Transcript of Ellen Huet (on wellness cults)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Sheppard, and I'm joined by Modice Mouse.

Hi.

Today, we have Ellen Hewitt, and she is an award-winning investigative reporter. And boy, does she have a barn burner of an investigation that we're going to talk about. She's got a new book out now called Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult. You know, these cults are juicy, juicy, juicy.

They're so juicy. You want to talk... Juicy, uh-oh, pun intended.

Oh, better coming out of your mouth. I feel like I should join a cult. I'm so interested in them. I should at least do it for a couple months. Give it a little try. Go live on some federal land or something. You would not. I'd be a bad cult member.

You'd be so bad.

Please enjoy Ellen Hewitt. He's an option expert.

He's an option expert. He's an option expert. He's an Hi. Hi. I'm Ellen. Hi, Ellen.

Oh, that's okay. No, you're good.

I love your shirt. Thank you. That's so sweet.

I like red.

I'm really feeling- Tell me more the color, the texture, the cut.

All of it, actually. Every single thing. But also, I'm really feeling red this season. Feeling red.

How high are you on the fashionista? What would you give yourself? Low.

I got this set of clothing swaps. Okay, great.

You look very stylish. Thank you. You look very cute, too.

Thank you.

So you got lucky.

Yes. Yeah. I have a good eye, but there was a period of time in my life when I shopped more and it took up not just money, but emotional and mental energy, and I decided to not do it anymore.

To liberate yourself from it.

Yeah. Now it's clothing swaps. But I also live with a lot of people who like to host clothing swaps. I think unless you have that in your life, it's a little harder for that to be where you get clothes.

Are you currently still with 10 roommates or is that in the past?

No, I now live with 20. What?

Is that a commun? Explain this structure to us. I might be breaking the story about you, which would be fun. It'd be like a baton handoff.

At our current, I call it a commun, but I'm mostly joking, it's communal living compound. The WiFi password is not a cult. We joke a lot about it. It definitely doesn't qualify in a lot of ways. For many years, I lived in a group house with 10 roommates. That was one house. I lived elsewhere for a bit, and then I moved a different communal living compound where there are currently 20 adults, including me, and eight children under the age of 4.

Oh, my goodness. Yeah. So obviously, it's co-ad.

Yes. There's a lot of married couples. Most people aren't married.

And is their bed hopping going on? I just don't know how you get that many people together and there's no bed hopping.

I know. It's a lot more trying to fix the ailments of life when you have a young kid. And so imagine, we talk a lot about baby monitor distance. Put your kid to bed, 7: 30 or 8: 00 PM, and then you can come over and hang out.

Be a human. It's a villain.

Hang out with other people. We have dinner together six nights a week. Each of us takes turns cooking, so you cook once or twice a month.

But for 20 people, that's a lot.

Which has been fun. That's a new skill that I now have, which I didn't have before. So that's nice.

Yeah. How big are the pots and pans in this house? Very large.

Restaurant.

Great.

We have a pot we like to call Mondo Pot. If you're making a baked soup.

Now, listen, between the 20 of you, first of all, I don't know how that divides by seven, but we'll Just forget about that. Maybe you cook less than once a week?

It's a little more complicated than that.

I had a hunch.

Well, maybe a third of the people have decided that they would rather pay into a chef than cook. Everyone's happy about that because some of those people Well, if you're not enthusiastic about cooking, you're probably not a good cook. That's where I was going with this.

Exactly.

There's going to be nights where it's like, Oh, fucking Devon's going to make cowboy stew again.

You're totally right. It was like that for a long time. That's why they set up this system, which It was like a godsend. That was before I moved in, but I've been friends with these people for a long time. It used to be like, Oh, no. Phil's cooking. No one's happy about this. Phil's not happy.

You almost wake up in a bad mood that day. It's Tuesday Phil's cooking.

Or you make other plans. Then all of a sudden, it's like no one's showing up for dinner.

Can you order in on your own, just in your bedroom ever, if you want? Of course.

But then, yes, then we found this wonderful woman named Julie, and she comes and she cooks twice a week. Oh. Thank you, Julie. So either you can have a cooking shift or you pay into Julie.

How often are you in a pinch and you have to bring Julie What percentage is it?

No, we plan ahead.

No, you, personally.

Oh, me? Oh, no, I love doing the cooking. It takes up my evening. So it's like I tend to set aside three hours for it.

Yeah, it's Thanksgiving you're making.

I usually make a big soup or one thing that's on the stove, maybe one thing that's in the stove, salad, and maybe rice or roast of veggies. We eat a lot of tofu. You might not be surprised.

Did you take this structure from the Sweeds or somebody, or is this proprietary? You guys just worked it out over time? Because they do this in Sweden and Norway.

They're all over. Basically, my friend Phil.

The shitty cook.

Yes, the shitty cook. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shitty Chef Phil.

This is his life's work is trying to come up with concepts that allow people to live near their friends. Yeah. And with the idea that it makes life easier, happier, better in all the ways that you can imagine. There are different versions of it. He encourages people. Obviously, the most involved one, which is hardest for people to do, is buying property together with your friends. Yeah. Or you could rent next to your friend, or you could befriend your neighbor. It started off as a hobby, and then it has slowly become a thing for him.

So the one that you're in now is not one building?

No, it is six buildings. Okay. Yes.

And is Phil charismatic? We need to watch Phil. Is he the most charismatic of the group? This is a nod to the definition of what a cult is.

His wife, who is one of my closest friends. I mean, I'm very close to Phil and Chris and his wife. She is my friend who is the most like a cult leader. Wow.

Okay, great. But we think she's benevolent.

She's benevolent enough, I think, on a scale. But she is that person who has a vision for how people should do things and can be pushy. She's extremely effective. She's one of the most high functioning people I know, and she's tiny. That's what's funny. They normally are. I know.

Small and mighty.

She's the one to watch out for.

Okay, I'll keep my eye on her.

It's hard to not talk about this the whole time. I'm finding this fascinating.

Maybe we will. Sure. We'll bounce back and forth. Because I'm going to be honest with you. I've thought about During COVID, we potted up with five families, and it became what you're talking about, which is like it was a reprieve for us parents because the kids would be distracted. Someone would host, so we'd fuck up someone's house, and then they dealt with it. Then you only got your house fucked up once a week. You handled food. It was lovely. It was so fun. There wasn't enough bed hopping, if I have a complaint. There was none. Yeah, there's no bed hopping. Were they nearby? Yeah, we never lived on the property, but we would vacation altogether.

Yeah, that's really nice.

The vacations were really when we were doing that because there were certain ones that were so perfect where it was like the pool was in the middle. Do you remember this one? And then there was like, surrounding.

The Palm Springs one had that.

Yeah. Individual rooms.

You want individual spaces with a communal space that's at the center, which I argue needs to have a kitchen.

Yes, that's what this had.

Because that's where people, you come into grays, you snack, you talk to someone. To me, it's like you could have everything individual. But as long as you had a shared kitchen that is really like a primary kitchen for most of the people, it's going to feel like living together. Yes. But you don't actually have to deal with sharing a bathroom, which can be harder for people.

What happens if someone becomes annoying?

Which certainly has to happen.

It has to happen.

Or goes through stuff.

It can be hard. In my old house, actually, one of the hardest things that we dealt with was there was a moth infestation, clothes moths. People had very different tolerances for a little bit of clothes moths. It caused a lot of pain. Some people were really feeling not heard. We'd have house meetings and be like, What should we do about the moths?

I would be so pissed if you brought moths and then they ate all my clothes up.

But how does one person bring moths?

You bring in clothing with moth. They're very hard to get rid of. Yes, they are. It's basically two kinds of people in the world, people who have dealt with a clothes-moth problem, and those who haven't, and blessed are the second category.

I just discovered a moth hole in one of my items that I hadn't worn for three years. I thought I gave a character. You could pay for that of distressed.

They're close to Kristen's closet. That's not fair to her.

But this is years ago. Let's not get too bogged down in that.

The real path is wear your clothes often and you won't have a problem with it. Because it's like, if you take them out, move them around, show them to the sun. They don't like that. They don't like that.

They don't like that.

Okay, I would imagine it's baked in that we have check-ins. It seems like it really needs check-ins. So what's that schedule?

There are a lot of houses like this in San Francisco, and they're all in a network. So I have friends who have lived in other ones. Some people do house meeting every week. That's a lot. At my current place, we have them roughly six weeks, and we don't need that many. And that's really nice. It's a sign of high functioning phase of the group where we have had a lot of house meetings where it's pretty simple. Two or three agenda items. Let's talk about should we move dinner time? Because the kids are getting older and they stay up later. How should we handle certain kinds of guests? We want to alert people more often.

It does sound really fun. More of all. I don't think they're all super sexually charged. I I think those ones that are probably don't last very long. It's too much trauma. Now, I want to hit you with this theory as someone who's now been studying a specific cult for seven years or eight years. I have this theory, and I say it with great respect to my many friends that are in Scientology. I think the fact that L. Ron Hubbard didn't fuck all the parishioners is very telling. I think there's something very interesting there. We don't have an example where the cult leader doesn't fuck everyone.

You're totally right.

It's really rare.

It's true that most cults control their members' sexuality in some way, whether that's prescribed celibacy, prescribed promiscuity, arranged marriages, whatever. I've heard experts describe this as just an effective tactic because if you manage to control someone's sex life, it's just this very intimate thing about them.

And can be manipulated and leveraged quite easily because it's also the source of shame and embarrassment and insecurity.

And can be used as leverage or payment, often like payment to the leader. But that's a great point. It's not like a must have, but I do think it's a most have.

I'm super fascinated by calls, and that's the only one I've ever been aware of where they weren't fucking everyone.

You're totally right. They weren't fucking everyone, but there's blackmail involved in Scientology. I think he knows about people's sex.

Well, let's be careful. There's alleged blackmail.

I'm not kidding. Well, you just call it... It's also an alleged cult.

No, I said I have an opinion and a theory. When you say they do blackmail, that's liable.

Okay, well, they're probably going to be mad that we're calling it a cult in general.

Someone's had their defamation training.

I just I want you to make that point. I just want you to say- There's alleged blackmail that happens.

And is it sexual in nature?

I think whatever they can get on you can be used. So I'm sure a lot of that is sexual.

Yeah. The allegations I've heard is you're doing these monitored sessions with the paddles, and you're telling a lot of your history, and that's being recorded. So then the embarrassing aspects of that can be leveraged against you, which, of course, would include sex a lot.

Yeah, probably a lot of that. If that If it happens. If it happens. If it's a cult. I mean, we have to say that, too. I bet on Wikipedia, it doesn't say that.

What's good is there's no... You couldn't prove or not for the cult.

Obviously, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to be careful, legally speaking. And yeah, cult, I think it can be maybe part of an argument, legally speaking, that there has been malice or hitting certain bars of defamation. But I don't think it's something that you can point to on its own and be like, it's defamity.

There's no actual legal issue with being a cult leader. You can't be tried for being a cult leader. That's not in itself a crime. But you'd have to do some other things. Yeah, I'm super fascinated by them. I'm also often in the position, as you probably are living in this communal situation, where you got to know what the difference is because I'm in AA. I'll be the first to admit, we It took a lot of boxes, man. But at the end of the day, there's no leader. That must be the quintessential ingredient because somehow this AA thing has lasted for 80 years pretty successfully.

