Part Two: The Orgasm Cult

Robert continues to tell Jamie about Nicole Daedone's OneTaste, orgasm cult. 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 where we have uncomfortable conversations about section sexuality and the 90s, the Bay Area, and the early 2000s. It's gonna be awkward for everybody.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Hitting a lot of quadrants, hitting a lot of important quadrants there.

• 0:23Robert Evans?

  Hitting a lot of big cues, big cues, a lot of Robert cues, in fact. Jamie Loftus, our wonderful guest, back in the saddle again to talk about the orgasm cults. How are you doing, Jamie?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  It's great to be back in the medical saddle that makes you come.

• 0:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, okay, well.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was like, saddle, weird choice today, buddy.

• 0:49Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Look, we're all struggling to not say things that sound like.

• 0:57Robert Evans?

  It's weird, especially like, again, this is all so adjacent to like, things I've done and were a part of my youth, that it's really kind of weird to me. Like, the reaction everyone else has to like, and then they're doing like, public sex demonstrations in front of crowds of people. It's like, no, I've been to a bunch of those, actually.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot of fine people at these events.

• 1:19Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. There's good, you know, I, we did, we had one, we did an event one year where like, the theme was, because there's a different one every year, "Bad Idea." And so, like, my roommate, who is a lady and is a bit older than me, I think she's like 30, wanted to do like, a demo on like, how to use like, different like, safe sex objects and stuff like that, because it's like, a big five-day camping trip where a bunch of people are having sex. And she was like, "Well, there should be an option for people to learn that, in addition to the weird kink camps that teach you how to use like, a fucking St. Andrews Cross or a whip or whatever." The problem was that the structure we had for it this year was also made to kind of meet the theme of "A Bad Idea." So it was a big like, pyramid, like, tent shade structure thing with like, a huge bed

• 2:01Robert Evans?

  thing at the bottom, but the top was like, a disco ball that we had made by cutting up hundreds of pieces of glass and putting them into like, a paper machine. Ball and they were just kind of glued on and it's like 100 degrees. And so as it heats up, as people are like cuddling or doing the safe sex demonstrations or whatever in there, pieces of like jagged glass are just like falling down. And we had put up like a tiny little net to catch it. But again, it's supposed to be a bad idea. So we didn't want to protect people too much. We just made sure people were warned. By the way, it rains glass inside the, inside the.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  This sounds like a saw trap. What are you talking about?

• 2:39Robert Evans?

  It was fun. Very few people got cut. It was a really nice week.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  I used to hang out in all of Jigsaw's tracks. We were young.

• 2:48Robert Evans?

  It was a good time and there were like maybe four to five stitches required as a result of the shattered glass disco ball. It was a great week. I had a really good time. I've got bad idea tattooed on my fingers because of that week. It was great.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 3:04Robert Evans?

  I got electrocuted twice.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  From. The dead, I was like the lore drop at the end.

• 3:11Robert Evans?

  I nearly killed a man with a flamethrower. It was an awesome week. Um, accidentally, guys.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  All right, Tarantino, let's move on.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 3:28Robert Evans?

  Picture this, you're listening to the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast and suddenly, wait, what did they just say? Well, the questions raised in those show stopping moments will be answered in the all new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions Bedside Manor. Hosts Gabe and Chris will dive deep on a specific topic covered in that week's Tuesday episode, from sexual health and HIV prevention to finding the right doctor. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gillian Sciences.

• 3:59Speaker 04

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star Trust Pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 4:32Robert Evans?

  So if you type the words welcomed consensus orgasm, which is the remember the group that kind of descends from the Morehouse community, the welcomed consensus. If you type those three words into Google, as I did, you'll be presented with the Amazon page for a video titled deliberate orgasm, expanding female orgasm, volume one. It currently costs $132 on Amazon.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  2.5 stars, 15 reviews.

• 5:01Robert Evans?

  2.4 stars.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Really? Honey. Ooh, the color, the cover is haunting. The cover is in like 160p.

• 5:14Robert Evans?

  Like it's a naked woman and like a man who's like straddling her and has a hand around her buttocks, but he's wearing jeans? She's completely naked and he's fully clothed in jeans.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  If, yeah, it looks like a cropped Guantanamo picture. It's horrific.

• 5:32Robert Evans?

  It looks like some shit from fucking Algarabe.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Thank you. I hate it, Net. God, okay. You have to really want, I actually do appreciate the financial barrier. Not just anyone should be able to look at that. You have to be a pervert with money.

• 5:49Robert Evans?

  No, most people are not ready. I also love that it's under the special interests section of the DVD categories for Amazon. This is indeed a special interest.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Full jeans, so you're like, let's be clear, no one's comfortable.

• 6:05Robert Evans?

  Nobody's having a good time. No one's having what you would call sex, right? Like.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Raw jeans on human skin, not for, it's that, that lady's gonna chafe.

• 6:17Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Big time.

• 6:19Robert Evans?

  Everyone's chafing. Now, this is one of several video guides published by the welcomed consensus. By the time that Nicole DeDon found it in 1998, she had dated Irwan for a while, and while that didn't last, her interest in deliberate orgasm did. She pressed Irwan to connect her to more training. And rather than send her to Morehouse, he advised that she look into the splinter group instead.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  And is this, is this pre, like huge groups? This is pre-operating theater coming?

• 6:49Robert Evans?

  No, they're doing that. Like, the Morehouse had done that. Remember, they'd done that thing where they said that like, it's a three-hour orgasm. Like, they had done some demos like that, largely as like PR things to like bring people in. And the Welcome Consensus did, it wasn't that big, but they did do live demonstrations, right? One of the things that they, because the Welcome Consensus is totally about orgasm and pleasure. And they declared our birthright because we were conceived in orgasm. That's like the motto of the group, essentially. And to bring in new members, they do live demonstrations where a woman would be masturbated for an hour. And they also sold really risque merch. Like, they're very proud of how horny their merchandise is. They have T-shirts that brag, "Life is too short for mediocre sex."

• 7:31Robert Evans?

  The Welcome Consensus didn't call new members "marks." Instead, they used the term "benchmarks." Because it's just a little different than the cult they're kind of ripping off.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  It sounds less antagonistic, for one.

• 7:42Robert Evans?

  This is the Burger King of the Morehouse. Like, it's a burger, it's the Burger King of orgasm cults, folks. That's what the Welcome Consensus is.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  "Life is too short for mediocre sex" is pretty good. It's a pretty good shirt.

• 7:57Robert Evans?

  It's a pretty good shirt. It's not attached to a cult, maybe? I don't know.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Nothing's gonna, nothing's gonna get me in the door like some fugly weird merch. So I was like, I know. Up till then, I'm like, at what point would I entertain going through the doors? And it is the fugly shirt.

• 8:13Robert Evans?

  It's the fugly shirt? Yeah, that's what they knew. So the Welcome Consensus, again, they call new members "benchmarks," but it only costs $11 to visit. They've got a, they've got a compound, obviously, that's elsewhere in California, but they've got a clubhouse in San Francisco. And they do like weekly game nights there. And these are games that have been invented by the group that are, and you know those like card games that are like, do you and your spouse want to communicate better? This card game will have you talking better and, you know, however long it takes to play, or whatever like that, right? Like, that kind of thing. Those are the sort of games that they're playing. These are like games they've created to aid in communication and intimacy. And that are also usually, you know, we, we did our episodes on Synanon, right? Like, because that comes out of the self-help movement that all this stuff is related to.

• 8:57Robert Evans?

  A big thing in Synanon is these sessions where people sit around in a circle and like insult each other. And they're definitely influenced by that. They've got some games that are like, we'll all sit around, we'll talk, we'll tell someone honestly something about like themselves. But it's usually supposed to be positive, but often there's like a negative side too. Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  That's how there I used to work at a now closed comedy theater and we would teach stand up sketch and improv, one of the most evil things you can do. And on in the stand up classes, the first day would always be just that to be you. You would have to get on stage. I never took it, but I I watched each student who just wants to put themselves out there, stands on stage and every other student says, what are some assumptions people might make about you? And this is in Boston, Massachusetts. So you're hearing some really nasty stuff.

• 9:51Robert Evans?

  Wild stuff. Yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Um, and then you're just told like, so, you know, maybe that's something you might want to play up on stage. You're like, it's just, ugh, ugh. Anyone who I don't know the radical honesty movement. I'm just like, please, less.

• 10:07Robert Evans?

  Disastrous. We need to lie more. We need to lie more to each other.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  We really for our own protection. Yeah. I don't want to know.

• 10:16Robert Evans?

