1:12:40Robert Evans?

  Speaking of that, when Nicole had established the second warehouse commune, you know, they move out of the first on Folsom and into another one. This is the one that has like semi-private rooms, which seems like a positive move. But when they move into this place, Nicole makes it be the rule that none of the bedrooms should have locking doors. And after this point, all of these OM House franchises around the country abide by this rule to disastrous effect. Now periodically throughout this long journey, Nicole and her top lieutenants would experiment with broadening the curriculum. On several occasions, they attempted to create male versions of the clitoral stimulation workshops, right? To where you're trying to teach people how to give a handjob really well, I guess.

• 1:13:25Robert Evans?

  And this never works out as a business. Nobody, for some reason, nobody wants to take handjob classes.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  It's just so half-assed.

• 1:13:36Robert Evans?

  It's really funny. It's really funny. No one interested at all in the dick version of this. If you tried to tell people that like, no, the penile orgasm is actually a sacred and magical, get the fuck out of here. Get the fuck out of here. No, it's not. You can't sell that. I'm sorry. Nobody's buying it.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  No, that's too free. That's too free. You cannot, no.

• 1:14:02Robert Evans?

  Fuck, dudes are so screwed up. The only way to make money in that fritways is to make people stop coming. Like, you can convince people there's magic in never coming, right? But you can't convince people that like a dick is magic. It's just not.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  If it was, we would know by now. We would certainly know. Oh, God, okay.

• 1:14:24Robert Evans?

  It's very funny to me. And the reason Hewitt gives for, like, these classes never take off is that One Touch's ability to recruit young women, both to pay for classes and to provide the sexual labor crucial to the organization's focusing, doesn't work. They're less interested if there's also handjob classes. That makes this seem like something else. If it's all focused on just, just people with vaginas being massaged, right? And if that's the only thing that's happening, you can convince yourself this is like really women-led and like women-positive. If like, there's also jerk-off classes, that doesn't work. That's just not a good sell.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  And so, so the jerk-off classes being completely unprofitable is incidental.

• 1:15:07Robert Evans?

  Super funny.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  That's so good.

• 1:15:10Robert Evans?

  So, um, a lot of, like, a lot of these people are comfortable being massaged, taking an OM, because they're being told the men are not getting any sexual gratification out of this, right? So if you add any kind of male sexual gratification classes in there, even though a lot of men are getting gratified, that's kind of how the money is being made. You have to hide that stuff.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:29Robert Evans?

  So earlier in the episodes, we talked about a guy named Ken Blackman. He was a former member of the Welcomed Consensus Orgasm Cult, who once punched a lady because he had been taught that violence was a kind of honest communication. Nicole eventually recruits this guy as a teacher because she knew him at the Welcomed Consensus, and because she's reintroducing a lot of these Welcomed Consensus curriculum about, like, violence, uh, into the One Taste Curriculum. And she, she changes the way they frame it, and, and her, her, her, her words, the way she describes this, the term she likes to use is "skillful violation." And "skillful violation" means that you know it's better for someone to

• 1:16:12Robert Evans?

  push through their boundaries, even if they say no, so you don't listen to the no. You violate them even though they say no, because you're skillful enough to know that they actually need to have their boundaries violated, right?

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  I'm curious what your opinions are on this. Like, is, why is it escalating towards such absurd violence at this point?

• 1:16:34Robert Evans?

  You have to, because there's nowhere else for it to go.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  Right. It's just escalating it to, like, how can I retain control? And eventually, it just becomes fear tactics.

• 1:16:42Robert Evans?

  That's right. If you're honestly trying to help people be more sex-positive, or, like, teach them kink stuff, there is a point at which, and it's a pretty quick point, at which people are just kind of good to go on their own. You know, they don't want to go to, like, parties or events, or, like, take specific technical classes on how to use whatever whip or a fucking St. Andrews cross or whatever. But, you know, they don't need to keep paying money to a group. They don't need to keep listening to a guru. You kind of give people a basic, and they're good to go. If you're not going to do that, in order to keep them following, you have to constantly have more new... Curriculum. And eventually, that's going to wind up in some really dangerous directions. Right?

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:18Robert Evans?

  And for one taste, it ends in skillful violation. And she, Nicole justifies skillful violation being a thing by teaching that only 25% of human communication is verbal. Right? Trained OM experts learn how to read the non-verbal 75% of communication that's going on.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  Which I'm sure you don't even realize what you're thinking or what you want. Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:17:41Robert Evans?

  So, a skillful violator is someone who's been trained enough to be able to read someone's real desires and then be able to force them to experience those. Right? At their annual conference, OMX one year, One Taste staff wore shirts with penetrate written on the front.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:17:59Robert Evans?