The main takeaway is there's no yes or no cult or not. It's not a binary. It exists on a continuum/spectrum. Charismatic leader is an important factor, but it can be part of a whole. Or you could imagine if something else checked all these other boxes and they happen to not have someone who fit that exact definition, you could still imagine it being pretty harmful, but it's all on a scale.

Then I'll tell you my grossest, deepest thoughts. I hope it's having integrity, which is like, I regularly am trying to make sure I'm not becoming a narcist or cult leader-like, Because when you have an audience, I think a lot of people have had an audience and not checked in with themselves, and I've watched them all go down a predictable. There's a great podcast about podcasters turned gurus, which is like a well worn path. I'm constantly thinking of like, okay, well, how do we know we're not a narcist? What proof do we have in our defense? And then why am I not a cult leader? Yeah. And making sure I don't ever try to become one because it's tempting, I think, for people.

Yeah. One of the hot tips to avoid being in too extractive of a cult is to try to join more than one. And see how they feel. Yeah. If you're worried, like group A in my life is taking too much control, I'm concerned about it, try to join another that is maybe equally demanding of your time. If that's an okay coexistence, that's actually probably a sign that you're okay, or maybe you're not in so much of a dangerous zone. We should let people join another.

We encourage people to listen Revisionist History all the time. Yeah, only that one, though. Well, no. Elizabeth and Andy.

And nobody's listening, right? We have a handful of allow.

But- It's sanction.

Yeah, exactly. There's a list on the website.

When there's the Biker Club meetup, these are the groups that can all coexist without the- Yeah, exactly. Okay, so you're from Fremont, and then you went to Stanford. That's right. You don't sound very financially motivated.

Is that because I'm a journalist?

When you think go to Stanford, you're like, oh, great, that's turnkey to 800,000 a year. A lot of people that go to Stanford are definitely financially motivated.

That seems fair. Okay.

Then now I find this communal living thing. Tell me about your relationship with, well, A, how do we major in English and poli sci? And also, what's just your disposition about this stuff?

About making money?

Yeah, you feel unique, especially in Silicon Valley.

When I was at Stanford, I took English classes. I was really involved in the school newspaper, did all the things that you might expect of a overachieving letters-oriented verbal gerble. The year that I graduated, a lot of the people who were really looking to get involved in Silicon Valley, working at Google was still a hot job. Now I gather you want to be a founder or boss, right? People are like, The best thing you can say is that I dropped out of Sanford to start a company or something. I didn't take a CS class until my last year at Sanford, and it was actually really fun. One of my only regrets is that maybe I should have done that sooner, but just because it was intellectually stimulating in a new way.

Is this fair to say you fell in love with writing at the paper at Sanford? I did. You were the editor.

No, I was a managing editor. But college was the first place where I remember writing a story that I felt mattered, that was a news story that had to do with Don't ask, don't tell or something that was controversial. I was really motivated by that. That was probably the first time I got the news bug. Then I really wanted to be a journalist.

You went straight to San Francisco Chronicle.

I almost took another job in marketing. I went to that job interview and I was like, This sucks. I don't want to do this. I called the newspaper who I had applied to, and they had not gone back to me. I called them. I was like, Please, please, please hire me. They said, yes. Then I did a tour of a few years of working at the paper and basically working as a general assignment, breaking news crime reporter, which means crime, fires, animal stories, traffic, random things, shootings, homicides.

A cornucopia of fun San Francisco offerings.

You learn a lot about the city. You learn how to call up people who are in a really tough situation, like maybe their child has just died or someone they know has killed somebody. You call them and you're like, Hi.

Yeah. What year Where is this?

This would have been 2011 to 2014.

I think saying I'm a reporter is a tough line.

It is hard, but you got to do it.

Although it's also exciting, I think for people to be approached by a reporter is like, My life just got newsworthy in an interesting way.

Someone says no, I'm like, great. I won't call you again.

I'm going to fuck you. I'm going to hang up.

100%. That has happened. Every once in a while, you call someone and they're like, I'm so glad you called. I'd really like to tell you about my brother. I really want to explain to you what he was like. He's not just this news incident that just defined him. He has this whole backstory or I remember experiences like that. So I never feel bad about asking the first time. Yeah. Yeah.

And do you feel lucky about the time frame in which you started this job? Because I feel like that's a very ripe time to be starting to report on this.

I'm in the 2010s in San Francisco, and I did eventually migrate to covering business and startups. The 2010s were an amazing time to be doing that. Frankly, a pretty unhinged time. Remind us. The venture capital was funding tech companies. It was Facebook, Google, all these companies were shooting to the moon. Then you had all this money flowing into venture capital, which then paid for extremely fast-growing companies that sometimes didn't pan out in the way that was expected. I spent a lot of the later 2010s covering WeWork.

Theranos.

Theranos is a great example.

You have a great podcast called Foundering.

That's right.

That's great. It won some awards, and it was all about the WeWork, so people should check that out.

That's like a seven-part narrative series about Adam and WeWork.

Yeah, what could be juicier? Because I don't know what the ratio is, but a very accepted risk-reward proposition in Silicon Valley is like, they know they're going to bet on 100 companies. They know 84 of them are going to go bust, but they know the 16 are going to 100X, and it's a winning strategy. So that's such a novel approach to investing that I can't imagine predated Silicon Valley. That's such a new way.

The ability to have 100X, 1,000X returns is very much a soft hardware era type thing. There's a reason that people talk about, Oh, B2B, SaaS companies. The joke is that they're boring, but the truth is, they print money. They're not shipping product. Their main expenses are employees, and they can sell scripture and software. When you think about the ability to have those types of returns, it's a reflection of the technology that's become available.

Yes, there's so many clickworthy, like they dumped 600 million into this and it failed. Then the wins are so spectacular. It's just like all headline father.

One of the stories that, even though it's not a big story, it's one of the ones I remain more known for is Jucero. Are you familiar with Jucero? What's Jucero? I'll try to keep it short, but it was this highly engineered juice press that was connected to the internet. It cost first something like $700, and then the price was lower to $400. It was this beautifully engineered machine. The idea was you buy this juice air and you can get cold press juice at home. The advertisements said things like, It presses with enough force to lift two Teslas.

I love that they put it in their vernacular, too. Not two GMC trucks.

I'm surprised, Chris didn't have this.

We probably have it somewhere in the basement.

You have it. Yeah, I'm sure. The only way that you could get the juice was by buying the machine and then ordering on demand these packets of freshly cut fruit vegetables that you would then put in the machine. The machine would squeeze it and cold press juice would come out. Oh, wow. But my colleague and I got a tip that you could just squeeze the packets by hand and get the juice out. You did not need this $400/at $1. 700 machine. We did a story and investigated and literally squeezed bags of juice at the office and made a little video of it. This company had raised over $100 million from some of the best VCs in Silicon Valley. This was 2017. Our story was, actually, you don't need the machine, you can squeeze it by hand. It's very rare that you write a story where you can actually summarize the whole thing in one sentence. I think it came out at a time when people were really interested in just having a little bit of schadenfreuda towards some of these really really overhyped companies.

Yeah, they somehow have this weird parallel of frivolous lawsuits. There's like, we smell fraud, right? There's something that we all just intuitively go, I don't know. How could that thing be worth 200 million? They haven't sold anything or it's not profitable. Then the 10th one hits. Yeah. Yeah. What a wild, bizarre period of time.

Did you feel any guilt? A little bit. Yeah. Because you just took down a whole company.

I don't feel great about it. I mean, that's not what I wake up in the morning thinking that... But and at the same time, the The public should know.

They should know. You're the fourth estate. Now, did you ever meet a founder who you realized the thing was bullshit, but you recognize that they sincerely did believe it? I feel like that's what would make it harder for me to take one down. They actually did believe it.

But then they're stupid. Everyone believes. It's very rare to meet a founder who would be willing to show or admit to you, even in private.

Well, the fair-nosed girl, she knew that thing didn't work. They were using other machines to do it.

Yes, and We say I've never been inside her head, but my guess is that inside her head, she was thinking, we're so close to it working.

Exactly.

Once I get this other thing going, it's going to be fine. If we're defrauding someone or if we're fibbing a little bit in the demo, it's in service of the mission, which is that eventually we will have a blood machine that is going to work as well as the others.

Most people aren't monsters. You justify, you figure out ways, and psychologically, I definitely I think she had to.

I have filed her into my like... Evil? Why don't I say evil? Because I don't believe in evil.

Yeah, exactly. I'm with you. I think she's rationalizing every step of the way or someone in her shoes. You don't wake up and you're like, Can't wait to lie today.

I think I observe the performative nature of her to be a little sociopathic, personally. When I watch the videos, I'm like, Oh, this person's nuts. They could be saying anything.

The voice, the low voice, yeah.

The packaging, to me, I'm sure she's just as earnest as all the others.

Yeah. I mean, she's copying a lot of other people. Steve Jobs, who also believe in it.

But he had the goods.

I know, but she must... I don't know. Okay. It's tricky, I think, taking down. We're all happy that she got caught. Yeah. And yet I still I'm like, oh, that's still a person.

Yeah. I don't know why I'm not sympathetic towards her. You need to do some soul searching. I need to try. I need to figure out how I can love her. But you make your way to Forbes, and then you make your way to Bloomberg. That's right. I guess you get pitched. So explain how when you're a journalist and you're working at Bloomberg, you get pitch story ideas by who?

The way it works is every morning a journalist wakes up and their email inbox has dozens of pitches from... There's a whole industry, PR professionals who send out emails being like, Our company is doing this cool new technology. We're going to launch in a month.

They're hoping you can lift the overall.

They're hoping that you'll write a story about them.

Which is how One Touch actually does get its first lift. One Taste. Sorry, One Taste.

What? Common mistake.

Yeah. But it could go either way.

It's bad branding because it's littoral's touching.

Yeah, and you're touching with one finger. But One Taste has a Buddhist origin, so that's part of why they picked it. The ocean. Yeah, just as the ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so too does the truth have one taste, the taste of liberation. Hence, One Taste. Yeah, okay, grand. Anyway, every morning, you wake up, there's a bunch of pitches in your inbox, and they could be about anything. In this case, part of why I paid attention to this pitch is I had actually interacted with that PR professional before on a different story because she works for different clients. She was like, Hey, just take a look at this. It's about a company called One Taste, and they teach a practice called Orgasmic Meditation. Look, it's a fast-growing, woman-led wellness startup. You cover startups. They're based in San Francisco. Maybe you'd be interested in writing about them.

That's very colorful.

Certainly, catches the attention. I had heard about Orgasmic Meditation before. I had read a piece about them a few years earlier. I was familiar, and I remembered, Oh, yeah, those are the 15-minute clitoris-stroking people. I had read a different story about One Taste and the founder, Nicole Dédon, and I was like, Okay, sure. I'll come in and we'll have a meeting. It was easy because it's in San Francisco, so I just headed over to their office and met with the current leadership of One Taste, which did not include Nicole, who is the founder, because she had recently sold her shares and stepped down, but she was still involved as the visionary of this company. I went in, I got the basic pitch. For those who aren't familiar, One Taste is a that was started in San Francisco in the mid 2000s by this woman, Nicole Dadeon. They sold courses on orgasmic meditation, which was like their central spiritual and sexual wellness practice. Orgasmic meditation is a 15-minute, partnered, clitoral stroking meditative practice in which a stroker, usually a man, puts on a glove and some lube on his left index finger.

His right thumb is on her perineam. Okay.