  It's not that we need to lie more. We need to just know less about each other. It's not lying just to not tell someone everything. And we don't all need to tell someone everything, you know? Um, so most of these games are again, just kind of, yeah, like dark secrets, like tell me the darkest thing that turns you on or stuff like that. Like, that's a lot of like, the kind of games that they're playing and doing so in public is really frightening, but also kind of thrilling and cathartic. And it creates this sort of stressful bonding experience that other self help groups like, you know, this is all of them are doing something like this in this period of time. And even kind of still into the modern day, everything is just kind of synonym when you get right down to it. Um, now, the founder of the welcome

• 10:57Robert Evans?

  consensus, RJ Testerman, which sounds fake, was a cowboy coded dude. He's always wearing like a fucking cowboy hat. He's in like his 50s and he's, he's, people will tell you about RJ and the cult is that he's really good at calling people on their bullshit. And here that phrase means he's really good at psychologically abusing people, right? Like, that's what that means.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:20Robert Evans?

  RJ was attended to by four women who were his lovers and also helped run the group. This was specifically framed more as polyamory than as polygamy. And one thing everyone got who lived at the group's ranch was plenty of sex and a near total escape from the real world. New members, like Nicole, were promised that they too could escape the grind of regular life if they just gave themselves over to the cause. They then got to live on an organic farm, growing their own food and orgasming at least five times per day. You really are not allowed to do it less. You're not allowed.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Okay, I was gonna say.

• 11:52Robert Evans?

  You gotta do it.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  How opt out?

• 11:53Robert Evans?

  That's our limit.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  It's not sounding like there is an opt out. Okay.

• 11:58Robert Evans?

  No. Now, can you lie? Of course. They're not checking, but.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Oh, you can lie. Okay.

• 12:05Robert Evans?

  You, everyone does. So the WC framed their sex work as a sex, as sexual experimentation. Again, just like the morales, like we're really more researchers trying to learn like, you know, this math, the scientific secrets of sex that have been locked away. And their goal is to create like an elite level sexual experience. They were actually more, as much as they were inspired by their self-help groups, they're inspired by like fine dining restaurants, like the French Laundry. That's very much how they like bill themselves. This is like a gourmet orgasm.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Orgasm.

• 12:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, a Michelin star cup. Yes. So Nicole was an instant fit. In short order, she'd paid $14,000 for a two-week class on how to feel and acknowledge her orgasms. Hewitt notes that in her bio for the group website at the time, she wrote, "Orgasm is the thread that weaves my life together. There is nothing but orgasm as much as I want." That's, that's really how a lot of the stuff in the later cult that she's gonna make is gonna sound like they talk about it like fucking mana, right? Like they're wizards and this is their magic power is orgasm? Like, like it's a quantifiable thing. Like it's not, it's not like a moment that happens. It's like a quantifiable kind of energy you just have with you and like do hadouken's with.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  It's kind of, it is kind of like almost, I mean, I know it won't be for long, but it is almost kind of sweet how they're talking about orgasms as if it was their idea and they're the first people to think of this.

• 13:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah. No one else has figured this out. So the older group members noticed right away that Nicole was very good at winning new recruits, at convincing people to join the group and to pay money. One of her first gets was a young woman named Allison, who was referred to the group by Erawan after meeting him at a rave. Again, there's a lot of like. After parties for Burning Man and stuff that people are being recruited for to some of these groups and shit like that's that's like a thing and Irwan is kind of the thing I get is that he's kind of like their floater like he's probably I think a good looking guy and he's going out to like parties and stuff to find women like Nicole and Allison and you know talk them into showing up at a place like this um so Allison meets Irwan

• 14:12Robert Evans?

  at the rave and she goes to the welcome consensus and at her first meeting she meets Nicole and she tells Nicole oh you know I just got awarded a bunch of stock at work so I just cashed in like hundreds of thousands of dollars and Nicole is like cash register signs right um so she starts flirting with Allison and Allison falls in love with Nicole even though she'd always considered herself straight before and I think this has a lot to do with just Nicole is very charismatic she's very good at making you feel like you're the only person in the world and she's very good at making you feel that like doing things that feel good with Nicole are also like revolutionary acts that are helping humanity you know that's kind of Nicole's superpower yeah um so we've talked about like we talked about the Greeks and we talked about um Morehouse about how they went from like you know when

• 14:56Robert Evans?

  women orgasm it's so incredibly powerful and they've used that as a way to like say obviously that means women always want it right and the same thing happens to the welcomed consensus right per the book of orgasm or I'm sorry per the book Empire of Orgasm

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Per the book

• 15:10Robert Evans?

  That's bad yeah uh they invoked biological generalizations about the way female mammals and estrus and nonverbal signals to attract mates and humans they argue this manifested through emotions women can therefore emit emotional calls and induce men to respond when men are feeling turned on or at peace or enraged that's because they're responding to a call that a woman is putting out right now this means that women aren't responsible for men's arousal for how men feel

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Right

• 15:39Robert Evans?

  And men are not

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Probably responsible for how they responsible for making sure that they're taking care of and that's actually feminism when you think about it isn't it ladies?

• 15:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah yeah Yeah, and as is the case with any group that dedicates themselves to reimagining human relationships while fucking on an isolated farm, they spiraled into madness as time went on. As researchers, the group decided to experiment with violence and whether or not that might be a healthy way for people to express emotions honestly. And the way, how this happens is like RJ and a bunch of the men are like, I get angry and just want to hit women sometimes. Maybe that's good. Like, that's literally the thought process here.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  And at this university, we're choosing to explore things we already know.

• 16:26Robert Evans?

  Already do. Yeah, it's fucked up. So, one example Ellen Hewitt gives is a male member of the welcome consensus who gets into an argument with a female member and punches her hard enough to knock her to the ground. And she goes to RJ to complain, and he says, hey, you need to cop to whatever it is you were doing that made him angry, or I'll beat you up myself. Right? And this is liberating, right?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Because that means you're powerful, and that's me acknowledging you're powerful.

• 16:53Robert Evans?

  That's me acknowledging your power. So RJ, this won't surprise anybody, was an aging drunk who went crazy with power and was as likely to give his followers pain as pleasure when he was doing these orgasm sessions. Sometimes if he was angry at a woman that he was like stroking, he would stroke her clitoris so hard that it like was agonizing. And then like when someone would be like, hey, you're hurting me, he would accuse her of refusing to surrender. And it was not like, he regularly would like literally just slap or otherwise hit his partner's genitals during these if he got angry at them. So again, these are not like nice times a lot of the time, right?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 17:30Robert Evans?

  Um, I'm sure that's super shocking to hear.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  I don't know this one. Say more.

• 17:36Robert Evans?

  No, not great.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  And this is all happening in groups that, this is like, there's no shortage of witnesses. Yeah.

• 17:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, lots of witnesses.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  That just reminds me of that Samantha Jones quote from Sex and the City, when they're at the massage store and there's a bunch of women there that are not actually shopping for massages, but they're shopping for vibrators. And she looks at this woman and she goes, not that one. That will burn your clit off.

• 18:04Robert Evans?

  Honey. Okay. Perfect.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Wow, she's always with us. She's always with us. Ahead of the times.

• 18:10Robert Evans?

  So Allison, not long after Nicole convinced her to join, became the target of RJ's ire. There's like a, an evening where they're like, the, there's several, a bunch of people hanging out at the property and RJ gets really drunk and he tells Allison, like, get down on your hands and knees. And he pulls up her skirt and he starts whipping her with a riding crop. And just like screaming and cursing. He's just like a maniac, right? Nicole does nothing, even though Allison is very clearly frightened. And that's kind of something Nicole takes with her, is that this person who I thought was into me and was like, it convinced me that this was a safe place, brought me into the situation and said nothing when this happened, right?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  It's, I mean, I know this echoes a lot of cults, but it feels very NXIVM adjacent in the way that women are being weaponized to recruit other women. Yeah.

• 18:56Robert Evans?

  And it happening at the same, Nicole's cult is gonna happen at the same time as NXIVM. I mean, this is too. NXIVM, I think, gets started in the 90s some, but they're very similar movements. Yes, there's a lot that they have in common.

• 19:10Robert Evans?

  Nicole would later brag when she starts her cult that she was one of the only women RJ never tried to hit, which like, I don't know what that says. Yeah. In 2001, after three years with the welcomed consensus, Nicole decided she had reached the peak of what they could give her. Their top training course was called validation. And to pass, you had to complete a three hour orgasmic stroking session and do a one hour public demonstration. To even attempt this costs a thou- $100,000. Nicole doesn't have that kind of money, so she goes to Erowan and is like, hey, man, you've just come into an inheritance. Why don't you pay for us both to have the $100,000 class? And Erowan pays initially, but then he like gets cold feet and he backs out and demands a refund of the money he'd put down. And RJ refuses to refund his money. So Erowan

• 19:55Robert Evans?

  sues the group and accuses them of prostitution and says, and he had been part of this, right? Erowan was, but he says they're just selling sex.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  He can't get a refund. Yeah.

