Ellen Huet (on wellness cults)

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Guest: Ellen Huet (On Wellness Cults)

Date: January 28, 2026
Episode Title: Ellen Huet (on wellness cults)
Main Theme:
An investigative deep dive into the rise and fall of the wellness cult OneTaste, the dynamics of cults in modern society, and the personal and social mechanisms that make such organizations appealing, through the lens of investigative journalist Ellen Huet and her new book "Empire of Sex, Power and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult."

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Episode Overview

Dax Shepard and Monica Padman are joined by award-winning investigative reporter Ellen Huet, who discusses her extensive research into OneTaste, a controversial wellness company centered around "orgasmic meditation." Ellen traces the group’s evolution from a provocative self-improvement start-up to a dangerous, exploitative cult, explaining the psychological, social, and structural ingredients that make cults—including OneTaste—so alluring and harmful. The trio explores themes of group psychology, personal vulnerability, power, sexual dynamics, legal boundaries, and the universal human search for meaning and connection.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Ellen’s Communal Living (03:27–11:45)

• Ellen currently lives with 20 adults and 8 children under four in a co-housing setup, which she jokingly calls a "commune" but emphasizes is not a cult.
  • “The WiFi password is 'not a cult.'”
    — Ellen (04:33)
• The cohab group rotates cooking, sometimes pooling money for a chef. Living together provides logistical and emotional support, but isn’t always harmonious.
• Dax relates his own experience of “podding up” during COVID, drawing parallels to communal living benefits.

Defining a Cult and Its Characteristics (11:45–15:43)

• Cults exist on a spectrum, not a binary; a charismatic leader is common but not required.
• A central feature in almost every cult is intense control over members’ sexuality—be it enforced celibacy or orchestrated promiscuity—which helps maintain power and leverage:
  • “Most cults control their members’ sexuality in some way… heard experts describe this as just an effective tactic.”
    — Ellen (12:17)
• The “no leader” aspect in groups like Alcoholics Anonymous is cited as a key reason such organizations avoid cult status despite having other cult-like features.

Avoiding Cult Dynamics and the Allure of Leadership (15:08–16:24)

• Dax is candid about the temptation of influencer power:
  • “I regularly am trying to make sure I’m not becoming a narcissist or cult leader you like.”
• Ellen shares a tip for cult immunity: “Try to join more than one [group].” If coexisting is possible, it’s probably not a cult.

Ellen’s Journey into Journalism & Early Career (16:31–22:51)

• Ellen’s path from Stanford to breaking news in San Francisco to tech and business reporting at Bloomberg.
• Discussion on the Silicon Valley ethos—risk, failure, and reward—and famous startup busts (Juicero, Theranos).
• The Juicero story: A high-profile startup creating a $400–$700 juice machine, which Ellen’s reporting revealed was effectively unnecessary (“you could just squeeze the packets by hand”).

Notable Quote

“I don’t feel great about [taking down a company]… but the public should know.”
— Ellen (23:13)

Entering the World of OneTaste (25:42–38:09)

• The origin story of OneTaste: A wellness startup selling courses on "Orgasmic Meditation" (OM)—a 15-minute clitoral-stroking meditation with strictly prescribed rules.
• OM pitched as “radically focused on female pleasure” but with a rigid structure and no reciprocation expected.
• OneTaste’s appeal: Promises of improved sex, relationships, and empowerment attract both women (seeking sexual agency) and men (enticed by access to intimacy).

Memorable Moment

“The only goal is for both parties to focus on the sensations in their bodies in sort of a meditative way.”
— Ellen (28:06)

The Darker Side: Exploitation, Pressure, and Abuse (38:11–72:33)

• Early on, Ellen’s investigation found “ex-members felt exploited,” especially regarding financial and sexual coercion.
  • “Some people spoke about feeling like they had been exploited financially… pressured to take on debt… others talked about being pressured to have sex with potential customers”
    — Ellen (38:28)
• Key pivot points included:
  • Financial struggles leading to sales pressure for expensive courses.
  • The introduction of insider-only communal living, deeper hierarchies, and religious/occult-like elements (magic schools, priests/priestesses).
• The leader, Nicole Daedone, had a complex childhood, entangling trauma with ideology; her father was a convicted child sex abuser, influencing both her worldview and the pseudo-philosophical justifications used in the group.