It's like this motion. Okay. Not to get too graphic. He strokes her clitoris for 15 minutes in a very prescribed manner.

Rising, falling, rising, falling. We're not trying to reach what we think of as orgasm.

They would call it climax, and they look down their noses at it a little bit. That's not the point. It's a secondary- Don't be gross.

You guys are fucking being immature.

It's not about climate. It's more about the journey of arousal. Don't try to get to any place in particular. During those 15 minutes, the only goal is for both parties to focus on the sensations in their bodies in a meditative way. If you've ever done sitting meditations, very similar, you're just noticing.

Like A body scan.

What is also unique is that participants who are observing are also encouraged to tell whatever sensations are coming up in them as they observe. That's the communal aspect.

Yes, and a more public demo. You could do orgasmic meditation on your own, just the two people, or there were sometimes these demos in which you might do it in front of an audience, maybe for a course in which you're explaining what orgasmic meditation is. Or investors. Or investors.

Investors? For what? There's no Well, they're selling courses.

That's the business. Oh, the courses. They're selling courses.

They're very much asked. We'll get into the history.

Do the gloves?

They did sell branded One Taste lube. That was a side merch. You got it.

It was sitting right there. You'd be a fool not to.

Oh, no.

That's what model they're in, which is the Est model of how she inherited this stuff, basically.

Yeah, totally. So any group that's selling personal development. Landmark. Personal transformation landmark, which is a spin off of Est. Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins, exactly.

Actors Way, I think also maybe is course.

Is it a... Okay. Allegedly.

Allegedly.

Anyway, orgasmic meditation, they call it OM or OM for short. In an OM session, the only goal is to feel the sensations in your body, and there is no expectation of reciprocation. This is the other important thing is that the woman receives this sexual touch, and it's all just for her to receive. She doesn't owe the stroker anything afterward. It is not meant to be foreplay. It is not meant to be considered sex, even though it's, I think, quite obviously general touching, so it's quite sexual. But they would argue that it's a meditative practice, not sex.

Great.

The idea is that if you do this practice regularly, both men and women benefit from better sex, better relationships, a better connection to your intuition. Intimacy. Yes, better intimacy.

Even though it's not supposed to be intimate.

Yeah, they would define intimacy broadly. It helps you get in touch with your desire.

I want to say, so far, I'm in. That's great. People want to lay there and do that. Wonderful. I like the dynamic that the man's pretty much just giving and not receiving. All this I'm in so far and the people participating love it.

Also, there's something very radical about it. It's like, oh, radically focused on female pleasure, which tends to be ignored or shunted aside.

It has the first appearance of being quite matriarchal and empowering for women. Now, did they offer you when you were doing your first chat with them, did they offer, would you like to receive it to experience it so you know what you're writing about? No. Are you sad about that? That was such a concise word.

I'm not sad about that. I'm not sad about that. I think it's better that I keep my objective journalistic distance.

Maybe I'm just a perv. I'm like, I would be interested if I was a woman.

Then you couldn't do it with journalistic integrity. Because what if you started loving it?

But are you not intrigued at all by this?

I'm not, weirdly. Okay, great. I understand why it would be intriguing to some people. I personally don't I don't find it.

I think if your sexuality up until that point had been pitched to you and you found that societally, it seemed like you were just in the position of providing service to men so they got what they wanted. Then this totally 180 paradigm hits you. It's like, Oh, no, no, girl, this is just about you. That seems... I mean, that's why it was successful.

We have told. There's a few things. First, I think there is something special about when it happens between two people as opposed to touching yourself. That was part of it as it can foster this sense of intimacy and connection between two people, this richer, slightly more spiritual experience. Then research suggests that something like 10 to 15% of American women struggle to have an orgasm. If you happen to be in that category, I think you hear this pitch and you think, Wow, This could teach me something new.

This could help me. The thing everyone's talking about, my friends tell me about I've been robbed up.

Maybe it'll open me up.

For men who struggle with performance anxiety and sex, I think the goallessness of an OM session is really appealing. For people who are in maybe marriages where they've been struggling to connect sexually. It offered something that was appealing to a lot of people, and in particular, something that people want but have a hard time finding where to look for help.

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Orgasm, Inc.

What is undeniable immediately is the women are all, in general, pretty young and attractive, and the men are admittedly tech nerds who can't be with girls. Almost everyone, they interview cops to that almost immediately. They learned about this, and they just thought, wow, I could participate in some sex. That would be better than none. So there's this really weird asymmetry between who's there.

I've gone back and forth on this because it is true of some people that there was that dynamic of men who were struggling to connect with women and women who were younger and had sexual appeal, and that was part of what they were able to offer. But they might have other reasons that they were attracted to One Taste. But I hesitate to make that a broad characterization. In general, I would say there were a mix of people. Sometimes it was men who were struggling to connect with women, and that was why they wanted to join One Taste. There were also some younger, hotter men who were brought in and who have talked to me about feeling like they were used as sexual objects themselves. Some of them have described to me being instructed to own with older women who had access to money in the hopes that those women would then buy more courses. So it wasn't It was all just- Women were getting used, and men were- There was a mix.

Yeah. And that's where we get into Nicole's exploiting of this whole dynamic, which is she does end up using these attractive young women to appeal to the investors, and then people who are going to spend 50 grand to watch a demo.

Also, remember, we had an armchair anonymous. That's right. Okay, he was not a tech bro?

Ruan. Ruan. He's an example of someone who... He's in the book. He's in the He was in his early 20s. He's young, he's attractive, wanted to have an adventure and joined One Taste. He has spoken about being asked by the leaders of One Taste to go and own with a woman who had access to money in the hopes that that would then prime her to receive a sales call and say yes to some large purchase.

Yeah, take some courses.

Yeah, so he has talked about that.

In keeping with you taking that first meeting, you then go and as a good journalist, doing your due diligence, you decide, I should talk to some ex-members and some ex-employees. When does it turn from, you think you might be writing this juicy, sexy story of a startup, and then you're like, Oh, no, there's a lot more going on here.

I mean, it happened pretty quickly. I had that first meeting with One Taste leadership They made the basic pitch to me. They were like, We're the Whole Foods of Sexual. We're the organic, good for you version of sexuality. They were very much like, Our practice is wholesome and helps heal people.

Did you have any spiny senses going off during that first thing?

Not a ton. I mean, there's so much to be I'm intrigued about. How does it work? What are the benefits? But then I started asking around a little on my own, finding people who had been involved in One Taste, and started to hear from people who were former customers, former members. They felt like they'd been exploited by this company. Some people spoke about feeling like they had been exploited financially. They said that they had been pressured to take on debt in order to buy expensive courses, which could cost upwards of 30 grand for an intensive course. Then some of them talked about feeling like had been exploited sexually, feeling like they had been taught or pressured to have sex with potential customers in order to have those customers buy courses and support the company financially. It's not black and white. For a lot of those people, they also felt like they had learned things of value during their time at One Taster, that it had been this interesting, helpful, sometimes even healing experience, and at the same time, simultaneously harmful. That was the intriguing part of it.

That's how all of them are.

Yeah, they wouldn't grow and expand if they weren't appealing and fun for a girl.

It was just bad. Yeah, if it was just bad. It wouldn't be interesting.

The first three months with the Bagwan up in Oregon, it looks fucking great. The Rajneeshis are partying.

A lot of cults are fun. You join a cult and it feels like you've discovered a special purpose. You're part of this special group that has a special knowledge about your new mission in life. You're going to change the world. You have these cool new friends. Everyone's really excited.

You've unbridled yourself from society in essence. You've declared, I'm going to try a different approach to this. So your ego is also stroke by that.

Yeah, I think that's how conspiracy theories work, too. Same situation where it's like, oh, we're in this special group that knows something most people don't. Special knowledge. Yeah.

Now, I want to say you write a piece in 2018. This becomes a humongous viral thing that really shakes the foundation of this place.

Totally.

Let's talk about Nicole and where she comes from because she's attractive, hyper-intelligent, seemingly fearless, confident, charismatic.

One might say. Yes. Nicole is the main character of one taste of this company, of everything that it stands for. She is the creator, the visionary, the founder. There was technically another co founder, but let's be real, Nicole is the main person. She is a fascinating and complicated person. She grew up in the Bay Area. Currently, she's in her late '50s. I think that she was growing up in the '70s. She had a really difficult childhood, which is something that we get into in the book, where her father was a convicted child sex abuser.

Oh, no. Single mom from Michigan, and dad's in and out.

She was raised by a single mom. Also, maybe her grandmother was in the picture. But in her own retelling, as much as I've been able to corroborate with other people who knew her, she really loved her dad, even though he was this somewhat absent figure in her life. He had other families, many other children, several other wives, not at the same time, but he had an itinerant life elsewhere, and she adored him. And according to court records and according to her own retelling, he was a convicted A child sex abuser. He went to jail for this at least once when she was younger, and then again when she was in her 20s. And in that case, he was arrested and charged and then died pretty soon after. So there was never a conviction for this second one. But one of the alleged victims in that case was his granddaughter.

That's hard to extrapolate that she might have been a victim.

What's complicated is, over the years, she has spoken about her father's sex abuse history, but she has often sidestepped the question of whether he ever abused her. I wanted to treat this subject really carefully and sensitively in the book. But I did find people who knew her when she was in her 20s, and around that time, who told me that she told them that he had sexually abused her. She does have a piece of writing that was once public and is not anymore, in which not only does she allude to this, but she actually spins it in this very complex way where she suggests that she perhaps initiated it. Keep in mind that what is being discussed here is a scenario in which she would have been under 10.

Yeah. Her public addressing of it evolves. I want to save to the end as it's unraveling where she ultimately goes with it, which I couldn't fucking believe what was coming out of her mouth. She's a competitive little girl. She's a spelling bee person, or at least a reporting to her, she's very bright.

She's an intense person. She also, I think, liked to play that up in her own retelling of her biography that she was someone who was inspired by intensity and edges. Right.

She goes to temple, but just for a year. Temple University.

Temple University, it's in Philadelphia.

I didn't know if you meant the temple.

Oh, sure. We are talking about spirituality and omes. But she returns to San Francisco after a year. Now, she finds herself in some communal living situations. She also loves She loves meth, and she loves psychedelics. She's a psychonaut.

Her 20s are a string of what I would describe as intense experiences. According to people who knew her, that involves meth use, copious amounts of LSD, sex work. She has talked about being an escort, a stripper. She also ran an art gallery, so I mean, some of that was a little bit more pedestrian. But she has described this era of her life, and other people who knew her have corroborated this, that it was quite extreme. She wasn't really living the normal path of getting a job. She allegedly spent three years or so living in what she later refers to as an acid house, a house with a bunch of other women in San Francisco where they did tons of acid. I mean, this is all a mix of her retelling. She is someone who is very good at telling stories about her life in a way that supports a point that she's trying to make at the time.

One thing I applaud her for is she doesn't really ever take a victim narrative, which, of course, is a tenet of this. But there's no sense that at any point she was a victim in any of these scenarios. But she meets a dude, Erwan, at a party, and this guy hits her with this notion of, what's it called then?

They call it deliberate orgasm. The way she tells this story is that she went to a party and she met a guy who is sometimes described as a Buddhist monk. Eruan had lived at an ashram for some point. I don't know if he considered himself a monk, but whatever.

He's in his 20s, good-looking, a little younger than her.

His name is Eruan?

Yeah, not Erwan. The grocery store. Not the grocery store. It's spelled E-R-W-A-N.