• 20:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:08Robert Evans?

  So journalists start converging on the community. They get a bunch of bad press. And that RJ is kind of getting old at this point, so he just backs off and they really reduce the recruitment efforts. He eventually decides I'm just gonna like, kind of fade away, right?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:22Robert Evans?

  Like, I'm too old for this shit. I don't want to have to like, fight the outside world.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  The grift, the abusive grift was good while it lasted.

• 20:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And that's when Nicole kind of decides it's time to leave, right? It's time for me, she can see like, okay, the welcome consensus is on its way out. It's time for me to start my own orgasm cult slash training program. And we'll talk about all that once we finish these ads.

• 20:48Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto Dolutigrevir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 21:12Speaker 05

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients, or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 21:48Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 22:29Robert Evans?

  So, uh, to find and start her own cult, Nicole knows she's gonna need money, right? And she does not have any. So before she leaves, she finds a married couple, Rob and Carol Candle, who had recently joined

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Good names.

• 22:42Robert Evans?

  the welcomed consensus. Yes, yes, very good name.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Carol Candle, oof.

• 22:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, K A N D E L L.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Good for her.

• 22:50Robert Evans?

  They wanna spice up their boring 1% of her corporate life, right? Rob is a successful businessman. I think he's, I don't know if he's like rich or just upper middle class, but he's got money. And he and Carol had lived up to this point a pretty standard life. Like, they get married. Rob is very successful. He works his way up the corporate ladder. And then kind of when they're in, you know, their 30s with middle aged, age in sight, Rob is like, oh, my God, like, we're boring, right? And so he goes to Burning Man with his wife and they take mushrooms. And he decides he wants more out of life than just like making money. And that's what brings Rob and Carol to the welcomed consensus, right?

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:26Robert Evans?

  And Rob is, because Nicole spots immediately that this is the guy I need to bring with me when I leave this cult. And that's because he's going to be the model for the kind of dude that she is going to kind of fashion her entire life around soaking for cash. Unfortunately, she's often going to do that by like making other women fulfill that guy's weird and sick desires. So he pays her, but that's coming in a bit. What she sees right away with Rob is that Silicon Valley is filled with dudes who spend all their, you know, when they were in school, they were always studying. They were big nerds. They didn't spend a lot of time partying. They didn't do a lot of dating. And then they start working and they're workaholics. And they don't spend a lot of time dating, too. And, you know, if they get married, they probably feel like they never got to sow their wild oats.

• 24:10Robert Evans?

  They didn't get to do enough partying. They didn't get to have enough sex, right? And they wind up bored and feeling like life is passing them by. And she sees that in Rob and she realizes this kind of guy will do anything to prove to himself that he's not just another middle aged, middle class, white guy with money, right?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  And I think that this like personality profile, too, is like, there's always an element of like revenge to having access to a lot of sex and that it's been owed to you. You're getting it back, yeah.

• 24:37Robert Evans?

  I never got it in high school, right? And yeah, he definitely, a big part of what he feels is that like, I will do anything to have sex with a lot of young women. Right? That's what, that's what Nicole sees in Rob, right? So she first enters Rob's life when he goes to a benchmark gathering and she walks in wearing this elaborate sexy costume. He would later describe it as like a moment from a movie where the music changes to mark an important plot point because all these guys want to feel like they're the leading man in a blockbuster film. And like, finally, like my life is turning into a movie. I'm no longer going to be like this boring schlub working a job, right? And Nicole sees that and sees like, that's just what you tell them. You just tell them this is a great adventure. Like you're the protagonist of life. We're gonna make like, this is like, that's, that's forever now, as long as you stick with me.

• 25:21Robert Evans?

  So for the moment, Carol needs to be around too, because Rob is not willing to immediately dump his wife. And Nicole manages to convince them both that she could provide a more exciting and lucrative future for them than the welcomed consensus. So she poaches these two and two other students before leaving and they all move into Rob's house in San Francisco. While Nicole tries to figure out what to do to differentiate her grift from the ones that had come before her, right? She knows she wants to do something like the Morehouse and the Welcome Consensus, but she wants it to be her own thing. And she wants it to be something that can last and will not wind up pissing off a bunch of like newspapers and stuff, right? She has, she has to make like somehow, how do I make it work? And how do I make it palatable?

• 26:02Robert Evans?

  For like people in the 90s who are less sexist than these dudes from like the 60s and 70s who had started the other orgasm cults.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Or at least a different kind.

• 26:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, or at least a different kind. So before she figures out what her grift is gonna be, while they're all still living at Rob's house, she knows she wants to launch a food donation charity called Fill Up America. And this is not an act of charity. This is something she had learned because both the Welcome Consensus and the Morehouse people did this, right? Where they had food donation charities and they would take food donations. But the purpose of these were not to give out food. It was so that you didn't have to shop, right? You take and you make yourself known as like, this is who you donate food to. And people donate food and you take out the good stuff and you use that to feed everyone for free at your commune. And then you give away the bad stuff. To like a food pantry or something like that. Like that's literally what it is. And that's what Nicole is doing. It's very unethical.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  God, that's so horrible. Yeah, where it's like a gigantic shipment of like soaking wet PB and Js.

• 27:02Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And you got out all the good shit. Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  I have to, I have to say, like, the future sex cult having something called Fill Up America is so funny. Fill up America is gross. That's gross.

• 27:17Robert Evans?

  It's really nasty. It's really gross. You had to know that, Nicole. This was like the year 2001. Like, we weren't that in the fucking like.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  You know what you're doing, Nicole. Fill up America. Nasty.

• 27:29Robert Evans?

  It says a lot about Nicole that she's like, first, even before I know what the grift is, when I know what the cult's gonna be, before I have any like members or any classes, we've gotta have our fake food charity so we don't have to pay for groceries.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:44Robert Evans?

  Now, Nicole starts writing her own guide to what she called orgasmic meditation, which pulled back from the multi-hour sessions the welcomed consensus had worked up to. She realized it was more, a lot more marketable to sell clitoral stroking as a 15-minute meditative technique, something you can plug into your morning routine without much fuss. She specifically says, I want this to replace coffee for like young professional women in like the Bay Area and stuff. Like, instead of your morning coffee, you have like your morning fucking 15-minute stroke.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  She already, I will say, based, other than, like, she's, it's a better hook than what Vic is saying.

• 28:18Robert Evans?

  It's a way better hook. She's much smarter than Dicker, aren't you?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Coffee with coming is a great pitch.

• 28:25Robert Evans?

  It's genius. It's genius in a way. Yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Not, uh, hey, guys, did you know my wife could come? Should we start a business? Like, she's, she has learned.

• 28:35Robert Evans?

  And what tells you how ahead of the curve she is is like, in like 2016, you would have written this as like a joke startup, right? To parody like the health and wellness culture and the other body optimization culture in the Valley, in the Bay.

• 28:50Robert Evans?

  But this is like 2001 or 2, right? She's really ahead of the curve. She sees this part of San Francisco before it's as much of a meme as it's kind of become.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Pre-Goop.

• 29:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, pre-goop. Uh, now, there is conflict arises pretty quickly between her and Carol. Carol is convinced that Nicole wants to make convince her husband to abandon her because that is exactly what Nicole is trying to do. Carol, get out of there. Get out of there, girl. So Carol gets pissed and she's like, Rob and I are leaving. We're gonna go stay at a nice place in Jersey for like a couple of weeks and you need to be gone when we get back. So Rob and Carol fucking bounce. And before they leave, Nicole is like, you'll regret it. Your life will be nothing but boring. Once you get back home. If you, if you leave us. And that says, like, she leaves, her little nascent cult leaves and they try to find a new place to be. And Rob and Carol come back and they do kind of miss the cult. They are like, oh, it is really boring without Nicole. I'm just kind of like making money

• 29:41Robert Evans?

  and living in like the Bay. I kind of want to be back in a cult. It's a lot more fun than my life. So there's not a lot of good movies out right now. We'd like to rejoin the cult. Can we take acid and party? Yeah. We took an impound class and it wasn't fun. We want the cult back. Didn't fix things.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  This is 2001, but is this 2001?

• 30:01Robert Evans?

  Or so.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Before 9/11 or after 9/11?

• 30:05Robert Evans?

  Probably after 9/11. Now, I don't know.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  All right. All right. I just wanted, I just wanted to understand the cultural vibes of the time.

• 30:13Robert Evans?

  Sure. So she, Nicole calls Rob a few weeks, you know, into this and is like, hey, you guys want to like come over and take acid? Like, we're, we're staying at this new place. Why don't you all party? And like, they do and soon they're back in the group. And she eventually talks Rob into leaving his wife. And she basically does it by pitching him like, look, we're gonna create this new tech savvy community of orgasm entrepreneurs and we're gonna sell this technique to all of these like rich people in the Bay and all these beautiful young women in the Bay. And I want you to be basically a human billboard, Rob. You're gonna have endless access to women's bodies as you just kind of like help, help, help us afford this while we're getting off the ground. And Rob agrees. Rob is on board, right? No kidding? Rob agrees? Yeah. That's crazy.