  Great stuff.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:18:01Robert Evans?

  In 2013, a member of an OM house in Austin posted on OM Hub, the cult's internal social network, and claimed that a man had repeatedly entered her room and sexually harassed her. Because again, the doors don't lock. This blows up internally. This is like, it causes problems. People are saying, shouldn't we be able to lock doors? Who was this guy? Should he even have been there? This seems like a problem. And initially, Rob comments internally and apologizes and says like, we'll get right on it. But after that, a bunch of Nicole's lieutenants come in, and I think this is actually Rachel who comes in and is, they're do damage control. And one of her lieutenants posts, as a woman, the easier thing for me to do is say I was violated. That way, I don't have to look at my part in it.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:18:47Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:18:48Robert Evans?

  Your part? She was in a room that won't lock. What was her part? Like...

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  It is insane how regressive it gets.

• 1:18:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  It gets, okay.

• 1:19:00Robert Evans?

  Now, by this point, Nicole has added a section to her coaching program lecture where she claims to have seen a 2013 study from somewhere which researchers studied, in which researchers studied rape victims to see how they'd healed afterwards. And Nicole claimed the women who recovered were the women who took responsibility for the action.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:20Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:19:21Robert Evans?

  So, this is part of what she's teaching. Now, this becomes an increasingly important message for the cult because in 2014, a sales meeting was called and one of Nicole's representatives told the company, it's really important that we not break any prostitution's laws while selling courses. And attendees say like, oh... That was a moment where I realized they're kind of telling me to prostitute myself, but just not to talk about it that way. Otherwise, they wouldn't have brought that up at all.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:47Robert Evans?

  Now, Nicole increasingly lectures about how sexual trauma is the result of not wanting sex enough. And as she taught, if you change your mental state to ones that accept, one that accepts sex as always a positive thing, you literally can't be raped. And while she gave these courses, she would talk about how she was sexually abused as a child and explain, the only way I healed is that I accepted I had actually caused that situation by coming on to him, and also that it was a good thing. Right? That it made me more powerful. Likewise, if someone expressed a fear or a phobia related to sexual trauma, the solution was to embrace that trauma and find a way to enjoy it. People are encouraged slash forced to participate

• 1:20:28Robert Evans?

  in rape and bondage play because they'd been raped or subjected to intimate partner violence. As Nicole said, "The places you hate are your practice. They're actually your biggest gift. They're the places where you get free."

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  This is so deeply fucking depressing, because it's like, not only practicing dissociation through being actively abused, but again, going back into like, all of these, she's capitalizing on these popular narratives about kink, and by like, suggesting that you would only be interested in this if you've experienced extreme trauma and enjoyed dissociation. Like, it's just so, it's such horseshit. This is so dangerous.

• 1:21:08Robert Evans?

  It's really bad. Yeah. 2016, the company made $9.4 million. Gwyneth Paltrow praised them openly. They do some like, goop stuff. Khloe Kardashian talks about them.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Honestly, shocking it took her that long.

• 1:21:22Robert Evans?

  Tim Ferriss does like, a podcast thing about them, you know? At the most advanced stage of the grift, one taste was breaking into the mainstream, or at least, the mainstream part of the woo self-help world. While the public-facing part of the company was very much in line with the body modification, self optimization, Bay Area culture of the era. That's not what's actually going on internally. And inside, there are ongoing experiments that are like verging on occult nonsense. At one point, Nicole starts initiating priests of OM and selling like $15,000 classes where rich guys can participate in these like drug drenched sex magic rituals and get like certified as priests.

• 1:22:04Robert Evans?

  And I think Nicole's idea, because this is, this never fully turns into anything. I think the idea at one point was that if this is successful enough, if enough guys are interested, if this proves to have legs, maybe we can apply for tax-free status and call ourselves a religion, right? I think Nicole was like exploring and just doesn't quite get the chance to live this drift out.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  I mean, she is committing enough sex crimes, I think, to qualify as a tax-free religion.

• 1:22:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  You might as well at that point. She's, she's committed enough crimes to be a religion.

• 1:22:39Robert Evans?

  Yep. So she is getting much more reckless with everything as the years go on. I found at least one account from a former member who claims Nicole plied these rich tech guys with drugs at these high dollar classes. And, you know, these are, not only are they basically paying to get into an orgy, but like at one point, this one member says Nicole specifically doses a dude with a bunch of LSD to try to convince him to donate another $250,000 to the company, right? So that's part of what she's doing.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  I'm honestly shocked at how, because of how modern this story is, that there is no, it doesn't seem like any member of the cult who has, that there's been no significant whistleblowing incident by this point.