Okay, got it.

But in the retellings, he supposedly comes up to her at this party and says, I'd like to introduce you to a sexuality practice. She says, Yes. I don't think they do it right then and there. I believe they met up later. He shows her this meditative clitoral stroking practice, and he talks about how I'm like, Here's what's going to happen. I'm going to stay clothed. You're going to remove your clothing from the waist down.

It's 15 minutes as well, right?

Fifteen minutes, probably. They like to use the word pussy, so I'm going to use it. Within One Taste, for a period of time, they preferred to use the terms pussy and cock to describe female and male genitalia, in part because it had charge to it. Because it was this provocative word.

But again, I'm so confused by this because it's supposed to be- Give us the program, Monica.

No. Jesus.

You're not supposed to climax. It's supposed to be just meditative. Then it's also the most sexually charged thing possible.

I would say the way to think about it is what One Taste was eventually selling was Horses on Orgasmic Meditation, which is a pretty fringe and provocative idea. Most people are not going to be like, Great, sign me up. You might need a little convincing. In order to do so, they did try to make it quite safe-seeming clinical. That's why it's like the 15 minutes, the prescribed script, all these safe- And they don't want you to not climax.

They just are saying it's bigger than just the climax.

They're like, Climax, sure, but there's more. But then when you get deeper inside, that's where some of the stranger things come up. If you're sensing a discordance, it doesn't line up, it's probably because the outer pitch was a little bit more buttoned up or as buttoned up as you could make literal stroking. Then for those who became more deeply involved, like they worked for the company, they lived in a communal residence with other One Taste people. They made this company and this lifestyle their whole life. That's where you get into some of the... There are layers, unsurprisingly.

Okay, so she has this experience. She describes it as quite transcendent, and for her, it's the highest level of intimacy she's ever experienced. She's of her experience. So she's converted from that one experience.

As she tells it, it's a pivotal moment in her life. She experiences this thing. She even likes to say that she was about to join a Buddhist monastery, and then throughout that plan, it was like, just kidding.

This was supposed to be her wild week before.

Yes, just I'm going to pursue this meditative clitoral stroking practice.

Now this guy, Erwan, he is working under another guy who has broken off from yet another organization that started much earlier in the '70s.

Yeah, it's a little complicated, but essentially, the origins of what becomes orgasmic meditation was these two other groups that had a relation to each other. One was a spin off of the other. They taught a practice called Deliberate Orgasm. Both of those groups were less business-oriented than One Taste. They were a little bit more insular, and they were both run by men. Deliberate Orgasm was a little bit more free wheeling. It wasn't 15 minutes. It didn't have as many guardrails. Nicole ends up going with Erwan to become part of one of these groups. What essentially happens is she learns how to run a community like this, and she learns the basics of this practice. After that, she's there for a couple of years. And after that, she decides, I want to do this on my own.

It has the same trajectory as some of the Christianity movements in the country where it's like there just keeps being these schisms that break off into their own, and they all need a little bit of a proprietary approach to justify why there are It's a different thing. But it's all pretty much the same.

What's interesting is, yeah, they all share this lineage. And if you want to trace it far enough back, there's even many shared lineages back to Est and what is now Landmark Forum. And there's probably a connection to Nexium. It's this tree, essentially, of personal development, personal transformation groups. They often have a tie to each other. If you wanted to map out that genealogy- You have Ascelin in there.

You have all these... It's a perfect area to be in.

You'll see that certain ideas that were popular at One Taste show up in some of these other groups as well. For example, taking 100% responsibility for your experience. I have friends who have taken leadership seminars where that is a big tenet. There's actually a lot of value to that idea. It can be taken too far and used to gaslight people into thinking that everything that happens to them is their fault.

It's impossible to be a victim. Someone jumps out of an alley.

The victim narrative is a really central part of understanding this. You know what you said earlier about Nicole never seeming like a victim, we can come back to it. But that is a key thing because it is both empowering and it can be used to convince people, well, if they're feeling harmed or if they're feeling like someone has been hurting them, that's their problem. To be a victim is to have such a small-minded mentality, or it's only for the weak-minded to think of themselves as a victim. That can be really convenient. If there's no victims, then there's no perpetrators. Oh, how nice.

Exactly.

It's a nice clean setup. Just though, I think it's interesting to say that There were a hundred Morehouses at one point. A lot of these have been really successful. I just watched the Sinanon. You talk about a little bit in the book. But I watched that doc and I was like, It's crazy how big Sinanon was. It's fascinating. It's huge. They're all borrowing from each other. They all a little lace with some Buddhism.

Morehouse, we won't spend too much on it, but basically, they had this network of houses across the US that were all painted purple, and they all had this philosophy about living with more pleasure, more fun.

Is that a different one or is that connected?

That's one of the two groups that taught deliberate orgasms. That's where the orgasms That's where it started. Every once in a while, when you mention that, there's someone who's like, Oh, I know someone who lived in one of those purple houses, or I know they're sometimes called the Purple People.

Oh. Yeah. Okay, so she breaks out on her own. She's having midline success. She gets a warehouse in San Francisco and invites people to live in it? Yes.

When she starts One Taste, they start off by having a center in San Francisco where they have a yoga studio, and they start offering classes. This is in 2004 or so. Pretty quickly, within a couple of years, they also rent a warehouse down the street, and that becomes the first communal residence of One Taste participants. That starts the whole history of One Taste people living together and having that be the inner experience, once you get more involved.

Then you're living it.

Yeah. For a lot of people who get involved in One Taste, you might join and just take a few classes and be like, great, I learned what I needed. See you later. Then there's other people who join, and then they're like, I want more. I want to be more immersed in this world. The path that a lot of those people end up following is they would quit their old job and start to work at One Taste, usually on their sales team, selling courses to other people. They would move out of their old home and move into one of the One Taste communal residences. They would gradually stop spending as much time with their friends and family who didn't understand their orgasmic life. Those squares. Yeah. Start spending all their time with people at one taste. That is how it can advance for certain people.

Okay, so it takes off. She decides to start franchising and selling more and more, and it starts growing into a pretty good size.

Yeah, they start in San Francisco, but they end up with offices in LA, San Diego, Austin, Boulder, New York, London, Australia.

Here's a tough question. How much do you think the news and media bears some responsibility? Because this was like a fledgling nothing. She does a demo in 2008, and the New York Times reports on it. That's when the explosion happens. How much responsibility should news and media take for promoting these terrible ideas? Where's the integrity there?

It's a little complicated. Some of the more egregious things that happened at One Taste happened in maybe the mid-2010s. In defense of the New York Times, I think they wrote their story that came out in 2009. Some things hadn't happened yet. As a journalist, I feel a lot of compassion for other journalists who are just trying to find a story, find something interesting to say, do a reasonable job, file it, and move on. There's so much to write about orgasmic meditation that's interesting to begin with. What is it? How does it work? Where did it come from? Wait, what happens in it again? It took me six or seven months to report that first story about these cult allegations. It takes time and resources. If that's not available to you as a journalist, you You might just write the story that's like, Here's this interesting thing.

It's hard to say. It is hard to say because obviously, Synanon, that's what it benefited from most. No one had a game plan for junkies, which was a big issue at the time. Where they failed in their integrity, I think, is where's the follow-up? What's eight months down the road? Who's someone who's used this system for four years? That's where I think, I don't know, there can be some laziness.

That's a broader question about journalism, the news, all of it.

How much resources does it take to hold people accountable? It's expensive.

And that some things can get out of it. Obviously, we have to report on a school shooting. But if you report on it, then people see it, and then other people do. It is complicated. It is. I don't know I don't know what the answer is, but it can create contagion effects.

Frankly, some of the other things that helped One Taste get mainstream success were also endorsements from influential people such as Gwyneth Paltrow. Tim Farris. Tim Farris, Floyd Kardashian.

Two out of three friends of the pod.

I don't necessarily blame them either. I think Tim wrote about One Taste in the 4-hour Body. It was a little bit more about the stroking practice. Those were markers that could quickly signal to someone who was like, Wait, Orgasmic Meditation, what is this? It's like, Oh, well, Nicole Dadeon has appeared on the group podcast, or she has spoken at a group conference.

She did a TED Talk. Yeah, TEDx. Tedx. Okay. I don't know the difference. What's the difference?

There For the people who care about the difference, Ted is... There's only one Ted, and there are many TEDx's. I think it's fair to say Tedx is like a regional. But the truth is, her Tedx Talk has been viewed millions of times on YouTube. It's hard to want to critique orgasmic meditation Because, again, it was this commendable thing. It was like raising up female sexuality. It just sounds like a good idea.

From all your years of being immersed in it, do you see turning points for her? When does it get more and more corrupt? Is Is it just the expansion in the money that's making her want to use these parishioners as a lure for these people's money? When does it turn? It gets crazy. You're not going to get there.

I think there's a few categories. First is In the early years of One Taste, the company was not bringing in enough money on its own to turn a profit. They were losing money every year. The way that Nicole was able to support the company and keep it going was by striking up this relationship with Reece Jones, who is Silicon Valley investor, who she met in roughly 2006, and the two of them began dating. He's interested in One Taste, he's interested in supporting it. He ends up paying for business expenses and giving loans to the company, according to court testimony and many, many people I spoke to. As part of the arrangement, he was promised a sexual handler, and that ended up being a job that certain employees of One Taste Women were asked if they wanted to do. To be Reese's handler meant sometimes living at his house, which was like in Russian Hill in San Francisco, taking care of his dog, maybe fetching his groceries, tidying the house and usually giving him some sexual service every day, whether like a hand job or something similar. It's really complicated because there are some employees of One Taste who had this job for a while and who, I think, considered it an honor.

No complaints. Yeah, no complaints. There are some people who, again, testified about this at trial and talked about this in detail with me and who feel like it was this exploitative setup in which they were taught certain psychological lessons that prepared them to want to say yes to this. They were taught that it was an honor. They were taught that helping and serving Nicole and the company was this great way to help the mission of spreading orgasmic meditation to the world. They were also taught certain philosophies within One Taste about, for example, that it was sexually powerful if you could have sex with someone that you were not attracted to.

Oh, this is one of the great. Particularly, If you had beef with, you didn't get along with somebody.

If you had an aversion to them is how they would describe.

It's like you slowly realize you hate this person, and they go, Well, you guys got to go in a room and fuck.

You're evolved if you're able to do that.

But you can see how the teachings of a group could start off with the beginnings of a good idea. Like, oh, maybe it's good to get out of your comfort zone, try things that you might be a little unsure about. But then it can quickly expand into a rationale for pressuring people to do something that they don't want to do and then making them think that actually they did want it and it was good for them. In general, many of these things at One Taste were pitched as the ultimate goal is more personal growth. It's like, well, maybe you were experiencing something painful or uncomfortable or emotionally difficult, but you might be also told that staying with it is going to lead to more personal growth. People really wanted personal growth. You'd be surprised at how frequently that can end up being the reward that is suggested. Then the means to get there could be something that actually ends up being quite harmful.

She has this incredible tool she's devised where their line of questioning is all about getting down to your base desire. That's the premise is you have all these distracting desires, but if we can get to the core base desire and address that, then there'll be some growth as well. So as she would question you, you would intuit eventually what her base desire was. And so this woman's talking and she's like, and we got to it, oh, my God, I want a child. I want a baby and she feels this elation of finally getting out of her base thing. She's like, No, but there's something lower than that. It was deeper than that. It was, of course, I need more orgasms. It was a deeper base desire than- Than wanting a child? Than wanting a child.