Quotes on Nicole’s Background

“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.”
— Ellen, relaying Nicole's words (76:44)

• The “Beast” doctrine: OneTaste’s leadership encouraged embracing men’s predatory nature; rejecting the concept of victimhood, blaming those who were harmed for not "owning" their experience, and dangerously blurring lines between consensual exploration and abuse.
  • Discussion of former members being pressured—sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly—into sexual acts as a form of “growth” or penance.

Notable Exchange

Ellen: “It is empowering to take full responsibility for your life and your experience… but it can be used to gaslight people into thinking that everything that happens to them is their fault.” (49:20)
Dax: “If there’s no victims, then there are no perpetrators. How nice.” (49:55)

Cult Growth, Celeb Endorsements, and Media Attention (52:05–55:23)

• OneTaste expanded from a single warehouse to multiple locations in the US, London, and Australia.
• Mainstream exposure—from The New York Times to TEDx, Tim Ferriss, Goop, Khloe Kardashian—played a significant role in legitimizing the cult, whether intentionally or not.

Quote

“It’s hard to want to critique orgasmic meditation because… it was this commendable thing. It was like raising up female sexuality.”
— Ellen (55:23)

Psychological Mechanisms & The “Slow Boil” (55:41–72:17)

• The journey deeper into OneTaste was incremental—members often didn’t realize how much their personal boundaries shifted over time (the “boiling frog” effect).
• Higher and higher "courses" created constant incentives for members to stay invested, both financially and emotionally.

“Consent” and Legal Gray Areas (84:29–87:30)

• The legal prosecution centered on the complex issue of coercion vs. consent within a high-pressure group:
  • “If you can’t freely say no, then you can’t freely say yes, and therefore you can’t consent.” — Ellen (86:56)
• Trials focused on whether psychological and implicit pressures undermined real consent, and the difficulty in prosecuting charismatic group leaders who rarely issue direct commands.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Communal Living & “Not a Cult”

• 04:33 Ellen Huet: “The WiFi password is ‘not a cult’... We joke a lot about it. It definitely doesn’t qualify in a lot of ways.”

On Cult Dynamics & Power

• 15:38 Dax Shepard: “I regularly am trying to make sure I’m not becoming a narcissist or cult leader you like.”
• 12:17 Ellen Huet: “Most cults control their members’ sexuality in some way... It’s just an effective tactic if you manage to control someone’s sex life.”

On OneTaste’s Origin

• 28:19 Ellen Huet: “During those 15 minutes, the only goal is for both parties to focus on sensations in their bodies in a meditative way.”

On Exploitation

• 38:28 Ellen Huet: “Some people spoke about feeling like they had been exploited financially... pressured to take on debt... others talked about being pressured to have sex with potential customers.”

On Nicole Daedone’s Worldview

• 76:44 Ellen Huet: “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.”

On Psychological Manipulation

• 49:20 Ellen Huet: “Taking 100% responsibility for your experience... can be taken too far and used to gaslight people... everything that happens to them is their fault.”

On Cult Susceptibility

• 82:18 Ellen Huet: “It’s not about smarts. It’s about your yearning and your seeking... if the right match finds you at the right time, you are at heightened vulnerability.”

On Status and Social Pressure

• 84:29 Ellen Huet: “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.”

On Meeting Nicole

• 88:55 Ellen Huet: “She immediately smiles and waves... She goes, ‘We have a strange intimacy.’... She’s a charmer.”

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 03:27–11:45 — Ellen’s Communal Living and Group Dynamics
• 11:45–15:43 — What Makes a Cult (Spectrum, Leadership, Sexual Control)
• 16:31–22:51 — Ellen’s Journalism Career & Tech Reporting
• 25:42–38:09 — OneTaste’s Practices and Public Pitch
• 38:11–72:33 — Inner Workings, Abuse, Financial Pressures, Leadership Pathology
• 72:33–80:29 — Nicole Daedone’s Background, Parental Trauma, Pseudo-Philosophy
• 84:29–90:47 — Group Status, Implicit Coercion, Legal Dilemmas

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Conclusion & Takeaways

• Modern cults blur the lines of consent and coercion through social status games, psychological manipulation, and gradually shifting group norms.
• OneTaste’s evolution from wellness startup to criminally prosecuted cult demonstrates the risks inherent when charismatic leaders exploit the universal human search for connection, meaning, and healing.
• Ellen’s reporting and the book "Empire of Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult" provide a cautionary, nuanced look at how these movements take root and flourish—even among seemingly sophisticated, intelligent people.
• The episode closes with a reminder to all: susceptibility to these dynamics isn’t about intelligence, but about timing, context, and our innate need for belonging.

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Book Plug:
Empire of Sex, Power and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult by Ellen Huet

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Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Hi.