• 1:23:22Robert Evans?

  Not yet, not yet. Pieces, bits have come out, but yeah, that's not going to happen until 2018 when Hewitt puts that article out.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Robert Evans?

  But because the men with money are so core to everything happening here, Nicole's teachings trended towards explaining how it was good for men to be angry and controlling to women. She called this letting out your beast and praised it. Everyone was increasingly encouraged to be brutal towards each other, to cut each other up with their skillful scalpels. Nicole also praised intimate partner violence, most of which seems to have been man on woman. Women were, who were beat by their partners were told that they had caused the situation by doting his beast or not understanding his beast enough. If they sought to escape abusive situations, they were insulted from fleeing it from his beast rather than meeting it with love. So these OM priest classes and orgy sessions could net as much as a million dollars

• 1:24:12Robert Evans?

  for One Taste for a five day class. These are the real top dollar things. And the guys in these, they are just paying to get into an orgy with a bunch of young women, right?

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Right. But they have, but it has to seem like school as well.

• 1:24:25Robert Evans?

  It's got to, right, right. And this, you know, this works for years without them getting in trouble, but it couldn't last forever. By 2017, there's a couple of pending lawsuits and there's some like rumblings that bad press might be coming, right? And Nicole decides to separate herself legally from the group in the hope of gaining some sort of plausible deniability. So she sells the company for $12 million to like her wealthiest followers. And this is framed as the company maturing, right? Nicole's still going to be the spiritual and intellectual leader, but One Taste is going to be run like a normal company with like a CEO and a normal business change, chain of command, right? Now initially, it seems like maybe this will work. In 2018, 35,000 people had attended One Taste events

• 1:25:10Robert Evans?

  in cities around the world and hundreds of members lived in OM houses in multiple countries, OMing twice in the morning and twice in the evening and often quitting their careers to sell courses. But that same year, Bloomberg published Hewitt's first bombshell article about the cult, which described it as looking like a prostitution ring. That article quoted former employees saying stuff like orgasm was God and Nicole was like Jesus. And I want to quote from an article in The Times about the fallout from this article. One Taste went quiet. It shut down all centers and courses. A group of about 30 senior practitioners, including Nicole, retreated to the land, which is like a chunk of land that they're starting a compound on, right? Then came the BBC podcast, The Orgasm Cult, a Netflix

• 1:25:53Robert Evans?

  documentary, Orgasm, Inc., a device documentary, and a Playboy investigation. On June, in June of 2023, the FBI stormed the land. Daedone and Sherwitz, that's Rachel, were arrested. The company has spent about $15 million on legal fees since 2018, suing the BBC, suing Netflix, suing a former member, being sued by another member for alleged sex trafficking and fighting the criminal trial. And yeah, that's that, uh, and it's one of those things where they were committing these crimes the whole time. It's as soon as that article comes out, the FBI is like, oh, I guess we gotta look into this. And there's just immediately tons of shit to make charges on. Rachel is like, she accused of targeting vulnerable people by advertising

• 1:26:35Robert Evans?

  that the companies like classes could fix sexual trauma, telling people to take on debt to pay for classes, withholding wages from employees, isolating people by demanding absolute commitment. She's accused of participating in abusive employment practices, subjecting members to economic, sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse, surveillance, indoctrination, and intimidation. And Dendon is accused of, you know, participating in or of sexually trafficking people of a whole bunch of bad stuff, right? And

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Robert Evans?

  There's a lot. We don't need to get into everything that happens in the court case. You know, just a few weeks ago, earlier this year, Dendon was sentenced to nine years in federal prison. She is convicted, so is Rachel. And they are sentenced both to prison sentences. Nicole, again, gets like nine years.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, which as always seems low.

• 1:27:26Robert Evans?

  Seems low, seems low. Judge Gujarati says that Nicole caused long lasting, if not irreparable harm to former One Taste employees. What she was doing wasn't about enlightenment or operating in a different dimension. It was criminal. Dendon has not accepted any wrongdoing. Neither has One Taste. The people currently leading things still stand by her and basically say she's the fucking best. They're apparently like, at least the way they're framing it is we're waiting for her, you know, as soon as she gets out, you know, we'll be able to get back to the important work.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Jesus, Jesus famously returns. That is, what did, what did she end up getting convicted on? I'm curious.

• 1:28:09Robert Evans?

  Oh, gosh. Uh, let's get the exact list up here. Cause I mean, obviously sex trafficking is part of it.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's so, because every time I hear about a case like this, and then you hear the actual conviction, it does sound like she was able to probably get out a lot of consequences by being able to argue, well, technically there was a degree of choice, even though people were so psychologically fucked that I would argue that's not true.