Oh, my God. To me, that's an example of something that shows up a lot in groups that you could call alleged cults, which is they foster this belief that the leader knows better than you what you that they possess wisdom and knowledge that you do not have access to. When people hear that, sometimes their first reaction is like, Oh, that's so sinister. But one thing I learned after talking to so many of these people that I appreciate now is that often for people who are looking for a solution or help or something in their life, it can feel like a relief to find someone who claims to have knowledge and wisdom that is going to help you. You then want to hand over your autonomy to them. In In fact, it feels good to do so. You feel like, this person is going to help me. It doesn't always feel like this sinister, extractive thing. There are many small anecdotes of people who described turning to Nicole in some lecture or a class and asking her, What's next for me? They would ask her for guidance, and she would often say like, Oh, I think you should do this or that.

Even within some of the One Taste residences, she would often give out assignments, which you didn't have to do them, but people wanted wanted to do them because they thought that, again, doing the assignment would help them with their personal growth. And so it's this gray area. It wasn't like, You must do this thing, but she would suggest to people like, Oh, your orgasm feels a little stuck these days, I think you would benefit from having sex with 30 different people in the next 30 days. That would be a typical assignment, again, according to people who witnessed this.

Having sex, not doing this 15 minutes separate.

Yeah. So, again, it's like, orgasmic meditation is the front door. They did do a lot of oming, even if you were more involved. But if you became more deeply involved, other sex acts became part of the arsenal.

They tried men for a while, but they jettisoned that.

Yeah. There was a brief period where they did study and try to incorporate om for men, which is the gender-flipped version of orgasmic meditation. It's basically a hand drop. A woman strokes a man's penis for 15 minutes. Good luck. I know. The conclusion was- Exactly. The The idea was basically the existence of this as a possibility created too much of an incentive for tit for tat. The whole point of orgasmic meditation is that you're supposed to be able to ask for an home and not a negative. I think it's funny. Not a heccerociph. They tried it briefly, and then you're right, they put it to the side.

This doesn't work with you. Now, this is where it takes this really wild turn, in my opinion, which is she starts speaking more and more about honoring men's predatory nature.

The beast.

Inviting the beast, not shaming the beast, accepting the outcome of the beast, somehow being empowered by being abused by the beast. There's a route to that. This is I'm sure it gets crazy. I mean, I think it all ends with this speech she gives about her dad. But just how did that evolve?

Basically, the idea of the beast within One Taste, and it's possible that One Taste would dispute this, but again, according to people who were there, the idea of the beast was that Inside of most or maybe all of us, there is an aggressive primal nature that has often been stifled, judged, shamed, repressed, and that there is value and enlightenment to being able to express this freely. Within One Taste, it's a pretty insular community, especially if you were, again, more involved. They wanted to experiment with social norms, and that sometimes looked condoning expressions of the beast. What people have described to me about how that played out in practice is that there were sometimes couples who would hit each other within one taste, and that this was often allegedly justified as an expression of the beast.

That rape is also potentially on the table.

It gets really complicated. Going back to what Nicole had said about victimhood. They taught within One Taste that having a victim mentality was looked down on. It goes hand in hand with this idea that it is empowering to take full responsibility for your life and your experience. Again, there's a lot of value in that. I think having an attitude in life where you feel like you have agency. Actually, with the nexium, they would often talk about being at cause and at effect. Being at effect means the world is happening to you.

Happening to you, yeah.

That can feel disempowering. Being at cause is a way that you can carry yourself and move through the world where you believe that you have agency in the world around you.

Which is largely true, again.

Yeah. Totally. That's what I found fascinating about this whole idea is they have these ideas that have this really valuable kernel, and it's hard to know when it goes too far. Anyway, there's this idea that you should take agency and responsibility for everything in your life. The flip side of that is having a victim mentality is bad. Many people in One Taste describe to me how this was a lesson that was taught broadly. Because they were also teaching about sex, and Nicole also liked to make provocative statements about sexual relations, sexual dynamics, there are video clips of her lecturing in courses where she talks about, I want to make sure I characterize this correctly, at one point, she makes a joke to a course where she says, We should make T-shirts that say, I got raped and all I got was a victim story, or, I raped someone and all I got was a perpetrator story.

Oh, my God.

She has also spoken about... She said something like, Women who have experienced sexual assault, were covered emotionally faster if they took responsibility for their role in the experience. Something along those lines. She also made a statement once that was like, The true way to deflect rape is to turn on 100%. They often talked about turning on within one taste. That one's a bit trickier because turning on had arguably a more holistic meaning to them rather than a strictly sexual arousal meaning. Regardless, a lot of people describe to me an attitude within one taste that was like, If you feel like you were assaulted or sexually assaulted, that's on you. Kind of, yeah. It is very complicated. For a lot of people, that's really horrifying.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare. Well, there's a story in the book, Back to Morehouse, and a male practitioner being also encouraged to embrace his primal side, who gets in a fight with his wife and punches his wife in the face. Close. Okay.

So at the welcomed consensus, which was, again, a spinoff of Morehouse. Oh, okay. You're totally right, and I forgot this, so thank you for bringing it up. Part of the origin of this idea, again, of the violence, maybe being an expression of the beast, it gets even more complicated and gendered because within the welcomed consensus, which was a predecessor to One Taste, a different group where they taught deliberate orgasm, according to people who were there, they had a belief that women were all powerful.

With their emotions.

That was there. Yeah, with their emotions. That was there. They were able to emit something that they called call, which was like an emotional signal to men, and that men received this call and only responded to it. They drew a parallel between that and, I guess, the mimealian pattern of a female in estress emitting some pheromone. Sexual signal. They would argue that anything that a man does in response to a woman. She wanted. Exactly. That she has put out a call for this and that he is merely responding. On some level, you can be like, wow, what an interesting philosophy that really makes women into this powerful actor. At the same time, It's obviously quite troubling because it suggests that men have no responsibility for the actions that they take. One of the ways that this shows up in an anecdote from that era is a man who was in the welcome consensus gets in an argument with a woman, and he feels the sudden urge to hit her. Even though he has never hit a woman before, he hits her in the face as hard as he can.

He's been encouraged to- He described this to me, and he said, I it sounds horrifying, and you have to understand that on some level, based on the philosophies that we believed at the time, it made sense.

He believed that violence was a form of emotional expression, and that everything that he felt called to do was actually in response to a woman's initiative. But yes, that is a very complicated way of also saying basically she asked for it.

Well, most importantly, she goes to the leader and says, This guy punched me in the face, and he said, you need to find out what you did that caused that, or I'm going to give you 10 times worse what he gave you.

Yeah.

What if he was like, Congratulations, that's what you wanted. You asked. That's what they're doing. Psychologically, you might not know that you wanted it, but your body knew and it told him, and he did it.

Again, it comes back to this central idea that Nicole is someone who, I think, believed that pushing herself to her edges gave her spiritual growth and insight and evolution. It was her enlightenment. Her pursuit of intensity brought her enlightenment, and she believed that it would do the same for other people.

Also, money is in the mix now because there's a point where this thing has generated $12 million.

Totally. There's a shift roughly around 2012, 2013, when Reese, the original investor, actually suffers some financial misfortune, is no longer able to be supporting the company. He asks for a repayment of his loan. This puts a lot of financial pressure on Nicole, on the leadership of the company, and they start to try to think about strategies for how to pay Ries back. This came up at trial. There were even emails that we saw at trial about him being like, I can't pay my bills.

How much did they owe him?

Roughly a million dollars. What happens around the same time is the company makes a decision to really start spinning up selling more expensive courses. They start pushing harder to sell, for example, the coaching program, which was a program that they had that lasted anywhere from 6 to 10 months, in which people get trained to be a certified orgasmic meditation coach. The coaching program became this big thing that could cost anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000. You would take this training, and it was really like your immersion in the one-taste way of life.

They're introducing new stratas all along, too. We introduced a notion of a priest-stroker.

Yeah. First, there's courses. It's like the coaching program, the Nicole De Dône Intensive membership, which was basically a way to take any course you want over the course of a year. Then the priests and the priestesses Those appeared in 2015, maybe 2014, when One Taste held this immersive course called Magic School.

What is happening?

Now we're getting into the occult, Monica. Oh my God. This is insane. They make videos that look like seances. It starts to get really occult. I'm asking you to psychoanalyze or maybe you don't have enough of the dets, but it's like, was the drug use picking up? Was it the money? It is coming off the rails. We're getting this religious strata, the occult practices.

I can only speculate, but my My sense is as the company got bigger, she felt able to explore things that might have felt a little too risky earlier.

She's getting more confident.

I think that's probably fair to say. Okay.

This is how it happens across the board with people doing things where you're like, How are you thinking that now? It's a slow, sliding scale.

It doesn't happen overnight.

The boiling frog.

It is the boiling frog. It's like you start out being like, Oh, yeah, I want to have more empowerment over my body, and that's normal. Then all of a sudden, you're in magic school.

Then you're going to some geriatrics house. Yeah.

That's a handsome young man. I have compassion for the fact that because it sounds so insane, but I think it's these little tiny baby steps, and all of a sudden you're there.

There's also a pragmatism to it, which is you have to keep offering more and more insular and more high-level training to get more money. It can't just be the thing. It's got to evolve.

You can't finish. It has to always keep going.

It's got to be a daily practice, and you got to add in things all the time.

Yeah. At Magic School, it's a four or five day immersive program. And at the first Magic School, they had, at the end of the course, a ceremony in which they ordained something like seven priests of orgasm and seven priestesses of orgasm in this elaborate ceremony where there was a group home demo in front of all the students who had participated. People were in robes.

Can we add to Nicole Cole is a great performer. She steps in a lot of times to put on these one hour demos where she has this orgasmic trip through the Cosmos and you all watch. She's also a performer.

What's interesting about that is in the early days, she would participate in an OM demo as the woman who was being stroked. Then later on, she actually replaced herself, and she would make herself the stroker. She would stroke a different woman on stage. In 2013 and 2014, One Taste hosted these big orgasm conferences in San Francisco. The big headliner event would be Nicole stroking one of her deputies, basically. I think that's really interesting because she probably... Look, I don't know. It's a speculation, but my guess is at some point she realized she's the CEO of this company. She can't be the one on the table. It's a pretty vulnerable position to be in. She elevated herself out of that.

Okay, so is it that or... There's even a piece with the Morehouse founder, which is like, it's an interesting trajectory for the man to go, no, I just want a service. That's already interesting. We haven't seen that historically because there might be something interesting.

Cower dynamics, you mean?

Yeah. There's something powerful about being in control of that. That can be its own satiating journey.

I have this impact on somebody.

Yeah. Well, this is where you get into the trauma. And again, I don't know how much I want to reveal. I see. If you have a guaranteed need pleasurable outcome that you can access with somebody. And you are afraid of people's emotions otherwise. And this is a way you know you're fucking safe. This person will be receiving pleasure. They'll be grateful. They'll like you. I get it is what I'm saying. And the fact that her trajectory goes there, I'm just curious, what is at play?

Well, also, when your sexual autonomy is taken from you at a young age, to regain that or feel that you've then reclaimed power over is, of course, going to seem appealing. Yeah.

Broadly speaking, when you talk to people who are experts on the long term lifetime effects of child sex abuse, it is often something like that. They will say that people who experience this as children will often, not always, but will often find ways. Sometimes it looks like acting out sexually, but it's a way to try to reassert agency over something. And be in control.