• 30:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Rob takes the deal, ultimately does leave his wife. I was trying to like-

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Drop myself into the experience of someone making, like, telling me to my face they're an orgasm entrepreneur.

• 31:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't know that she uses that word, but that is what they're doing, right? They're starting an orgasm business.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  And I do, and I do believe that guys like this would, would feel so comfortable just letting that, "I'm a bit of an orgasm entrepreneur," you could say, "and then my clitoris would just fall off right there."

• 31:33Robert Evans?

  So around the same time that all this is happening, Nicole has started gathering a coterie of older men to her, right? That she's, at first, she's gonna use for money and then for, like, some of their knowledge and advice. And in all of these cases, she's kind of like, you get the, some of the times it's spelled it, sometimes it's not, but she's kind of offering up her, her body, in some cases, to these men that she needs something from in order to get pieces that she needs to complete this cult. And that's gonna be relevant because of, like, what she's going to do later, right? But that is a, that is an aspect of this that's not always directly discussed, but sometimes it's even just like, these old guys just wanna like, spend time and feel like they're influential to this young, hot woman. Sometimes they are getting something physical out, from it.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a different version of the, the Elizabeth Holmes playbook.

• 32:23Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right, exactly, exactly.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  My, my hot, young ward.

• 32:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yep. And the first of these men was the former Morehouse founder, Vic Beranko, who by this point was old and dying and was living in Hawaii. He had just a handful, he'd basically, again, Morehouse still exists, but he'd kind of given up control and had just retreated to this, like, nice place in Hawaii with a few of his closest followers, right? Cause he knows he's not gonna last much longer and he just wants to enjoy life.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Kind of less.

• 32:51Robert Evans?

  And she thinks that she convinces him over a couple of days and who knows what goes on to make her his heir so she can take over after him and like, move Morehouse into a new age. But that was just a lie. Like, he was, he never meant that and she eventually realizes that she's been had and he was just kind of screwing around with her. And so she leaves with her followers from the Morehouse compound and they rent another Place in Hawaii for a while and they start like planning out like what is our, what are we gonna do? Like, what is our course curriculum gonna be? And they start writing out, obviously taking these ideas from Morehouse and the welcome consensus and throwing in some of their own, mostly Nicole's, and they're putting stuff together. They move back to San Francisco where they meet the next of these older guys,

• 33:35Robert Evans?

  who's a 45-year-old former musician named Don Marys. His longtime girlfriend had recently died from some sort of cancer and Don is just deeply depressed. He's certainly not a rich guy, but he's got a house of his own and he's got some amount of money and they really just need a place, right? Nicole had known him when she was in her early twenties and had been partying and doing a lot of drugs. And, you know, he's a musician, so they'd kind of known each other. And she'd latched on to him like 10 or so years ago, even though he was a lot older. And he'd avoid getting entangled with her then because a friend of his had told him, quote, "She's a monster." But she shows up a decade later, he's really lonely and sad. And she's like, "Hey, we're doing this like fun thing. We're gonna start an orgasm business. Can we like do it in your house?" And he's like, "Okay, I guess, why not?"

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Cool, cool, cool.

• 34:22Robert Evans?

  She doesn't, critically, I said, she doesn't say it's an orgasm business. "We're doing like a self-help thing and we're going to come up with like a new training program to sell people and start a business. Can we do it in your house?" Right?

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Right, and orgasms are what, like the Xenu of the operation?

• 34:38Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, very much, absolutely.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:41Robert Evans?

  For Don, yeah, you're good. Don's gonna have to wait to learn that orgasms are what this is all about. So while he's out working, because he's still like a handyman or something, Nicole and her friends are at his house writing courses on orgasmic meditation and clitoral stroking. Don is kind of only dimly aware of like literally what they're doing. He's mostly just happy to not be lonely, it kind of seems like to me. And he starts to become aware that like, whatever they're doing during the day, Nicole seems to be flirting with him. And Don is a smart enough guy to know like, "Well, that can't be genuine." Like, "I know, like, I'm, I'm way over the hill. I don't feel good anymore." Like, this is, she's gotta have an angle in this, right?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  I'm grieving, like, it, yeah.

• 35:20Robert Evans?

  So one day, she tells, Don is in the room, but Nicole is talking to Rob. And Nicole tells Rob, I should marry Don. I think that would be really good for the group if I married Don. And she doesn't even say this to Don. And they went up taking acid later, and he kind of gets pissed about this because again, he's grieving and he's like, you shouldn't joke about stuff like that. And he like, kind of leaves for a while, but he comes back and she keeps pushing him to spend more time with them and to party with them and kind of flirting with him more. And even after, they eventually leave his place because Rob gets a new place near San Francisco. And she's like, Don, why don't you come with us and stay for a few days? And he's like, I know something's going on here. I know this isn't on the up and up, but I am old and sad and I kind of want to take

• 36:04Robert Evans?

  drugs with this hot young lady and her orgasm cult, what might be an orgasm cult, right?

• 36:09Speaker 01

  He was going through a hard time. Oh, I feel through a hard time. Yeah.

• 36:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah. She applies Don with LSD and he winds up spending like more than like weeks there. And her followers pitch him on what they'd started calling the Institute of Monastic Understanding.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 36:24Robert Evans?

  Which they like because the acronym is IMU. Right? Yeah, there's your Zenu.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Gross. Nope.

• 36:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So their food charity is in full swing by this point and they start recruiting people who volunteered to help them bag and distribute groceries, right? To, to join the cult. These people are hearing about the orgasms. Don still is not. People come and go from the property, including Don's cousin, William, who Don like calls Will up and Will comes down for a few weeks. And he writes a fictional book about his time there and about like falling in love with these like LSD cultists. And Hewitt includes some lines from it in her book. And, and this, Don's cousin's writings give a pretty compelling glimpse inside the minds of these older men that she's bringing in. And like, because this is going to be relevant, the whole growth of this cult. This is what's always going on in the dudes' heads.

• 37:13Robert Evans?

  Quote, "Think of it, the endless excellent sex, the lively intellectual conversation, the intense tripping, all the new people I was meeting, and just the entire unknown adventure of it all. And this community more happened in a week, every week, than what happened in three months back in the old world, my other life, that place when I had an American Express card a lifetime ago." Right? Well, if you didn't have to think about money or work, it could just take drugs and have sex. Yeah.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Right, but then also positioning that, I feel like so, so like crucial to these kinds of grifts is to not make it just sound like what it is, which is like

• 37:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  drugs and sex and the illusion of power and access and all this stuff. And being like, this is a spiritual mission and, um, and you're doing the best at it.

• 38:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah. No, that's, that is what I got out of the events I used to go to as a young person because they were, they were totally honest. It was like, no, no, for like five days, we're going to do drugs and have a bunch of weird sex and there will be a bunch of art and music to dance to, but then we, then you go home.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Then you go home is the crucial part.

• 38:19Robert Evans?

  Five days, then you go home.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  And, and if you have a nice time, that's great, but crucially, it does not make you God.

• 38:27Robert Evans?

  Great thing to do, but you're not God and you haven't figured out the universe. You've just learned that doing drugs and fucking for five days with your friends can be a pretty good time.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:42Robert Evans?

  Like you knew already before you did it.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Hope you disinfected those cuts from the glass that was falling from the ceiling.

• 38:50Robert Evans?

  A little bit of glass cuts. Whoever got hurt by glass, other than the people. So Don agrees eventually to marry Nicole, knowing it's a bad idea. And Nicole admits to him at this point, after he says, let's get married. She's like, by the way, this whole thing is all about orgasms. This is an orgasm cult that we're doing. And he is, he's initially pissed, but at this point he's agreed to marry her, right? So he forgives her and they have a weird wedding where she kind of ignores him until they're married. And then she tells him, she turns to him and she says, actually, you've just married everyone in this room. And it's all of the other cult members. Horrible time for Don.

• 39:28Robert Evans?

  And her followers jokingly make Don a shirt that says, indignant man kidnapped by love cult, like a, like a fake headline as a joke that I love. Like they're really poor, like Don is, he's getting fucked with, but also they were just saying what was happening, man. Like, I don't know.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  It's like, at some point, well, I don't, I don't even know, this, this guy can't catch a break and they're bullying him.

• 39:55Robert Evans?

  And they're bullying him. And I think his attitude is kind of like, I bought the ticket, I took the ride, you know? Like, he's not the ultimate victim. His story's just very funny to me.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just like, at some point, it just gets weird where he's like, well, it's, it's just like someone acting like they're wearing handcuffs when it's like, no, man, you own the house. This is your house.