[Dax Shepard]

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 Sex, Power and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult. You know, these cults are juicy, Juicy, juicy.

[Monica Padman]

They are so juicy. You want to talk juicy? Oh, pun intended.

[Dax Shepard]

Whoa. Better coming out of your mouth. I feel like I should join a call. I'm so interested in them. I should at least do it for.

[Monica Padman]

A couple months, give it a little.

[Dax Shepard]

Try, like go live on, you know, some. You would Federal land or something. No, I'd be a bad cult member.

[Monica Padman]

So bad.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

I love Quince.

[Dax Shepard]

Who did we just run into that said they were buying Quints because of our show? It was on the red carpet, wasn't it?

[Monica Padman]

It was.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

As we were getting interviewed.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, yes.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

It really is. Their clothes are great and also their home goods are great.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Ellen Hewitt]

I'm Ellen.

[Dax Shepard]

Hi, Ellen.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's okay. No, you're good. And I love your shirt.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Thank you. That's so sweet.

[Monica Padman]

I like red. I'm really.

[Dax Shepard]

Tell me more. The color, the texture, the cut.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

How high are you on the fashioniste? What would you give?

[Ellen Hewitt]

I got this at a clothing swap.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, but you look very stylish. Thank you. Your pants are cute too.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

Lucky.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

To liberate yourself.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

No, I Now live with 20. What?

[Dax Shepard]

Explain this structure to us. I might be breaking the story about you, which would be fun. It'd be like a baton handoff at our current.

[Ellen Hewitt]

I call it a commune, but I'm mostly joking. It's a communal living compound. The wi fi 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 to a different communal living compound where There are currently 20 adults, including me and eight children under the age of four.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my goodness.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So obviously it's co ed.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

And is there bed hopping going on? I just don't know how you get that many people together and there's not bed hopping.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's a vibe with other people.

[Ellen Hewitt]

We have dinner together six nights a week.

[Monica Padman]

Aww.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Each of us takes turns cooking. So you cook once or twice a.

[Monica Padman]

Month for 20 people. That's a lot.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Ellen Hewitt]

So that's nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. How big are the pots and pans.

[Ellen Hewitt]

In this very large restaurant?

[Monica Padman]

Great.

[Ellen Hewitt]

We have a pot we like to call Mondo pot. You know, if you're making like a big soup.

[Dax Shepard]

Now listen, between the 20 of you. First of all, I don't know how that divides by seven, but let's forget about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So maybe you cook less than once a week.

[Ellen Hewitt]

It's a little more complicated than that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I had a hunch.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Half. Well, maybe like a third of the people have decided that they would rather pay into a chef than cook.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And everyone's happy about that because some of those people, if you're not enthusiastic about cooking, you're probably not a good cook.

[Dax Shepard]

That's where I was going with this.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

So there's gonna be nights where it's like, ah, fucking Devin's is gonna make cowboy stew again.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

Can you order in on your own? Just like in your bedroom ever? If you want, of course.

[Ellen Hewitt]

But then. Yes. Then we found this wonderful woman named Julie. And she comes in, she cooks twice a week. Oh. And so either you can have a cooking shift or you pay into Julie.

[Dax Shepard]

And how often are you In a pinch. And you have to bring Julie in. What percentage?

[Ellen Hewitt]

No, no, we plan ahead.

[Dax Shepard]

No, you or me?

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's Thanksgiving. You're making.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

They're like all over, basically. My friend Phil.

[Dax Shepard]

The shitty cook.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yes, the shitty cook.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shitty chef cook.

[Ellen Hewitt]

This is kind of his life's work is like trying to come up with concepts that allow people to live near their friends.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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. Or you could, like, rent next to your friend or you could befriend your neighbor. It started off as a hobby, and then it has slowly become a thing for him.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

No, it is six buildings.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. And is Phil charismatic? Did 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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

They normally are.

[Ellen Hewitt]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Small and mighty.

[Ellen Hewitt]

So she's the one to watch out for.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, I'll keep my eye on her.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe we will, you know, maybe we'll bounce back and forth because I'm going to be honest with you, I've thought about this. So during COVID we kind of potted up with five families and it kind of became what you're talking about, which is like. It was a reprieve for us parents. Cause the kids would be distracted. Someone would host. So we'd fuck up someone's house. And then they dealt with it. And then you only got your house up once a week. And, yeah, you handled food. It was lovely.

[Ellen Hewitt]

It was so fun.