Yeah, be in the driver's seat where it was taken.

That's probably what I relate too.

Yeah. What drove her to move from being the strokey during these demos to the strokeer? I truly don't know. It's inside her head. I just think there's something really juicy there. It's interesting. Yeah. It's possible that she was also just trying to rise to a form of leadership by taking over the man's role, which is a 2010s era women in power move.

Barry, yeah.

Now, I love this whole story because it's comforting to believe that just power and money makes everyone an asshole. We don't have a monopoly of men on it. I mean, there's some part of it that's comforting to me. That's like, oh, yeah, you put a woman at the top of a cult and guess what? She'll be a terrible person at the end of it. Okay, so it all leads to what I think is the darkest and most interesting speech she gives that's caught on camera, which is she's discussing her father, and ultimately, and I'll botch it, and this is paraphrasing, but she basically says her father was operating on this fourth dimension, and that when he would try to lock back into this third dimension, it was a little scramble, and that the people here didn't really understand his basically enlightenment. So she is on record and out loud basically saying, It was the other people's fault. My dad really is fine.

Not only fine, he's special.

He's enlightened. She calls him expansive.

It makes me so sad. I think that is at the core of this whole thing and the wanting to embrace and forgive the beast is all an attempt to, as Sedara says, All of my books have a singular goal of making you love my mother as much as I did. That's what every story is about. That's what every book's about. I think there's some bizarre version of that at play here.

I think that's really insightful. She said something like, I never took on the idea that my dad was a bad person. I just believed that he was too expansive for the arbitrary laws of our third dimension. Instead, on the fourth dimension, he was this wonderful person.

Yeah, dude, that's fucking heavy.

It's so sad because that's so human Kids cannot wrap their head around being hurt by their parents. It's not connected to anything that's supposed to be. It's not the reality that we know. In order to make sense of it, people do all- It's so destabilizing. It's destabilizing. It's not the natural order of things. Your parents are supposed to protect you, not hurt you.

It's deeply, deeply confusing to a child.

Yes. They spend their whole life trying to figure out how to make that make sense, and this is how she did it, I think. That's so sad.

I couldn't believe that part. I was like, Okay, here we go. We're at the base of what's happening here. That she's even taking the time in this other ceremony to even be talking about him is already weird.

I will never know for certain exactly what happened between Nicole and her father. But I think to look at a statement like that, it would be impossible not to feel this human compassion for, you can imagine, a little girl who is trying to... Yeah, when you said it's deeply human, that is how I feel.

You only get one, and she wants that one to have been a good one, somebody hook or crook.

Have you seen the doc? What's the Doc that came out earlier this year? The girl's mom was sending her all these horrible texts.

Yes, I know that story. Oh, yeah. Yes, I know that story.

Oh, my God. And at the end, she's reconnecting with her mom. And it's just an example of this. Kids are not supposed to feel that their parents are dangerous, and they often just don't. They have to avoid it. Your brain can't handle it. It's so upsetting. It's too hurtful.

It's too much. Other people who have studied under Nicole have described to me that she also put forth theories like, there's no such thing as pleasure or pain or good or evil. It's just all variants of sensation. Again, there's a hint of some of that in sitting meditation, mindfulness, this idea that no feeling is necessarily good or bad. Yeah, it's Buddhist. But you can also see how that type of idea might have served the part of her that wanted to make sense of her dad. What thinking is going to allow her to say, I never thought of my dad as a bad person.

Well, I think at the very, very core, if you distill it down, it's that all of our deepest fears would be that were unlovable. Then you're assigned to people that are supposed to love you no matter what. But if they have behaviors that would suggest they didn't love you and they were trying to hurt you, it has the risk of confirming your ultimate fear, which is like, I'm so unlovable. My own parents didn't love me. They abused me. So anything's worth attempting to avoid that conclusion. Yeah.

Let's say he didn't hurt her or abuse her. The fact that it's known that he abused other children still causes the same reaction.

You're still supposed to love your kids enough to stay out of jail for them. Even if it was for other people, he should have stayed out of prison for her.

But knowing that your father, who you love, could cause so much damage is just not something a kid can reconcile.

It doesn't compete.

Yeah, it won't compute.

How did she get brought down? Obviously, your article played a huge role in that because right after it was published, the FBI started looking into her. Yeah.

I don't know for sure what prompted the FBI to start. It's possible they could have started before that story ran. But basically, that story ran in mid-2018. A few months later is the first time I heard from some of my sources. They were like, The FBI is showing up at our doors asking us about what happened at One Taste. I knew the FBI was investigating, but that's all I knew for many years. That's all anyone knew for many years. Five years later, After much investigation, they charged Nicole and Rachel Churwitz, who was her second in command, with forced labor conspiracy, which was a federal crime. Then two years later, there was a criminal trial this summer in Brooklyn and went on for five or six weeks. In the end, the jury unanimously decided that both Rachel and Nicole were guilty of forced labor conspiracy. They had been out on bail. The next day, both women were taken taken into custody, and they have been in a federal jail ever since their waiting sentencing.

All the way to next September?

No, it was supposed to happen this September. It's gotten delayed, and so it could happen later this year, or maybe more likely early next year. Yeah.

So what are your conclusions after all of this exploration? I think that was the thing that I found most shocking about the Nexium doc was it went counter to who I would imagine would be susceptible to such a thing. Almost without exclusion, all the Nexium followers were incredibly bright, industrious, motivated, conscientious dream employees. I think a lot of us think you'd have to be stupid to fall for this. But I think you definitely have the goal in the book of pointing out, really, this could happen to anyone.

A lot of people have that thought, I would never join a cult, or people who join cults are stupid. I completely understand why people have that thought because it's very comforting, and it really makes you feel safe, and it really makes you feel in control, which is something that every human wants. At the same time, when I started reporting on this group, it's not like I was a cult expert. Now, I feel like I've done a lot of research, and I understand both this group and then broad patterns, generally. I think I would say that it's not about smarts. It's about your yearning and your seeking. Everyone has something that they are looking for. If that right match finds you at the right time in your life when you are maybe having just gone through some life transition, or you moved to a new city, or you went through a divorce, or anything like that, you are at heightened vulnerability. So I think that some people are more vulnerable than others. But I do not agree that there are people out there who are totally immune to this risk. Yeah, I agree. And I think having some humility about that is actually probably protective because if you assume that this will never happen to you, you might not recognize it it does.

And cults look different now than they did 40 or 50 years ago. I don't mean to be fear mongering, but it's just more about understanding that by nature, humans are searching for things. I think if someone promises an answer, that's a very tantalizing thing. One of the major things that I found interesting about researching and understanding One Taste is just how much status games play a role in why people did certain behaviors within the group. All of a sudden, if you When you become really emotionally invested in a fairly tight knit social circle with unusual rules and a very clear hierarchy and a pretty clear norm of what's accepted and approved of behavior and disapproved of behavior, you are going to make decisions that are in line with that set of social pressures rather than your own moral compass. Your moral compass goes out the window.

Well, your moral compass was set by your peers already.

That's how we work. There's no objective. Observers will look at some of the choices that people made when they were inside One Taste, and they might judge, and they might say, I would never do that. I would never agree to that arrangement or I would never stand by while my friend was being punished for something. But again and again, I spoke to people who said, I did it because I knew it was going to get me approval. I did it because people who were higher status than me in the group told me that that's what I needed to do. I did it because I knew they would like me more if I did it. I didn't say anything because I was afraid I would get punished if I spoke up. Guess what? That's why...

We do everything.

Yeah, that's why we do everything. That's exactly right. Might I be tricked into a cult? Set that aside. That is an interesting lesson to try to reflect on. But more so than that, it's like in your daily life, it is interesting to try to be aware of how frequently you are making decisions based on wanting approval or status or avoiding disapproval or pain.

We're all really super susceptible to our context, and we act in accordance with whatever our chosen group is.

What's interesting is I read a book, the author has passed away, but she wrote this seminal book about cult behavior. One of the things that really stuck with me is she said, We're such finely-tuned social creatures that we don't even need to be told what the rules are. We are so good at looking around and just inferring what we should be doing. Within one taste, Nicole rarely commanded. She would just praise someone in a very targeted way if they did what she wanted, or she would ignore or look poorly on someone who didn't do what she wanted. That is more effective than telling someone, You need to do this thing.

That's where it gets so tricky criminally for all these different things because everyone's consenting in whatever broad definition you have of consent.

I mean, legally, they're consenting.

At the trial, the defense attorneys would often cross-examine witnesses and ask them questions like, maybe they didn't use these exact words, but the suggestion was, was someone holding a gun to your head? Were you locked in a room? Or could you have walked away? What they're suggesting there, in my opinion, is that implicit pressure doesn't exist.

Look, it's a tricky one because we all want liberty. Yeah, of course. We got to draw these really tenuous lines.

Someone at trial said something that I think sums it up really well. This was a former One Taste member, and he said, On the stand, if you can't freely say no, then you can't freely say yes, and therefore, you can't consent. So that is one framework to think about it, which is that if someone said yes, but the environment is such that a reasonable person would agree that there was not room to say no, is that still yes? I don't know that as a society, we've come to a clear conclusion on that, but that's a central question that was coming up at trial. That's been on my mind.

Yeah, Then you get into like, okay, then what's the line? So a guy who joins a gang and it's pretty implicit, not stated, you should kill members of the opposing gang. Is that person not have any responsibility? Because they write. So that's why it's murky, and that's why it's really hard. That's why these can exist because we all do want liberty.

Like many things, there's not an easy end.

Yeah. Have you ever sat down face to face with Nicole?

There is a scene at the end of the book where I meet her for the first time, and we have our only conversation. I had, at that point, studied her for many years. I'd spent hours talking to people who knew her. I had watched hours and hours of video of her lecturing, but we had never met. We had never talked.

Is it fair to say she hated you?

I don't know.

Okay, again, you were never in her head.

But what happened, she had just been indicted, and I happened to be in New York for work. She had a procedural court hearing. I went to the courthouse in Brooklyn, and I walked in. If you've ever been inside a federal courthouse, there's a lot of security. You have to hand over your phone to the security guard. You put all your stuff a metal detector and a scanning thing. I went through that, and I was standing in the lobby with my notebook. I knew she would show up. I just didn't know when. She shows up with this whole entourage. It's her and her co-defendant, Rachel. There are attorneys, probably close to a dozen one-taste supporters, some of whom I recognize her face is. They're going through the security line, and Nicole spots me. She immediately smiles and waves. She calls out, Hi, Ellen.

Oh, these leaders are good. They're good.

She's very good. She makes her way through security. The rest of her entourage is still handing over their phones. She approaches me. I ask if I can shake her hand, and I shake her hand. Then she hangs on for an extra second, and she goes, We have a strange intimacy. I was like, Oh, yeah. I'm sure I said something really dumb. Then I was like, It's great to meet you. I'll see you in the courtroom. That's our only conversation. It was just a moment, and I don't need to make it more than it is, but it is true. She's a charmer. I think she really knew how to describe our strange relationship.

It's fucking powerful.

Another thing that I learned from a different cult researcher is people often talk about charisma in cult leaders. Sometimes it falls flat because some people will look at a cult leader and be like, That person's not charismatic at all.

Keith, when I watch that doc, I'm like, This is your dude?