• 1:28:33Robert Evans?

  I mean, we'll see how much that helped, but she does get like, it's a forced labor conspiracy. Like, it's conspiracy to commit forced labor that she gets in trouble with and gets convicted of, like, forced labor conspiracy. Like, is like, the actual crime she's convicted on is forced labor conspiracy alongside a little under 900 grand in restitution and two years supervised, uh, release. And it's just so far, seven victims confirmed, right? That's based on this. Uh, the only accomplice who goes down with her is Rachel. Obviously, a lot of other people were complicit and still are. Uh, but yeah, I don't think One Taste is gonna have the juice to survive until she's done, but we'll see.

• 1:29:15Speaker 05

  Lord have mercy.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  I know, truly. Let's, uh, I, I, I hope not. I hope not. But usually with something like this, unfortunately, they're just gonna be another grifter that, uh, that innovates in the field of, uh, you know, taking advantage of people, so.

• 1:29:34Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 1:29:35Speaker 05

  Holy shit.

• 1:29:36Robert Evans?

  Well.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  Well, holy shit, Robert.

• 1:29:38Robert Evans?

  Has this influenced any of your thinking on how to create your own cult, Jamie?

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  Um, look, Nicole, uh, this was a truly horrific one. I, I feel like she really, uh, did find a way to incorporate almost every grift of the last 20 years.

• 1:29:57Robert Evans?

  It really is impressive in that, yeah.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  Into a single, there's an element of false feminism, there is an element of capitalizing on male loneliness, there's a class element to it, there's indentured labor, there's forced labor, there's a tech element. I mean, it really does kind of run the gamut. And, and she almost became a religion. I think that really would have been the bingo, right? Is to rebrand as a religion.

• 1:30:22Robert Evans?

  And that's what I will do eventually, when I finally best this, with a cult that's about the opposite of orgasming. I'm gonna teach people how to poop right, you know? I think that's the next grift.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  Well, and I think that's also, I mean, don't.

• 1:30:35Robert Evans?

  You're doing it wrong.

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  Poop Right is a good name.

• 1:30:39Robert Evans?

  If you get better at it, there's magic. It'll make you immortal.

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  Look, media literacy is at an all-time low. I think you should call it poop right. Get to the point.

• 1:30:47Robert Evans?

  Poop Right, call it poop right.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  One Taste, I had to think too hard.

• 1:30:50Robert Evans?

  And like by three years on, I'll be teaching people that like if you're, if you're not eating an all grape diet, like God is going to kill your children or something like that. It'll go crazy after a while, but up to that point, we'll have a lot of fun, you know?

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:06Speaker 05

  You'll sell so many supplements.

• 1:31:09Robert Evans?

  So many supplements.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:31:10Robert Evans?

  It's basically all supplements.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, she wasn't selling supplements. That's a big, that was a mistake.

• 1:31:15Robert Evans?

  She wasn't actually, you're right. That was an error.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  That was, there should have been a useless product.

• 1:31:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, there were so many things she could have sold under one taste name. Oh, she fucked it.

• 1:31:25Robert Evans?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  God, I, I guess when I'm, when I'm signing over my $20,000 check, uh, I, I hope I'll remember to withhold it when you're like, actually, the best way to poop is, uh, to punch your spouse before, that's the only way to really release is to assault someone immediately before taking the healthiest shit of your life.

• 1:31:48Robert Evans?

  Jamie, I, I would never do that, but the key to pooping is to live on a boat for several years, like robbing merchant vessels for me in order that I can like sell the, the, the proceeds. That, that's, that's how you do it.

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  That's kind of brilliant to sell a poop only you could, you could take.

• 1:32:07Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:32:11Robert Evans?

  Okay, well.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  This was a good Blue Sky meeting, I think. Yeah, this was good. I feel good about it.

• 1:32:16Robert Evans?

  Great stuff. Yeah, I think we're, we're on our way here. Jamie, you got any pluggables here?

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  Oh, man, uh, the usuals. I, I, uh, I have a book coming out next year that there's no link for, uh, so I'll, I'll, I'll let you know when there's a, a link for it, but for now, listen to the Bechdel Cast every week, uh, listen to We the Unhoused every other week, both, uh, on Thursdays and Tuesdays respectively. And, uh, and yeah, take a, take a healthy shit for free at your house tonight. Do that, do that for me.

• 1:32:48Robert Evans?

  Yep. All right, everybody.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  I'm trying to undercut your business.

• 1:32:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:32:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Thank you. All right, everyone, we're done. Go away. Bye.

• 1:33:00Speaker 05

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit "Remind Me" on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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