• 40:15Robert Evans?

  You own the house, bro. Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  You are not trapped here. He's like, well, there's nothing I can do. Sir.

• 40:22Robert Evans?

  So the group, still going by IMU, starts offering courses for money. And so for the first time, people start paying them and attending, but they're not a lot of people. This is not a big group yet. And they're not teaching orgasm at first in these classes. They're not doing the stroking or anything of that. Instead, they're teaching Nicole's philosophy, which is a bunch of warmed over bullshit from like the middle of the last century. And basically like, basically Nicole's attitude is like, life has no inherent meaning other than the one that you give it, which sounds like it could be fine, right? People take that in healthy ways. This is often the case with Nicole's stuff. There's a way you can interpret that healthily. But what Nicole means by that is that if you have

• 41:03Robert Evans?

  a bad experience, that's because you're choosing to frame the thing that happened to you as a bad thing, and you don't have to do that. And the point that she will tell in these, in these classes to illustrate what she's saying is that, you know, when I was a child, I used to think that my father had molested me. But now that I'm a mature adult and I've done a lot of work and gone through all of the coursework and stuff on this, I know now I seduced my father. I was the one with power.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  So she's just teaching Darv, like that's.

• 41:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's the class.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  That's.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. That's very upsetting.

• 41:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  It's really, I mean, especially because.

• 41:45Robert Evans?

  It's upsetting, yeah.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Because you're like, I mean, it's like the, you, you gotta feel for her that it's like, if she does, if she does believe it, that's really tragic and.

• 41:56Robert Evans?

  That's really fucked up.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:59Robert Evans?

  That said, I think, I don't think that she, I think this is, maybe she believes or not, but I think this is consciously, she's doing this because she knows what she's gonna be doing to the people who are her followers, right? And she wants, this is a really good thing to convince everyone to believe at the baseline before you start doing the other shit she's gonna do. That if you think something's bad, it's because you're interpreting it as bad.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  It's like almost like a grooming tactic. Like you've just taken a course on why everything that's about to happen to you is actually okay.

• 42:26Robert Evans?

  It's fine, is good, yes.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 42:30Robert Evans?

  And obviously that, that really like sends a message to her followers early on. In 2003, after Carol leaves and Dawn marries Nicole, Nicole brings a new guy into the fold, a new old guy. This is Ray Vetterling. Ray Vetterling had been a protege of Vic at Moore, at, at the Morehouse thing. And he, he was like the almost famous version of a cult leader. Like he'd been pretty big in Morehouse. He'd done some cult stuff of his own, but had never really taken off. He'd like done, he'd made some money, he'd done okay, but it never really.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Cult leaders.

• 43:05Robert Evans?

  It's a tough industry. He's a working cult leader, Ray is, right?

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Don't take it personally, man. It could have just as easily been you.

• 43:13Robert Evans?

  One leg at a time? Yeah, exactly.

• 43:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. But Ray knows the business, right? Ray knows if you're gonna start a cult, here's the things you wanna do. Here's how you build the curriculum that you're gonna sell and all this stuff. And so she brings him in and he writes down a lot of his best tips and tricks and he helps her kind of plan the cult she's gonna start from the ground up.

• 43:36Robert Evans?

  And this is kind of a situation where Ray is both gonna get physical access into Cole's body. He's gonna be doing all of these physical orgasm demonstrations where he's like stroking her. But he also, he gets to like, he gets to kind of live through her because she is young enough and has enough energy to start a successful cult and he doesn't anymore. And I think that's a big part of it for Ray, right?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:57Robert Evans?

  Um, so he writes out a document for her, laying out how this orgasm cult ought to function. Per the book Empire of Orgasm, quote, "Some of the lessons were nuts and bolts practical. Teachers should be in couples, ideally in their early 30s. Young enough that 20-year-old students won't see them as mom and dad making out. Host a law, a day-long intro course twice a month," he said, "and use a short demo of a woman in orgasm at the end of the class as a safe showstopper, a format that one taste, that's her later cult, would employ for more than a decade. The minute one woman sees another woman getting off like that, they want to be there too," Ray wrote. Right? So, he, they spell this out all very directly. And his pitch to her as to like, why this is gonna work, is that Morehouse had failed because it was too patriarchal. It was too trapped in the 70s

• 44:41Robert Evans?

  and 80s, right? People today didn't want to hear like a fucking dude with a mustache talk about how much he's getting laid. They want the illusion at least of feminism and gender equality. And they want to be told that what they're doing isn't just because they're horny, it's because it's gonna optimize their health. It's gonna make them more powerful. It's gonna make you smarter. It's gonna make you faster. It's gonna make you better able to compete in the cutthroat tech industry, right?

• 45:02Speaker 01

  That is such a like, it's, it's the same sexual crime, but being positioned by a woman who claims this will optimize you.

• 45:11Robert Evans?

  This will optimize you? Like eating their, drinking the right juice?

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Super funny.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  I mean, that's like, that is, even though it is funny and a great pitch, replacing, like, it's so Silicon Valley brain to be like, I come instead of drink coffee and it saves me time and it actually releases more chemicals.

• 45:29Robert Evans?

  It saves me eight minutes a day.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Look at how many emails I've sent. It's the same as the AI thing, really, right?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 45:37Robert Evans?

  Look at how many more emails I send than everyone else. I'm productive.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  They all, they like, they're all in a language I don't speak, but I sent them.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  And that's what matters.

• 45:49Robert Evans?

  That's what, that's all that matters in business. Ray has in this document, he writes, he has a line that is one of my favorite things from this. Since we are not yet selling the God hustle, what do we do? What we have to sell is an organically healthy lifestyle with sensuality and intimacy. Ray's really good at this. Like Ray's honestly a great mind in the, in the con business.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 46:13Robert Evans?

  You know who else is a great mind when it comes to conning people?

• 46:17Speaker 02

  You?

• 46:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And the sponsors of this podcast. This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto Dolutegravir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 46:48Speaker 05

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 47:23Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 47:30Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 48:04Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So Ray wrote that anyone showing up to their classes was by definition missing something, right? This is like, because this is something Nicole knows a lot of this, but Ray's kind of writing out all of his lessons. And one thing he writes that like, anyone's going to show up to like a optimize your life fucking orgasm class is missing something, right? They don't, they don't have everything they need. They're not fully happy. Otherwise, they wouldn't be here. And the one thing that Americans are more likely to miss than anything else is intimacy, right? So if you can create situations that fake very sudden, very intense intimacy with a large number of hot people, you can make a fuckload of money because people will get addicted to that and they'll pay any amount of money to keep being around it.

• 48:47Robert Evans?

  And all you have to do is be brutally honest about what they're doing wrong, at which point they'll listen to whatever you tell them is the right way to do things, right? Because they want to stay there. They want to keep having these experiences. They want to keep feeling that they're having revelations and stuff because they're just doing things that feel good for their body and that's nice. And people can't accept that. People can't just accept that like, oh, maybe I like having sex in like a fucking weird group situation, which is a perfectly fine thing for people to do if that's what gets you off. But they, they can't just accept this feels good. It has to be optimizing me. This has to be unlocking a secret hack in my brain. Otherwise, it's a waste of time because I won't make more money at Apple, right? Like, that's literally just the fucking thing.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  And it's like going back to the fucking 12th century is like a cis woman orgasming has to have some sort of like crucial productive function where it just, nothing can just feel good.

• 49:39Robert Evans?

  And that's, that's really what drew me in to like the fucking events that I like, these little burn events that I went to was like, the whole, the whole pitch was like, you know what sucks? Capitalism. You know, it doesn't suck doing drugs with your friends in the woods. And like,

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Where's the hedonism?

• 49:54Robert Evans?

  It wasn't like, the hedonism's important.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Where's the hedonism? This shit sucks.

• 50:00Robert Evans?

  They had that back in Morehouse, but it got really, again, if there's also a guy that you're paying for the experience.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:07Robert Evans?

  That's the other important thing is that, and there's not like a guy, like it's just a bunch of people hanging out, like, no one's getting rich off of this.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:16Robert Evans?

  Like, as soon as there's a guy, and as soon as you're paying thousands of dollars, like, things get very quickly problematic. Um, and, but, but, if you're paying thousands of dollars, then it can't just be something that feels good. Cause like, actually feeling good can be really cheap. Like, like, I had to sit on the couch, like, with my partner, and we both have a real, like, feel really nice, like, watching a movie.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:36Robert Evans?

  But nobody makes money off of that.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  You can't tell.

• 50:38Robert Evans?

  There's gotta be a fucking, yeah.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  They have a meeting.

• 50:40Robert Evans?