What this researcher says, and it has made a lot of sense to me, is she's like, I prefer to think of charisma as descriptive of a relationship between two people. So there's charisma that exists in a connection between two people. So between a follower of Nexium and Keith, the charisma is off the charts. But someone from the outside might look at him and be like, It's totally lacking.

This guy's a volleyball champ?

In the judo champ? More like chemistry then.

Yeah. Or maybe it describes like one way. I forgot about how much volleyball there is in Nexium. He thinks he's like an Olympic volleyball player. He loves volleyball.

Yeah.

But anyway, there were people who looked at Nicole and became entranced. Then there were some people who looked at her and they're like, This woman does nothing for me. That existence doesn't negate the pull that she had on these other people or the spell that she was able to cast on them. That helps also give people more compassion for someone might be having a different experience with this person than I am. Oh, yeah.

People describe having worked with her and then looked through the delivery window of the food and caught a minute of her eye contact and felt more connected to her than anyone else they'd ever. I, of course, was just like, I want to meet her as a challenge. I wanted to see if she- Just had a curiosity. I wanted her to try to woo me.

Then when I was covering the trial, I saw her every day, but we didn't talk. Instead, I would be sitting in the courtroom for hours at a time. You can't bring in any device You're just there with your notebook. It's very meditative. What I would do is I would also watch the people in the courtroom. You're watching the One Taste supporters who's showing up on the other side every day, and the lawyers and the jurors. Then mostly I would watch Nicole. It was funny because Rachel, her second in command, who was also a defendant, not very expressive, would look straight ahead, and neither of them testified. She wouldn't really talk very much. Nicole was the opposite. Anytime someone entered the courtroom, she would turn around and be like, Who is it? Then she recognized them. She would put her hands on her heart. After the trial was over, I interviewed a few jurors, and all of them said to me, they were like, Nicole kept looking at us and trying to make eye contact. She would often smile. She would sometimes laugh. She would whisper to her attorney. She's a very animated person. She's very alive.

You're around her and you're like, whoa, this person has a lot of energy. Yeah. I would observe her. I mean, I'm not sure I came away with deep conclusions, but it was fascinating to watch her even as she's not in a speaking role. Still include. Try to project her energy out to the people around her.

Yeah. Oh, man. Wow. Well, the book is called Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult. I love when journalists who write mostly in short form write books because Because the pace is so fucking good. It's like reading just a super compelling article. The information is coming so quick and concisely and cleverly worded, and it's just a very exciting read. Thank you. It's a great book. I hope everyone checks out Empire of Orgasm. Ellen, this has been delightful. So fun. Yeah, thanks for coming. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Who are you going to take down next? Who's next? Oh, man. If you're going to email about me, just ignore it. I promise I won't look too hard.

But you got to find out if you had a Jucero.

Yeah. On the fact check, we'll get down to the nitty-gritty on the Jucero.

There's just so many devices in the house.

I don't know. I would honestly not be surprised.

No, it wouldn't be surprised.

She just loves her wellness.

The juice was good. I tasted the juice. No one's arguing the juice was not delicious, fresh.

But that's just a smoothie package delivery, really. That's a different business. Also, sorry. You got to do one second on it. The mad grab to make all companies a tech company during that era was so funny. It's like, it's a juice company. That's not a tech company. You're going to try to make it a tech company?

You're totally right. It's like, why does this need to be this huge engineering feat? They were selling a juice subscription. The juice machine was WiFi connected in a way that was absolutely not necessary. They argued that it meant that they could scan the QR code of each juice pack and alert you if there had been a recall. Okay.

Safety.

But again, you could just squeeze it with your- The big three around this time was like, we got to stop thinking about these as car companies and think about them as tech I'm like, No, you don't.

I need this motherfucker to drive me to point B. I don't need a subscription on the info.

I don't like the screen.

But you know why there's this incentive? It goes back to what we were saying earlier about so much money in VC, giving heightened valuations to companies that could call themselves conceivably tech companies. As soon as you can call yourself a tech company, you're going to get a valuation that's 5X, what you could have gotten if you were just consumer goods.

Gm is never going to 100X in the next 20 years. It's just not going to happen.

So there's a pretty big financial incentive to want to do that, even if it was a bit of a stretch.

Yeah. Well, Ellen, what a delight. This is so fun. I hope you'll read another book and come back to us. Yeah.

All right. Thank you. All right, take care.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.

Hello. Hello.

How are the.?

Good. It's almost the weekend.

I'm very pumped about the weekend. It's been a very big week. Very, very big week. Lots and lots of episodes, and I filmed this week. Yeah. Which meant going to Long Beach. I was on the West Side, which I never am, and I'm meaning to go look at the Palisades in Malibu. Oh, yeah. Have you been?

No, I haven't. Well, no.

It's a crazy drive just because I've driven sunset to the beach so many times in my 10 years of living in Santa Monica. So I know I know how it's supposed to feel. And I know how the PCH is supposed to feel leaving Santa Monica and driving up to Malibu. And it was interesting to me how much of it all you log without knowing, right? Like your subconsciousness It was like, as you're driving, you know where you're at based on all these markers that you're not really paying attention to that you know. I kept going like, I don't know. Because just the entire side of the PCH on the left side is gone. None of those houses are there. So crazy. It's so crazy.

Is there like, construction happening? Did you see?

In the Palisades, it's insane how many houses are framed there already. Oh, there are. Okay. Yeah. I think I had this very pessimistic fear That given the restraints of building permits and stuff in LA, which can be brutal, I'm like, when will they and will people even try? Right. And there's just houses everywhere.

So you are seeing them even though it's gone?

They're mostly just framed I was thinking, as you would know better than anyone, I was like, it's so deceptive if you build a house, when you see it frame, you're like, Oh, I have a house. I'll be in this in 10 minutes. You're like, Oh, no. It hasn't even begun.

I know.

And they frame these houses. They frame them in a few days. It's like, insane how quickly they build the physical wooden structure of it. And then you're just years out from before that final piece of tile goes in.

I know. Speaking of I'm coming real... I'm close. I'm close, everyone- Tic-toc. To moving in. I mean, I'm like- Like, what's left? Exactly.

What pretty necklaces you have on today. Thank you.

I have two necklaces on. I'm less than two weeks out. No way. Yes. It's really exciting. Calleigh came to visit me yesterday, and she was telling the designer She was like, Monica and I built our... We had to design our dorm room, and now this is where she gets to live. She was very proud and happy for me. I'm lucky and I'm excited. I also, though, I keep having nightmares.

Oh, wonderful. What type of nightmare?

I'm not a big nightmare, gal. I don't really have many, but I've been having a lot more lately. I I think, I assume, has to do with this big, huge transition that's coming that, again, I'm so grateful to be able to do and so lucky.

But you have change anxiety as we've well documented.

Yes. Change isn't my... It doesn't come that easy to me. The nightmares are murdery and stuff like that.

Oh, like you're afraid to be in the new house.

By myself.

.

I think I already... It was I thought it's been lingering a little bit for a long time. That's a big house. Now it's coming. It feels a little… It's so exciting, but it is a little scary. There's so many… I feel like I shouldn't even say this on here, but there's multiple entry points.

Well, to home. I think they might have concluded there's not a single entrance. What if you had to leave your front door under the street and then walk around to get on your deck? That'd be great.

Or go to your pool? I feel like I should. I should lock up the rest of it. I should make it hard. Board it up. Yeah.

Why don't you have young Jess come stay at your house the first week or something? I know.

I'm thinking about that. I'm thinking about trying to ease my way in and I've had some people stay. Then they leave and there will be a day, or maybe I'll be ready by then. I don't know, but there'll be a day that I'll be by myself.

My prediction is you'll be shocking extremely comfortable very quickly. I hope so. I think, yeah, the unknown of it and the thought of being in that big house by yourself is quite scary. But I think very quickly... Because I had that moving from our old house to this house. It's just like a new thing. The threats are all the same, by the way. It doesn't matter if you have two doors in your current apartment, people get killed just as much as an apartment as they do houses.

Well, yes and no. They probably don't because I I bet robbery is much higher in a house and an apartment because the items- But robbers don't kill people. Well, if they're in there. No.

Robbers aren't killers. Robbers come to rob stuff. They hope to not interact with- They hope to, but sometimes when they do- So if you don't go confront them and try to stop them, they're not there to kill anyone. Those are killers. People who are in the market to murder someone are much different than people who want to go steal shit.

Yeah. I understand you think that's helpful to say, but it's not. I don't want to be robbed. Yeah, of course not. I don't want to be robbed when I'm in my house or when I'm not.

It's very scary the thought of being robbed. But if you read a statistic that robberies never end in murder unless the homeowners or confronts the assailant. If you read that statistic, would it comfort you at all or no?

But if they come in my room and I'm in my room, I didn't go confront them. And you just lay there.

I don't know. It's in the trying to stop them where they think they might get arrested, where you have problems.

Yeah. But they're not like, I want to go murder something.

They're like, I want shit so I have money so I can get the thing I'm trying to get.

Right. No, I know that.

And murder is not going to help them in that at all.

I agree. I think there's this sense of like, in my apartment, if I scream, people can hear me. They're above me and next door, and they'll be able to hear my screams.

But you also have an alarm at your house, which you don't have at your- Exactly.

That's right. And a lot of security. Yes, I am definitely more protected in the house, but it's just new. I do remember when I first moved into my apartment that first night, I slept at Calleys.

You did. You left your apartment.

I was like, Yeah. I couldn't do it. But it'll be great. It's a big, big old change on the horizon.

Yeah, I'm excited for you.

Thank you. Me, too.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare.

Dr. Mike's coming over tonight.

Oh, that's bud. Yeah, he's in town, so he's going to join us for a family dinner. Then Frankenstein, which I haven't seen.

I haven't seen it either.

I've gotten my children willing to watch what is on the surface of scary movie because Jacob already's in it. Oh, you're real, you're real. God bless his handsomeness.

I know. It'll buy you a lot.

It will. I think they're willing to get through anything. I also heard it's not... Have you seen it?

No, I want to.

I've heard it's not as scary as you might think.

Yeah, I want to see it.

I also didn't know that was a Guillermo de Toro movie, and I see all of his movies, and he's a genius. So then all of a sudden, I was like, Why haven't I seen this movie?

Yeah. I saw a movie that I want to shout out, Eternity. It is Elizabeth Olson and Miles Teller and Callum Turner. It's a rom-com-ish. It's so good and so sweet and heartwarming. I just loved it. Oh, good. I really recommend if you want a feel good.

Where did you stream it?

Did you rent it? I rented it. I think soon it will be out to stream. It was just out in the theater, it's in November or something. But I highly recommend it if you want something that makes you feel good and you want to cry, but in a happy way and a sad way, but also a happy way. I recommend that.

I have a recommendation, too. It's a funny circuitous route to this recommendation, which is I had dinner with Malcolm, who was in town, which is great. I had remembered that he kept going to Alabama to do a story story on a murder. The last time I had seen him in New York, and I said, Hey, how's that story coming? And he said, Oh, my God, it's so good. It turned out so good. It's out. And I go, It's out? And I said, Oh, my God, this is my problem with your show. Because you're not weekly, I don't ever know when a new season comes out of Revisionist History.

You got to subscribe.

I do subscribe.

Oh, then it should pop up on your Spotify.