[Dax Shepard]

There wasn't enough bed hopping. If I have a plan. There was a plan. Yeah. There was no bed hopping.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Were they nearby?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. We never lived on the property, but we would vacation all together.

[Ellen Hewitt]

That's really nice.

[Monica Padman]

Vacations, work, really, when we were doing that. Because there were stuff, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Had that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Individual rooms.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yes. That's what this had.

[Ellen Hewitt]

It was because that's where people. You know, you come into graves. You snack, you talk to someone. To me, it's like you could have everything individual. But as long as you had a shared kitchen that is really like a primary kitchen for most of the people, it's gonna feel like living together.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Ellen Hewitt]

But you don't actually have to deal with sharing a bathroom, which can be harder for people.

[Monica Padman]

What happens if someone becomes annoying?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, which certainly happens.

[Monica Padman]

It has to happen.

[Dax Shepard]

Or goes through stuff.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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. Toler wore a little bit of clothes moth. And it caused a lot of pain. And some people were really feeling not heard. You know, we'd have house meetings and be like, what should we do about the moths?

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

But how does one person bring moths?

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

I just discovered a moth haul in one of my items that I hadn't worn for three years.

[Ellen Hewitt]

It happens.

[Dax Shepard]

I thought it gave a character. You could pay for that kind of distress.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

The Real path is wear your clothes often and you won't have a problem with it. But. Oh, because it's like if you take them out, move them around, show them to the sun, they don't like her out of there.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

There are a lot of houses like this in San Francisco and they're all kind of in a network. So I have friends who have lived in other ones. Some people do house meeting every week. That's a lot. At my current place, we have them roughly every six weeks. And we don't need that many. Yeah, yeah. 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? Like we want to alert people more often.

[Dax Shepard]

It does sound really fun. And I don't think they're all super sexually charged. And I think those ones that are probably don't last very long. Too volatile.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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. Oh, I think there's something very interesting there. We don't have an example where the cult leader doesn't fuck everybody.

[Ellen Hewitt]

You're totally right.

[Monica Padman]

Really rare.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

Totally right.

[Monica Padman]

They weren't fucking everyone. But there's blackmail involved in Scientology, so I think he knows about.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, let's be careful. There's alleged blackmail. I'm not kidding.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Well, you just call.

[Monica Padman]

It's also an alleged cult.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Okay, well, they're probably mad that we're calling it a cult.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Someone had their defamation training.

[Dax Shepard]

I just want, you know, I want you to make that point.

[Monica Padman]

I just want you to say, well, there's alleged blackmail. That happens.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And is it sexual in nature?

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Well, what's good is there's no definite you can prove or not.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Well, 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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah, it's not.

[Dax Shepard]

You'd have to do some other things. Yeah, I'm super fascinated by him. 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, and I'll be the first to admit we check a lot of boxes, 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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

You could still imagine it being pretty harmful, but it's all on a scale.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I'll tell you my grossest, deepest thoughts. I hope it's having integrity, which is like I regularly am trying to make sure I'm not becoming a narcissist or cult leader you 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. I kind of predictable. There's a great podcast about kind of podcasters turned gurus, which is like a well worn path. I'm constantly thinking of like, okay, well how do we know we're not a narcissist? What proof do we have in our defense? And then why am I not a cult leader?

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And making sure I don't ever try to become one. Because it's tempting, I think, for people.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah. One of the hot tips to avoid being in too extractive of a cult is to try to join more than.

[Dax Shepard]

One and see how they feel.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah. You know, if you're worried like group A in my life is taking too much control, I'm concerned about it. Try to join another that is maybe equally demanding of your time. And if that's an okay coexistence, that's actually probably a sign that you're okay. Or maybe you're not in so much of a danger zone so you should let people join another.

[Dax Shepard]

We encourage people to listen to revisionist history all the time.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Only that one though.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, no Elizabeth and Andy and nobody's listening.

[Monica Padman]

Right. We have like a handle.

[Ellen Hewitt]

We'll allow. But it's sanctioned.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

When there's the biker club meetup, these are the groups that can all coexist without the emergency. Okay, so you're from Fremont and you went to Stanford.

[Ellen Hewitt]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't sound very financially motivated.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Is that because I'm a journalist?

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

That seems fair.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so. And then now I find out this communal living thing. So tell me about your relationship with well A. How do we major in English and poli sci? And also what's just your disposition about.

[Ellen Hewitt]

This stuff about making money?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You feel unique. Especially in Silicon Valley.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

So is this fair to say you fell in love with writing at the paper?

[Ellen Hewitt]

I did.