  Can't be worth anything.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  They have a meeting at the beginning of every day. Do not tell people they can just come at their house.

• 50:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Do not tell them.

• 50:47Robert Evans?

  Don't tell people that. Don't let them know they can just actually find love and companionship without, like, paying money, cause that will ruin us.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  You can just start a conversation with someone and see what happens. Don't tell them that shit.

• 50:58Robert Evans?

  Don't let them know. Don't let them know. So, Don and Nicole and their little group are living at Ray's place at this point, right? They moved into Ray's house, and they're helping Nicole explore how to make her, they're basically prepping, they're never gonna be doing these public orgasm demos, and they're, they're, they're training, right? They're doing, they're like, preparing for like, these marathon public orgasm sessions, right? And this means that Nicole, every day, is lying down in a room full of mirrors while Don and Ray, and Ray's in his 70s, masturbate her at the same time. And Ray is supposed to be kind of like, teaching Don how to do it, cause the idea initially is that Don will do this, cause he's her husband, in the, uh, in the actual, like, public classes. And Nicole is, she's not, you know, she's, she's having these with a lot of her followers,

• 51:43Robert Evans?

  like, they're all practicing their, these masturbation techniques. And Nicole is keeping a blog, in which she writes about her experiences in lurid detail. And this is, to give you an idea of like, how she's, cause she, you can't ever talk about it like sex. You should never describe the sexual sensations, or what you're seeing or doing in a sexual manner. You don't want it to be hot. You want it to sound like a fucking poem or something, right? Like, because that makes it not gross. So, for an example of that, here's one description that Nicole wrote about how it felt to be masturbated by Ray, this elderly cult leader.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Oh no.

• 52:19Robert Evans?

  The laughter welled and welled inside of me. I became swollen with laughter and then like champagne pouring over the sides of the bottle, tears began to flood me. Right? And again, the key here is that there's nothing about sex in there. Right? That makes it seem profound and also marketable.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Some Lana Del Rey ass line.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  I was like, it is like, whatever, writing sex poetry is fine, but if, but if that's like a hard rule, then it starts to feel kind of like dissociative.

• 52:45Robert Evans?

  But also that makes it feel very different from these prior cults. There's no guys going, and this is so hot, isn't it? Like, because they're not, they're being like, no, it's like champagne pouring over the sides of a bottle. You know, it just feels more intellectual and thus safe. Right?

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:01Robert Evans?

  That's the basic idea. And part of the idea here is that like, while she's being stroked for an audience, she'll call in like people to put her hands, their hands on her and describe how they felt. And the idea is that like, this is such a, like a powerful spiritual thing that like, everybody is affected by it in the room. Right? And that gets everyone to buy into it and it makes them feel connected and included and helps make it an addictive experience. Soon she's got like 20 or so followers, but she's not making money off of this and she feels like the group is incomplete. Until one day, Ray is like, hey, Don's not working for like the sex demo stuff. Nobody's gonna want to watch Don do this. I think you should bring Irwan back because Irwan's hot and he's really good at doing these, these demos.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Don cannot catch a break.

• 53:49Robert Evans?

  Fucking Don?

• 53:50Speaker 01

  He's been fired from the manipulative sex local theater troupe.

• 53:54Robert Evans?

  It's so sad. And, and Don, he's growing increasingly disillusioned. He hears, one day, he overhears Ray and Irwan talking because she brings in Irwan and Ray and Irwan called Don a throwaway person?

• 54:08Speaker 01

  He, okay.

• 54:09Robert Evans?

  It's so sad.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  There is like a Eugene Levy and Best in Show quality to Don to me. He's just like.

• 54:17Robert Evans?

  It's really funny. Eugene Levy 20 years ago would have been the guy to cast for Don.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  For Don. Be like, hey, so, um, people, you're really bringing down the vibe at the sex cult.

• 54:30Robert Evans?

  Done. So Don flips out and Don leaves. Nicole divorces him and by the time she and Erwan do their first public demo in front of an audience of 40, he is all but forgotten.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Bye, Don. Bye, Don. Good for you.

• 54:44Robert Evans?

  Bye, Don. Bye, Don. This first public, like, stroking demo happens in August of 2003. Hewitt's book describes the scene in detail, and I don't feel the need to tell you what Erwan did to this woman's vulva step by step. I appreciate that Ellen does. Her book is very good. You learn a lot about this group and exactly what they're doing. We don't need to talk about that. You get the idea, right? What's important is what he tells the audience after Nicole has a massive, shuddering, hour-long orgasm in front of a crowd. Quote, "It's pure euphoria. You can have as much of that sensation as you like. You can feel it in your body as much as you want. If she can do this, so can you." And then he invites audience members up to touch Nicole, and this works like gangbusters, right?

• 55:28Robert Evans?

  People love this. They tell their friends. Soon more folks are signing up to go watch the orgasm class, right?

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Doing like a horny Marina Abramovic thing. It just feels like, it's like a, it's like a performance art thing. It's...

• 55:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  And he's like the maître d'. He's the, he's the, you know, guy with the microphone. Come, come first, come all.

• 55:53Robert Evans?

  And that's gonna be a problem, right? Because Nicole, she got into this to be the one, right? She's the cult leader. If Erwan is like the star of the show, because he's actually doing the demonstration and talking, and she's just kind of like mutely, not mutely, but like, she's not making like, she's not speaking. She's, she's supposed to be having an orgasm, right? She's kind of a secondary figure in the demo. That is not gonna work for Nicole.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  One of my favorite details to add here is that this man's name is definitely Erwan, but Robert keeps calling him Erwan, like, the grocery store. And I love it.

• 56:33Robert Evans?

  It's spelled E-R-W-A-N.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  And I've been enjoying it the entire time, but I think, uh, but I think we're about to see, I think we're about to see the last of this man, and I wanted to get it in.

• 56:44Robert Evans?

  We are. We're not, we're not, everyone's not gonna be around all that much longer.

• 56:49Robert Evans?

  Because Nicole, Nicole was, basically as soon as this first demo goes the way it does, Nicole has like a team meeting, like a cult meeting, and she's like, you guys gotta choose him or me. Like, she has enough in, she's got the instincts where she's like, if I let this get established is the way we do things, he's gonna be the cult leader, right? And I don't want that. That's not okay.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  This is such a Silicon Valley approach to cult leading. It's so wild.

• 57:15Robert Evans?

  It is, it is, it's very much. This is like the PayPal mafia shit.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  It's like a board meeting.

• 57:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:20Robert Evans?

  It's the PayPal mafia with weird orgasm fucking teachings.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  So, so he's nuked. He's gone.

• 57:28Robert Evans?

  He's nuked, yeah. The cult picks Nicole. Nicole wins. And Erwan leaves the picture. Erwin, whatever you wanna call him.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  Bye, Erwan.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Erwin, whatever.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Your prices are high. Great produce. Sorry.

• 57:42Robert Evans?

  And, uh, Ray gets kicked out right after that, not long after that, because Nicole no longer needs any old men, like, hanging around the group, right?

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Bye, Ray.

• 57:50Robert Evans?

  She's, she's figured things out, yeah. The grift is now ready. This is a fully operational battle station. The grift is now ready for the prime time.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  So long, farewell, avita. Sorry. I just like that she's kicking out all these fucking weird men.

• 58:05Robert Evans?

  You like that Ray's gone, all the, all the fuckboys and fuck elderly men are gone?

• 58:07Speaker 02

  It's nice so far.

• 58:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, in March of 2004, Nicole finally settles on a name for what they were doing. One Taste. It was taken from the title of a book by a philosopher and attributed to a statement by the Buddha. Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so also this teaching and discipline has one taste.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  One taste?

• 58:28Robert Evans?

  The taste of liberation. Yes, one taste. The taste of liberation. He's talking about, that's Buddha talking about, I guess, Buddhism.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. But she's like, one taste, because when you have one taste...

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Not pussy, you guys. Not pussy.

• 58:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah. They're, they're not doing that, Jamie, but when you have one taste of the life we offer you, you'll never want anything else for yourself, right? That's how it's supposed to feel, you know?

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:48Robert Evans?

  Um, so, on July 30th, 2004, the One Taste Urban Retreat Center opened in San Francisco's Folsom Street, which is probably the most sex-positive neighborhood in the US at the time. There's a big street fair on Folsom that's like a bunch of leather daddies and like some really depraved public sex acts. If you really wanna see some shit, go to the Folsom Street Parade.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  San Francisco in the 2000s is still, like, kind of hanging on to still be cool.

• 59:13Robert Evans?

  It's pretty cool.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 59:14Robert Evans?

  It's pretty cool, yeah.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:16Robert Evans?