It doesn't. Maybe I'm not using it correctly. Okay. Okay. Suffice to say, I was unaware of it. So I knew I had this drive to Long Beach. I'm like, Oh, perfect. I'll start Malcolm's murder show. So I go and I see the most recent revisionist history, and I start it. And the first episode is about genius and the two different kinds of genius, which is fascinating. There's distinctly two types. And one is the archetype is Picasso, which is like, he explodes on the scene at 20 years old, and he's doing something no one else is doing. And he's just so fast, and he can rip these things out, and it's so impressive. And then there's Saison, who's also the master of all masters. And his paintings, the ones you've seen have been redone sometimes, like eight, nine times. They've taken years. And then he uses this parallel to talk about Leonard Cohen and his music. And like, Hallelujah. He He wrote that song for 10 years, and he made four or five failed versions of it before it becomes the one that we know. But even more interestingly, we really know the Jeff Buckley version.

Yeah, exactly. It's It's like it's then Jeff Buckley's interpretation of this thing that is now really everyone that's doing it now is doing.

His.

Yeah. So it's just this complicated- Iteration. Root iteration to perfection. I'm fascinated. It's great. I love listening listening to it. It's a lot about Elvis Costello. It's very cute because you hear Malcolm was such a music nerd as a kid. He was going to his concert. Oh, yeah, he loves music. Yeah, it's very cute. I'm going, when will he seamlessly integrate a murder plot line into this? Then the next episode starts, and it is about sad songs. And then on the Rolling Stones top 50 songs of all time, he goes through them. It's saying there's almost no sad songs on this list. It's weird. Then he goes into this whole thing about country, how country has really fearlessly explored sadness like no other genre. And the hits in country are often like their alcoholism and their death and their divorce and all these topics. The thing that was so fascinating about it is he then references this other guy who put the 1,500 songs into this algorithm he created. What it would do is it would basically, it could listen to the song and then tell you what percentage of the lyrics are unique and which percentage are repeated.

Does that make sense? Through chorus or whatever, they're repeating stanzas, whatever. It turns out that rock is, I want to say it was 60% is new, and then 40% of all the lyrics are repeated. Then in country, Oh, and the other point he had made before he makes this point is that the heartbreak... He compares Wild Horses as a sad song by the Rolling Stones to this country song. He says the reason this country song is so much more heartbreaking is the specificity of it. It's like a motion coupled with specificity really results in this emotion. Country music has far less repetition. Then he goes through this fascinating thing where he reads a list of the top 100 country songs ever written. A hundred?

Lucky he gets to do that.

He doesn't go through the whole, he knows better.

Him and I need to have a podcast where we just read a hundred lists.

But he didn't go through the whole list. Okay, but he wanted to. What he immediately shows you is that almost every single one of the songs was written by someone from either Arkansas, Texas, or Kentucky, maybe, Tennessee.

In the country list?

In the country top 100 of all time. They're all written by protestants. They're white, protestant Southerners from almost just three or four states, the entire list. If you look at the list of all the top rock songs, it's people from everywhere in the world. He said, So rock as a genre is way more diverse, which is why rock iterates way faster. Rock changes a lot more than country has changed because of all these diversity of viewpoints. He said, But the price it pays is rock can't be specific because it's not speaking a language everyone listening already speaks, which is so interesting. So the country people, they don't have to bury it in metaphor or repeat it. They give you the specifics because they assume everyone listening already speaks the language and knows all of it. And he said, The only other genre genre that does that is hip hop.

I was about to say rap does it.

Yes. And he said, Again, it's written by... He reads that list. The top list of those is like, Brooklyn, Brooklyn, South Central, Bronx, South Central, Brooklyn, Brooklyn. It's all from It's very concentrated. Everyone already speaks the language. They're not going to dumb it down for anybody.

Yeah, that's interesting.

And I have always been saying those two genres to me are identical genres. It's like the white version and the black version. And my explanation was it talks about socioeconomic struggle. That was why I thought they were so similar, which I still maintain as part of it. But to hear this other explanation, which is so fascinating, is no, it's the specificity that's only being written by these handful of people for other people in that community is really cool.

That's very cool. Yeah. I mean, I definitely think I've said this a lot. The more specific you get, the more universal you get. Yeah. Which is counterintuitive, but it's true. Yeah. So that applies is here.

All to say, I'm like, wow, where is the... Now I've had this whole education on country music and all these singers, songwriters. I'm like, how the fuck is he going to get a murder in Alabama in this mix? I'm thinking, Oh, country. So then somehow my phone fucks up and it sends me now back to the main page. It doesn't autoload the next one, whatever it is. And now I realize when I opened up Revisionist history the first time, that was what was the most recent. But now when I'm back on the page, I'm seeing the shit that is not his stuff that's in his normal feed. And then I see, murder in Alabama. I mean, that is the name of the series. Then I started murder in Alabama because I was driving around so much looking at Palisades in Malibu.

That's funny. Okay, that makes sense because I was like, wow, he's really taking his time. And that's hard to do in a podcast.

And then the other thing that was tripping me up, and I'm not saying anything. I said this directly to him. I sent him a voice memo, which was the music one was really good. But I was also like, wow, he thinks this is the best thing he's ever done. It's really good, but it doesn't feel head and shoulders above anything else I've listened to of his. So I wonder, and then I get more fascinating with what did he get out of his heart and his mind in this one that he feels so proud of? But I wasn't even on the right fucking one.

I see. Wow.

Okay. I could make a little up on my pedestal point. I've been I'm thinking a lot about lately.

Okay, let's hear it.

I think no one likes paying taxes. You think? Yeah. So I think that it's safe to say no one likes paying taxes. Correct. And I think the assumption, and I can relate to this, is like, Hold on. I went out and made this money. Why do I have to give half of it to you? And then you start thinking about, Where's that money going? And this and that. But I think what you don't think about is you were able to make that money Because this is a place that enforces the laws, that has highways that you can transport goods on. All of the stuff. I think it's the same condition we all suffer from where we think we got ourselves to where we're at. We don't acknowledge everyone else who got us here. It's like, you can't make money unless you have this really robust system in place that allows you to do it in the first place. That's what you're paying for, is a place where one can be prosperous.

Yeah. And if you have a good or a service, the people around you need to have money to be able to buy your service or your product. So it benefits you for everyone to have stuff and have money and have some abundance so that you can keep your thing up. It's all connected.

Even the service or the product, right? You have a product, and the reason you can profit on it is because if someone tries to make the same product and sell it under the same name as yours, you can take them to court. There's a system in place that will allow you to profit from the thing that you created. You're safeguarded. Yeah.

I mean, when we had Walter Isaacson on, we talked so much about this, and I thought it was great where he talks about the commons and the way that this country was built is because of the common good. That's what taxes go to. We wouldn't have a country like this if we didn't have that.

People like to make a big deal out of the fact that Elon did successfully move Tesla to Texas. But it's a little unfair because it's like he couldn't have made Tesla there. Exactly. But now that it is what it is, he can take it there and just pay way less taxes. But it's quite unfair because it's like you should give back to the system that allowed you to make the thing in the first place. The second you can be independent from it to some degree.

Where you were able to innovate it. Yeah. I like that. That's a good soapbox. I read a quote. I posted it because I thought it was nice. That's very in keeping with what you're saying. I also posted about Veronica Mars. It's on Netflix. People should go watch Veronica Mars on Netflix. Or just got there? Yes, it's very exciting. One of my favorite shows of all time. Okay, so thinking today about the Park Ranger in Mirror Woods on Thanksgiving Day, 2025, who told us that red woods distribute water to other trees and plants that surround them because they know that if they have all the water from themselves and let everything else go dry, they're at greater risk of burning in a wildfire. I don't think that story was just about trees. So same concept.

Yeah, that's nice.

Same concept.

I like that. Let's do some facts.

Ellen Fax. Ellen Fox.

It's something that could be a name, Ellen Fax. It could. Like a news reporter. Some of these reporters, they like to give themselves a that seems really on brand with what they do.

Oh, it's true.

Dallas Rains. Yeah, correct. Meteorologist seem to do this more, but- Yeah, I agree. You could be Ellen Fax. You could change your name to Monica Fax.

Mots. She had an issue with Motts. They are the bane of my existence. Of sweater collectors. Yes, exactly. Now, it says, To get rid of closet mots, deep clean the closet by vacuuming and wiping surfaces. Treat infested clothes by washing or freezing them to kill eggs and larva. I hate the word eggs and larva. And use natural deterrence, like cedar and lavande. My closet has so much cedar all over it.

Do you have those little cedar sticks that hang on the hook?

Yeah. And like, balls.

I noticed those were in my closet in Nashville. I get taken care of, but I don't even know. Sometimes it flies over my head, but I did notice, Oh, someone had the foresight and kindness to put one of those in my closet.

You need it along with pheromone traps to break the breeding I hate the word breeding cycle and prevent reinfestation. I hate moss.

Yeah. Okay.

You might need to publish a list in descending order of fear, your most hated animals down to moss.

I, of course, want to know our moss above or below dogs, snakes. There's so many of these animals that you hate, mice. We need a comprehensive- Are we going hate or scared?

I'm scared of? Because those are actually different.

But break that down for me.

I'm not scared- Of a moth. Of a moss, exactly. But I hate them.

Isn't it crazy when you kill them? Do you ever kill moss with your hand?

I've tried.

Or with a fucking object. Yeah. They just turn to powder. They're made of powder.

Well, okay. So there's moths. They're full of all that. Then there's these tiny guys that look like moss, but they actually come out of your rice. Oh. Those are They're so easy to kill that it's actually like, it's so disgusting. Then they do. They're just like nothing.

They turn into a little pile of cotton dust.

It's clear that they've been eating cotton. It's clear that they've been eating cotton. What the sea horse is.

It's like that dust gets made into a seahorse. It's a reverse. It returns back to a powder.

Eew. Eew, Rob.

They're pretty. No. The pantry moth. A pantry moth.

Okay, those are the ones that get in the rice. I don't want to look at that anymore. It's stuck on the TV.

I don't know.

It's stuck on the TV. Okay, so for venture capitalists, what percentage of companies do VCs count on succeeding? Vcs count on a few big home run successes to cover many failures, which estimate suggesting up to 75% of VC-backed startups fail, while only a tiny fraction, around 9%, generate all the industry's profits. Most VCs expect only one in 10 funded companies to be truly successful. Okay, Is the actor's Way, is it courses? Yes. Ten Lessons, Holistic Online Acting Course. Okay. Erwan. I wrote down Erwan. I don't know why I wrote that down. Okay. Oh, because his name was Erwan or something, and we thought it was Eruan. I just wonder if people even know that Eruan is nowhere spelled backwards.

I did not know that. That's what it is. That's intentional? Do you like that?

It's very stupid.

Okay, okay, okay. But I like Erwan. I don't know where it is. I'm just going to keep my opinion to myself if you are super gung-ho about that.

No, it feels so pretentious, but I do like Erwan. I have to be honest about that. I know it's absolutely ridiculous. It's ridiculous. It's so expensive, but I like it in there.

People do. People travel here to go.

I like their pre-made. Their pre-made food is good.

You get what you pay for. You don't get upset.

You get what you pay for and you don't get upset.

That's my adage. I have that tattooed on my small of my back.

Oh, I really liked this, what she said, a definition of consent. I really liked this. If you can't freely say no, then you can't freely say yes. I really like that a lot. I checked to see if Kristen had a Jusero. She did not.

Okay.

So that's a feather in her cap.

Now I know what to get her for her birthday.

Exactly. Come July. That's all for the facts.

All right. Love you. All right. Love you.