[Dax Shepard]

At Stanford, you were the editor?

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

You went straight to San Francisco Chronicle?

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

A cornucopia from San Francisco offerings.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

What year was this?

[Ellen Hewitt]

This would have been 2011 to 2014.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

It is hard, but you gotta do it.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Do you want to hang up?

[Ellen Hewitt]

100%. And that has happened. And every once in a while you call someone and they're like, I'm so glad you called. Yeah, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, 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 reply.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yes. I mean, the 2010s in San Francisco and I did eventually migrate to covering business and startups. The 2000 and tens were an amazing time to be doing that. Frankly, a pretty unhinged time. The venture capital boom was funding tech companies. It was like Facebook, Google, all these companies were shooting to the moon and then you had all this money flowing into venture capital, which then paid for extremely fast growing companies that sometimes didn't pan out in the way that was expected. So I spent a lot of the later 2010s covering WeWork Theranos. Theranos is a great example.

[Dax Shepard]

You have a great podcast called Foundering.

[Ellen Hewitt]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

Won some awards and it was all about the we work.

[Ellen Hewitt]

So people check out a seven part narrative series about Adam Newman and we work.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. What could be juicier? Because I don't know what the ratio is, but a very accepted risk reward proposition in Silicon Valley is like they know they're going to bet on 100 companies, they know 84 of them are going to go bust. Maybe 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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

The ability to have hundred x thousand x returns is very much a software era type thing. So there's a reason that people talk about, oh, B2B SaaS companies. The joke is that they're kind of boring. But the truth is they print money, they're not shipping product, their main expenses are employees and they can sell subscription software. When you think about the ability to have those types of returns, it's a reflection of the technology that's become available.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, there's so many click worthy like they dumped 600 million into this and it failed. And then the wins are so spectacular. It's just like all headline fodder.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Guys, Kristen didn't have this.

[Dax Shepard]

We probably have it somewhere.

[Monica Padman]

You have it. Yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. What a wild, bizarre period of time.

[Monica Padman]

Did you feel any guilt? A little bit, yeah. Is that you just like, took down.

[Ellen Hewitt]

A whole company I don't feel great about. I mean, that's not what I wake up in the morning thinking that, you know, but. And at the same time, the public should know.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

But then they're stupid.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Everyone believes it's very rare to meet a founder who would be willing to show or admit to you, even in private.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, the Theranos gal, she knew that thing didn't work. They were using other machines to do it.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Once I get this other thing going, it's gonna be fine if we're defrauding someone or if we're fibbing a little bit in the demo. It's in service of the mission.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Which is that eventually we will have a blood machine that is going to work as well as the others.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

I have filed her into my.

[Monica Padman]

Like, evil.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I don't want to say evil, because I don't believe in evil.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

They could be saying voice. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I mean, she's copying a lot of other people.

[Dax Shepard]

Steve Jobs, but he had the goods.

[Monica Padman]

That's nervous. I know, but she must. I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

It's tricky, I think, taking down. We're all happy that she got caught.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And yet I still am like, ooh, that's still a person.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I don't know why I'm not sympathetic towards her. Maybe 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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

Pitched. So explain how when you're a journalist and you're working at Bloomberg, you get pitched story ideas by who?

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

They're hoping you can lift the overall.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

About them, which is how One Touch actually does get its first. Is The New York.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Sorry. One touch taste, common mistake.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But it could go either way.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah. And you're touching with one finger. But one taste has a Buddhist origin, so that's part of why they picked it. Yeah. Just as the ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so too does the truth have one taste, the taste of liberation. Hence one taste.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Okay.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Anyway, every morning, you know, you wake up, there's a bunch of pitches in your inbox, and they could be about anything. So in this case, part of why I paid attention to this pitch is I had actually interacted with that PR professional before on a different story because she works for different clients. So she was like, hey, just take a look at this. It's about a company called Onetaste and they teach a practice called orgasmic meditation. And look, it's a fast growing woman led wellness startup. And you cover startups. They're based in San Francisco. Maybe you'd be interested in writing about them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's very colorful.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

His right thumb is on her perineum.

[Ellen Hewitt]

So yes.

[Monica Padman]

So he's okay.

[Ellen Hewitt]

It's kind of like this motion.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Not to get too graphic, he strokes her clitoris for 15 minutes in a very prescribed manner.

[Dax Shepard]

Rising, falling, rising, falling. We're not trying to reach what we.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Think of as Orgasm, they would call it climax. And they kind of look down their noses at it a little bit.