  So Nicole and her followers ran their orgasm demos there. But they also like, this is like a big warehouse, basically. And they've got like several different businesses that they operate out of it. They've got a yoga studio. They've got a massage parlor. They've got like a cafe that sells fucking frozen yogurt because it's 2004. And they're also hosting workshops, not just the orgasm stuff. They've got some very bay friendly subjects like conscious cuddling, right? Where again, it's, and you get a lot of like, oh, people think you have to pay to like cuddle with a bunch of people. Because they don't know, they don't have any community. Like, ah, that's a bummer. Again, that stuff was just free when I was

• 59:56Robert Evans?

  younger. We didn't have to pay to fucking do a workshop next to a froyo stand. So the orgasm stuff was kooky and out there. But for the most part, they blended into the scenery of San Francisco at that time. One Taste was a business and her cult members are also all employees, although they are not receiving regular or sufficient pay for the 14 hour days that they're putting in.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Okay, Silicon Valley, paid in experience.

• 1:00:21Robert Evans?

  Paid in experience, baby.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  Since you mentioned froyo, it does, One Taste does sound like a Pinkberry.

• 1:00:28Robert Evans?

  It's a good idea for a froyo name, yeah.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Robert Evans?

  It would be funny if they hadn't become a criminal cult, which is where this ends. And it had just pivoted hard into froyo. And I was just explaining the origins of a popular frozen yogurt company.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. They're just like, wait, so we just realized froyo is where the money is? So we're dropping the sex cult.

• 1:00:47Robert Evans?

  We're dropping the sex. It's like if you were looking up like the marble slab cream. You're like, oh, they used to fuck on the slab? Huh.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:00:53Robert Evans?

  I didn't guess that.

• 1:00:56Robert Evans?

  Guess the ice cream was a better business. Yeah, McDonald's used to, used to just be a guy named McDonald in a bedroom. But then he started serving burgers and, you know, one thing led to another. So Morehouse starts having weekly sessions where they'll, again, they're playing communication games to draw in the normies. You know, instead of calling it the mark group or the benchmark group, she called this the in-group. A term which I think deeply revealing to the social dynamics that are at play here. Because most people, most of us. Weren't cool at high school or at any of the schools that we went to. And some people grow up and they enter the wide world and they find their place in it. And we forget that we ever wanted strangers to think that we were cool. Other people don't get over that and they particularly never get over, a lot of men,

• 1:01:39Robert Evans?

  never get over seeing like the cool, hot guys at their high school, hanging out with the cool, hot girls who didn't know they existed, right? That like eats at them the remainder of their lives. And so that's why she's calling it the in-group, right? Is it's to kind of, to be like, you're one of the cool kids if you're hanging out with us, right? Like you're one of the cool kids if you pay for our classes. This is how to be that because we're having lots of fun, experimental weird sex. Now, it would be very unfair of me, I should, I should note, just to say that, to talk about, because I've largely been talking about what is drawing like these men, particularly these men with money into this group, right? What is bringing them in? And it'd be really unfair of me to say that and not talk about what the women who are joining the cult are getting out of this.

• 1:02:23Robert Evans?

  Because most of the cult leaders, I think, are women, or cult members are women, right? And they're women of all ages. They are really heavily recruiting younger women, but there are women who are in like their 40s and 50s who are joining too. And so it's important, like, what are, how is Nicole reaching them? Because I can understand the marketing to middle-aged men thing, right? But I don't know, like, what's drawing these, because it seems like a lot of vulnerability, a lot of putting your body on display, a lot of like risk. And anyway, I looked into a bunch of like their advertising videos and I found some of those that I think make that a little easier to understand. Sophie's going to play a video for you called "Overcoming Depression Through Orgasmic Meditation", and it shows one example of how the cult sold themselves to women.

• 1:03:07Speaker 06

  I didn't know another way of being. Like, I was like, oh, everybody has this, everybody has these thoughts and feelings, but you have to keep them hidden.

• 1:03:16Speaker 07

  When I see how people are treated for depression now, it breaks my heart. The very last thing you need is a diagnosis that comes on to you, like an additional sentence, because most people who are depressed feel guilty.

• 1:03:33Speaker 06

  My whole life, I struggled with depression. I never felt a lot of joy, like I didn't have a big range of emotions above sadness. I'd come home from work and lay on the couch. I would drink, I would sleep, take sleeping pills, anything to make the thoughts in my mind stop and to not have to feel what I was feeling. I'd taken antidepressants, you know, many antidepressants, many anti-anxiety medications. And the best they did was just numb the feelings a little bit. The thoughts were still there, the doubt, the fear, the lack of joy or happiness was still there. So it didn't seem like those provided me with the solution.

• 1:04:15Speaker 06

  I wanted to actually have a full, the full life that I wanted to live.

• 1:04:21Speaker 07

  What is aimed to heal them in their depression actually just numbs them and has them feel that much more disconnected from life.

• 1:04:31Robert Evans?

  So, first off, you see the pitch. Are you depressed and sad? We have an answer. Boy, medication isn't always pleasant and it kind of, the diagnosis can feel like an anchor. There's a lot of anti-medical stuff in that video, right? And she describes that like many people are have like suffer both from the dis- it's not just depression is suffering, people suffer, sure, but then when you go on the drugs, it disconnects them. And that's the kind of suffering too, right?

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  I guess it's like, I, it's, it's very new agey bullshit and like trying to separate you from potential tools, but also, I don't know. Targeting women in their 40s and 50s is interesting to me because I'm, I'm wondering if it's connected to possibly, you know, like when women hit midlife, they're treated like they don't exist as sexual beings and that that's like not something that is thought about.

• 1:05:29Robert Evans?

  And especially older women in this period would have grown up in a time that was even more sexually restricted.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:35Robert Evans?

  And people are starting to talk openly. That's kind of part of why, like, people are so affected by this is like, if you're someone in that situation and you like lay down and there's like this hot young guy who like tells you, like, looks at you and tells you you're beautiful and then starts massaging you like that, I'm not surprised. A lot of people get very addicted to that and they're like, yeah, this did more for my depression than than therapy was doing, right?

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:58Robert Evans?

  How they would feel like that in the moment and then they get wrapped up in a cult that causes much, much more damage.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  But it's just the way that they're targeting people is very particular. That that was a freaky ad.

• 1:06:10Robert Evans?

  It's really, it's about to get freakier because Sophie's gonna play you, continue playing that, but from, can you play from 132 to 147 from the same video, Sophie? Thank you.

• 1:06:17Speaker 07

  For depression, many have turned successfully to orgasmic meditation, an attention training practice with defined procedures. In Ohm, a partner strokes a woman's clitoris for 15 minutes with no other goal than to feel what is present in the moment.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  Ah!

• 1:06:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  Ah!

• 1:06:39Robert Evans?

  So.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  They did her dirty in that edit. Oh, my God.

• 1:06:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Oh, this is a bummer.

• 1:06:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it is a little, it's a, it is a bummer.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Robert Evans?

  It's depressing. Now, a big thing that Nicole is doing here, she's recruiting and stocking her events with a lot of attractive young women and some attractive young men, but most of the guys in the group are like closer to or past middle age. And when those other dudes saw that, like, the guys who were in the cult giving clitoral massages to 22-year-olds who are also like in the cult, or like just playing card games and laughing like close friends with those same girls, their brains go right back to the 11th grade, right? Only now Nicole is there with an offer, which is pay me for classes and you get to be in the in-group, right?

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:27Robert Evans?

  And they're, you know, that's kind of, part of it is like, yeah, you get to be cool and you get to have this, these new cool friends who are all like free with each other's bodies with each other. And people are just so fucking lonely. Like, this is very appealing to some folks.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Right. It's

• 1:07:40Robert Evans?

  It's a bummer.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  It's not, it is really sad. And I know it's like not necessar- It does feel like very American to like monetize the idea of community like this. And, you know, just like whatever, hyper, hyper target people who are made invisible by the culture they're in and be, and being like, okay, you're seen now, you're valid, you're attractive, you're loved. That'll be $5,000.

• 1:08:08Robert Evans?

  That'll be fit, like, yeah.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  And then call that community. It's just like, yeah.

• 1:08:14Robert Evans?

  And a big thing Nicole is doing, because when she's like recruiting, particularly the younger people who are going to like be, like, doing most of the work in this, is she's a bit older than them, but she seems like she has her life together. She seems like she has an identity. She's offering an identity. And all you have to do is like a whole bunch of clitoral massages and sometimes open yourself sexually to a bunch of like weird older men who are giving the cult money. And this kind of

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Not a small ask, to be fair.

• 1:08:41Robert Evans?

  Nicole makes the transition from previously to kind of get the things the cult needed. Nicole had had to either sleep with directly, or at least like offer pieces of herself up to these like older and wealthier men that she needed something from. Now the cult is established, increasingly what she's going to do is these younger women and some of the younger men she's bringing in, because she does abuse a lot of younger men this way. Now, hey, the group needs you to have sex with this person, because they will spend a lot of money if you do that, right? That's the route this goes on, is from, I am going to make that choice for myself, to I am going to kind of convince other people to make that choice, to make me money, right? That's the journey Nicole has gone on in this, in this

• 1:09:24Robert Evans?

  story thus far. So one of her big teachings that she's, because in addition to the orgasm stuff, there's always way more convoluted philosophical stuff. And she's teaching her followers, life is a game, and it should be viewed as a game. And in a game, you have to explore all the nooks and crannies and try everything to solve different kinds of puzzles, right? Or find power ups or whatever. And so when she would ask a member to, to om or to have sex with somebody that they didn't find attractive, that's a game. Oh, you don't like this like rich, older dude who's kind of like weird and lecherous to you? Well, it'll be a game for you to figure out how to have fun, you know? Like, that's the game. Like, um, when, yeah, like, exactly. And she'll do, this will be very directly.

• 1:10:08Robert Evans?

  When wealthy men or women will like walk into a One Taste event and Nicole will notice that they're like attracted to or hitting on a specific member of the cult. She'll tell that person, go flirt with them, right? Maybe you don't have to have sex with them right away, but convince them to like take a class, to sign up, they'll get to hang out with you. And she'll put, she'll give some of her followers free or discounted classes to make sure they're in the same class as like these dudes who were joining, because they never, most of the cult is pretty, there's a lot of women in it, but most of the people paying for classes are paying to get physical access to the bodies of the younger female cult members. And there's not enough women paying for classes for like, Nicole has to constantly putting people in. And that's just prostitution, right?

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  Right, I was like, this is like unethical.

• 1:10:51Robert Evans?

  You're gonna have to go in and they will pay money to touch you, right?

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Right, but it's, it sounds like, what if there was a model for sex work in which only Nicole was making money?

• 1:11:01Robert Evans?

  Makes money?

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  Like, that's not how that works and that no one has technically consented to be doing this sex work.

• 1:11:10Robert Evans?

  No. Now, a big part of the game is to keep people talking about One Taste, you know, hype and allure spread by word of mouth. And so Nicole starts offering, because they've got this yoga center, they offer naked yoga classes, which get newspaper, there's a bunch of stories about it, you know, like it becomes like this, oh, San Francisco sort of thing, right? It helps drive more people to the business. Maybe they come in to see the naked yoga class, but they find out orgasmic meditation, what's that, right?

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:11:40Robert Evans?

  And so they take a class. Now, as you probably heard by now, they're referring to om orgasmic meditation, they're pronouncing it om, like, you know, the, om, right, the meditative, you know, chant thing.

• 1:11:53Robert Evans?

  At the same time, they have turned the actual like clitoral stimulation massage thing into this almost sexless procedure. In one of the 10 books the group would publish under Nicole's name, she described orgasmic meditation as, quote, "a structured attention training practice described in concrete terms as one person stroking another's clitoris for 15 minutes according to specific instructions." And that language works really well in terms of getting newspapers and other media organizations to treat one taste very differently than they treated Morehouse or The Welcomed Consensus, both of which were described accurately as creepy weird sex clubs for perverts. One taste is going to be treated like a startup,

• 1:12:34Robert Evans?

  right? Or at least like a massively popular alt-health practice. And to kind of make that point, here's a segment from a 2009 New York Times article by Patricia Lay Brown and Carol Pogesh. Quote, "At 7:00 a.m. each day, as the rest of America is eating Cheerios or trying to face gridlock without hyperventilating, about a dozen women, naked from the waist down, lie with eyes closed in a velvet-curtained room while clothed men huddle over them, stroking them in a ritual known as orgasmic meditation, oming for short. The couples, who may or may not be romantically involved, call one another 'research partners.' A commune dedicated to men and women publicly creating the orgasm that exists between them," in the words of one resident, "may sound like the ultimate California satire. The notion of

• 1:13:16Robert Evans?

  a San Francisco sex commune focused on female orgasm as part of a long and rich history of women being public and empowered about their sexuality," said Elizabeth A. Armstrong, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, who has studied San Francisco's sexual subcultures. And I find that is really interesting because like, not only did you all fall for it, the New York Times kind of repeated their ad pitch where like, other people are stuck in traffic and going to work, you're just coming all the time if you join the cult.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, see, I wouldn't do their first time. It's so, how, I mean, how instantly, and I, like Nicole is really smart to do this if you're trying to do this, like, just like, co-opting any feminist talking point and the history of feminism in the area is Like thing number one to do.

• 1:14:06Robert Evans?

  Yep, immediately.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  It's from, straight from the Sandberg playbook.

• 1:14:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  And it's like, don't read too carefully. Yeah.

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  I see the puzzle pieces. You've got the border set up where it's gonna end up in part three being very...

• 1:14:18Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 1:14:19Speaker 02

  Like, I see the Silicon Valley of it all happening. Yeah.

• 1:14:22Robert Evans?

  And as you, as you note, Jamie, like Professor Armstrong isn't like, wrong per se.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:14:28Robert Evans?

  But also, she wouldn't have described Morehouse as part of a long and rich history of women being public and empowered about their sexuality, right? And this is the same thing. They've just dressed it up as a tech startup.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  And I'm curious about, I mean, like, what, I guess, this does feel very like Silicon Valley clinical to like mask something else. But removing all of this, it's like, all of the sexy parts of sex, but keeping all of the vulnerable parts of sex.

• 1:15:00Robert Evans?

  Interesting.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  I'm trying to, I mean, it's, it's leading to something, obviously, but it's just interesting how quickly we're, people at the time were like, so this is great, right?

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Like, the least sexy sex that you could possibly have, and it's expensive?

• 1:15:16Robert Evans?

  And it costs money. Well, part of what, I want to be clear here, it's only the classes where it's deliberately not sexy.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:15:24Robert Evans?

  Outside of the classes, there's a lot of regular sex happening. As we'll talk about in the, in the next part, these people are living together for a chunk of this, right?

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 1:15:32Robert Evans?

  For a lot of this. And Nicole is also telling them to pair up with people that like, I think it would be good for you to have sex with this guy who's gonna give us money. I think it'll be a growth experience for you to like, fuck this, this guy, this lady who we need something out of, right? But that's in the, that's happening underneath these public sterile sex demos. And so,

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  That's the facade.

• 1:15:52Robert Evans?

  The law who comes is gonna be like, well, whatever this is, it's not prostitution. They're clearly not horny. And they're ignoring all of the straight up prostitution that's happening in the background. Right?

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  They're clearly not horny. Let's keep moving.

• 1:16:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Off to find somebody else. It's also important, I note, kind of at the end here, that the image of this is that what's different about One Taste is that Nicole is running things. The boys aren't in charge. So this really is feminine and empowering. But that's not really what's happening either.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:16:22Robert Evans?

  Because by the time they start doing demos in San Francisco, Nicole is the stroker who's performing most often in front of these large groups. That's what they call it, right? And so she's often, when the media comes by, she'll often do the demo that they see of these meditative techniques. But she's the only woman in the cult who regularly got to perform as a stroker for classes and demonstrations.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:16:43Robert Evans?

  The other strokers in public are almost always men. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  So, I mean, and she has extra...

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  Gross.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's like she has, every other woman works under her, right? There's no, at this point, she has gotten rid of everyone who could be considered her equal.

• 1:16:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's definitely going to be some other women who have power in the cult that start, like, forming because she has to rely and delegate a lot.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05Robert Evans?

  But, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:17:07Speaker 02

  Well, I'm looking forward to part three.

• 1:17:10Robert Evans?

  Well, that's part two.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Awesome, guys. Really good.

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  Jamie, plug, let's plug some pluggables.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Let's plug, baby. Yeah, you can listen to Back to the Castle, we can be unhoused every single week. I've got a book coming out next year that I'll be able to talk more about soon. I can't talk about, yeah, follow me on Instagram, Jamie Cry Superstar.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:37Robert Evans?

  Excellent.

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  Podcast is over.

• 1:17:40Robert Evans?

  We're done. We're done.

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:18:19Speaker 05

  This January, bare-knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brew's Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool-deck bare-knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Mess of parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at B K F S E A dot com.

• 1:18:49Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Having peace of mind for your home, family, and connected life is more important than ever. Introducing Xfinity Shield. A force field for your home and devices with built-in Wi-Fi features that protect from threats at home and online. With the Xfinity Gateway, you can detect movement in your home. No cameras needed.

• 1:19:35Speaker 04

  Plus, get always-on protection for all your devices the moment you connect. So you can rest easy and stream more of your favorite podcasts on iHeartRadio. Get it now at Xfinity.com slash Shield. Xfinity. Imagine that. Restrictions apply. Not available in all areas. Xfinity Internet and compatible equipment required.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.