[Dax Shepard]

That's how I. Don't be gross. You guys are fucking being immature. It's not about the way.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

You're just noticing like body scan.

[Dax Shepard]

And what is also unique is that participants who are observing are also encouraged to tell whatever sensations are coming up in them as they observe.

[Ellen Hewitt]

So that's the communal aspect of the more public demo. So you could do orgasmic meditation on your own, just the two people. Or there were sometimes these demos in which you might do it in front of an audience. Maybe for a course in which you're explaining what orgasmic meditation.

[Dax Shepard]

Or investors.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Or investors.

[Monica Padman]

Investors for what? There's no machine.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Well, they're selling courses. That's the business.

[Monica Padman]

We'll get into the history do the gloves.

[Ellen Hewitt]

They did sell branded one taste lube. But that was kind of a like side merch.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Oh, no.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what model they're in. Which is the EST model. How she inherited this stuff.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Totally. So any group that's selling personal development, personal transformation. Landmark. Which is a spin off Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins. Exactly.

[Monica Padman]

Actors way. I think also maybe is course.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it a. Okay. Allegedly.

[Monica Padman]

Allegedly.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Great.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

Better intimacy, even though it's not supposed to be intimate. It's like. Yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

They would define intimacy broadly. Helps you get in touch with your desire.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

So 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, like, would you like to receive it, to experience it so you know what you're writing about?

[Ellen Hewitt]

No.

[Monica Padman]

Are you sad?

[Dax Shepard]

Such a concise word.

[Ellen Hewitt]

I'm not.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not sad about that.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

But then you couldn't do it with journalistic integrity because what if you started loving?

[Dax Shepard]

But are you not intrigued at all by this?

[Monica Padman]

I'm not, weirdly.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[Monica Padman]

I understand why it would be intriguing to some people. I personally don't find it.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

So the thing everyone's talking about, my friends tell me about, I've been robbed of it.

[Monica Padman]

Maybe it'll open me up.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And 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 marriages where they've been struggling to connect sexually in 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart. Not checking which platform you watch that new show on. So frustrating. 15 minutes later, you've logged into seven apps, reset two passwords and still haven't found it. It. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check all state first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Company Affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We are supported by Intuit Turbo Tax. You know that feeling when you drop your taxes off with someone and then nothing? You're just sitting there wondering if they've even started, if there's a problem. If you're getting everything you're owed, it's like sending your car to the shop and never getting an update. That's what I appreciate about TurboTax. With TurboTax Expert full service, they've completely transformed that experience. You get matched with a dedicated tax expert who actually does your taxes for you. And here's the part that changes everything. You can get real time updates on your expert's progress from start to finish. You can literally see when they're working on your return. No more guessing, no more waiting by the phone. And if you have questions, you get unlimited help from your expert at no extra cost. Even nights and weekends during tax season, they're focused on getting you the best possible outcome and every dollar you deserve.

[Monica Padman]

My dad loves TurboTax and he's a meticulous man. He doesn't cut corners.

[Dax Shepard]

If you're not going to trust me, trust Ashoka.

[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

Visit TurboTax.com to get matched with a TurboTax full service expert today. That's TurboTax.com only available with TurboTax full service experts real time updates only on iOS mobile app. We are supported by skims. Monica, can we talk about underwear for a second?

[Monica Padman]

Yes, always.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I've tried so many different brands over the years and most of them just don't deliver. Either they're uncomfortable, don't fit right, or they fall apart in a few washes.

[Monica Padman]

Same. And with bras, it's even worse. There's so many ways for it to become uncomfortable, but skims actually solved all of those problems for me. So I just got some new skims underwear. They're cotton, they're very, very basic, but they're very chic. And this happens every time I get a new skims product. I put it on my body and I'm like, God, they really know what they're doing.

[Dax Shepard]

Chic, chic, chic, chic.

[Monica Padman]

Comfortable. It's so hard to do both.

[Dax Shepard]

And durable.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And durable.

[Dax Shepard]

The thing is, what you wear underneath actually matters. It's not just an afterthought anymore.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. It's the foundation for how you feel every day.

[Dax Shepard]

Shop our favorite bras and [e-mail] after you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you select podcast in the survey and be sure to select our show in the drop down menu that follows.

[Monica Padman]

And if you're looking for the perfect gift for your valentine or for yourself, the Skims Valentine shop is now open.

[Dax Shepard]

And I have had the benefit of not just reading the description in your book, but getting to watch in the doc that was on Netflix that you participated in. What was it called? 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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

Getting used and men were.

[Ellen Hewitt]

There was a mix.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Also, remember we had an armchair Anonymous.

[Ellen Hewitt]

That's right.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. He was not a tech bro ruan.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And he's an example of someone who. He's in the book, he's in the documentary. He was in his early 20s. He's young, he's attractive, wanted to have an adventure.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And joined OneTaste. He has spoken about being asked by the leaders of OneTaste to go and om with. With a woman who had access to money in the hopes that that would then kind of prime her to receive a sales call and say yes to some large purchase.

[Dax Shepard]

Take some courses.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah. So he has talked about that.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

I mean, it happened pretty quickly. So I had that first meeting with One Taste Leadership. They made the basic pitch to me. They were like, we're the whole foods of sexuality. We're the organic, good for you version of sexuality. They were very much like, our practice is wholesome and helps heal people.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

Not a ton. I mean, there's so much to be intrigued about. How does it work? What are the benefits? But then I started asking around a little on my own, finding people who had been involved in One Taste and started to hear from people who were former customers, former members. They felt like they'd been exploited by this company. Some people spoke about feeling like they 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 like an intensive course. And then some of them talked about feeling like they had been exploited sexually, feeling like they had been taught were 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 Taste or that it had been this interesting, helpful, sometimes even healing experience and at the same time simultaneously harmful. That was kind of the intriguing part of it.

[Monica Padman]

That's how all of them are.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. They wouldn't grow and expand if they weren't appealing. If it was just bad.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

It was three months with the Bagwan up in Oregon. Looks fucking great. The Rajneeshi's our party.

[Ellen Hewitt]

A lot of cults are fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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 gonna change the world. You have these cool new friends. Everyone's really excited.

[Dax Shepard]

You've unbridled yourself from society. In essence, you've declared, I'm gonna try a different approach to this. So your ego is also stroked by that. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

Totally.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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. And she is a fascinating and complicated person. She grew up in the Bay Area. Currently she's in her late 50s. So I think that she was growing up in the 70s. And she had a really difficult childhood, which is something that we get into in the book, where her father was a convicted child sex abuser, single mom.

[Dax Shepard]

From Michigan, and dad's in and out.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Not hard to extrapolate that she might have been a victim.

[Ellen Hewitt]

What's complicated is, 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. And I wanted to treat this subject really carefully and sensitively in the book. But I did find people who knew her when she was in her 20s and around that time who told me that she told them that he had sexually abused her.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And she does have a piece of writing that was once public and is not anymore, in which not only does she allude to this, but she actually spins it in this very complex way where she suggests that she perhaps initiated it. And keep in mind that what is being discussed here is a scenario in which she would have been under.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right. So she goes to temple, but just for a year. Temple University.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Temple University of Philadelphia.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I didn't know he meant the temple.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, sure, we are talking about spirituality and alms. But she returns to San Francisco after a year and now she finds herself in some kind of communal living situation. She also loves meth and she loves psychedelics. So she's a psychonaut.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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. And she allegedly spent three years or so living in what she. As an acid house, a house with a bunch of other women in San Francisco where they did tons of acid.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Ellen Hewitt]

I mean, this is all a mix of her retelling. And 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

They call it deliberate orgasm. So 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. Erawan had lived at an ashram for some point. I don't know if he considered himself a monk, but whatever.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

His name is Erawan?

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah. Not Erawan. Like the grocery store. Not the grocery store. It's spelled E, R, W A N.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, okay, got it.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

It's 15 minutes as well, right?

[Ellen Hewitt]

15 minutes, probably. They like to use the word pussy, so I'm gonna use it within one taste. For a period of time. They preferred to use the terms pussy and cocktail to describe female and male genitalia, in part because it had charge to it.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Because it was this provocative word.

[Monica Padman]

But again, I'm so confused by this, because it's like it's supposed to be.

[Dax Shepard]

Get the program, Monica. Jesus.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

I would say the way to think about it is what Onetaste was eventually selling was horses on orgasmic meditation, which is. Is a pretty fringe and provocative idea. Right. Like, most people are not going to be like, great, sign me up. You might need a little convincing. So in order to do so, they did try to make it quite safe, seeming clinical. That's why it's like the 15 minutes, the prescribed script, all these safe.

[Dax Shepard]

And they don't want you to not climax. They just are saying it's bigger than just the climax.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

This was supposed to be her wild week.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yes. Just kidding. I'm gonna pursue this. This meditative clitoral stroking practice.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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, and they taught a practice called deliberate orgasm. And both of those groups were less business oriented than one taste. They were a little bit more insular, and they were both run by men. And deliberate orgasm was like, a little bit more freewheeling. It wasn't 15 minutes. It didn't have as many guardrails. So Nicole ends up going with Erewhon to become part of one of these groups. And what essentially happens is she learns how to run a community like this, and she learns the basics of this practice. And after that, she's there for a couple years, and after that, she decides, I want to do this on my own.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

I mean, what's interesting is, yeah, they all share this lineage, and if you want to trace it far enough back, there's even many shared lineages back to Ed and what is now Landmark Forum. And there's probably a connection to Nexium. You know, it's like this tree essentially of personal development, personal transformation groups. They Often have a tie to each other. So if you wanted to like map out that genealogy.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you have Aselen in there, you have all these. It's a perfect area to be in.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a nice clean setup. Just though I think it's interesting to say that there were a hundred more houses at one point. A lot of these have been really successful. I just watched the Synanon you talk.

[Ellen Hewitt]

About a little bit in the book.

[Dax Shepard]

But I watched that doc and I was like, it's crazy. How fascinating is huge. They're all kind of borrowing from each other. They all kind of little laced with some Buddhism.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

Was that a different one or is that connected?

[Ellen Hewitt]

That's one of the two groups that taught deliberate organism.

[Dax Shepard]

That's where the organism kind of start out.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh yeah, okay. So she breaks out on her own. She's having kind of middling success. She gets a warehouse in San Francisco and invites people to live in it.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yes. So when she starts onetaste, they start off by having a center in San Francisco where they have, like, a yoga studio and they start offering classes. And this is in 2004 or so. And pretty quickly, within a couple years, they also rent a warehouse down the street, and that becomes the first communal residence of One Taste participants. And that starts the whole history of onetaste. People living together and having that be kind of the inner experience. Kind of like once you get more.

[Dax Shepard]

Involved, then you're living it.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Those squares.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah. Start spending all their time with people at OneTaste. And that is how it can advance for certain people.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And that's when the explosion happens. How much responsibility should news and media take for kind of promoting these terrible ideas? Where's the integrity there?

[Ellen Hewitt]

It's a little complicated.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And that some things can get at it. Like even, obviously we have to report on a school shooting, but if you report on it, then people see it and then other people do. It is complicated.

[Ellen Hewitt]

It is.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know what the answer is, but it can create contagion effects, frankly.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Some of the other things that helped OneTaste get mainstream success were also endorsements from influential people such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim Ferriss, Kim Ferriss, Khloe Kardashian.

[Monica Padman]

Two out of three friends of the pod.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And I don't necessarily blame them either. I think Tim wrote about one taste in the four hour body. And so it was like a little bit more about the stroking practice. Those were markers that could quickly signal to someone who was like, wait, orgasmic meditation? What is this? It's like, oh, well, Nicole Daedon has appeared on the Goop podcast or she has spoken at a Goop conference.

[Dax Shepard]

She did a TED talk?

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah. TEDx.

[Dax Shepard]

TEDx. Okay. I don't know the difference. What's the difference?

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Idea from all your years of being immersed in it. Do you see turning points for her? Like, when does it get more and more corrupt? Is it just the expansion in the money that's making her want to use these parishioners as a lure for these people. Money, like, when does it turn? It gets crazy wanting to get there.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

No complaints.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

It's like you slowly realize you hate this person. And they go, well, you guys gotta go in a room and fuck.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

And she has this incredible tool she's devised where their line of questioning is all about getting down to your base desire. Right? That's kind of the 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 down to her base thing. And she's like, no, but there's something lower than that. There's deeper than that. And it was, of course I need more orgasms was a deeper base desire.

[Monica Padman]

Than wanting a child.

[Dax Shepard]

Than wanting a child.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Ellen Hewitt]

I mean, to me, that's an example of something that shows up a lot in groups that you could. Could call alleged cults, which is they foster this belief that the leader knows better than you what you want, or that they possess wisdom and knowledge that you do not have access to. And when people hear that, sometimes their first reaction is like, oh, that's so sinister. But one thing I learned after talking to so many of these people that I appreciate now is that that often for people who are looking for solution or help or something in their life, it can feel like a relief to find someone who claims to have knowledge and wisdom that is going to help you, and you then want to hand over your autonomy to them. In fact, it feels good to do so. You feel like this person is going to help me. It doesn't always feel like this sinister extractive thing. And so there are many small anecdotes of people who describe turning to Nicole in some sort of Lecture or class and asking her, what's next for me? They would ask her for guidance and she would often say, like, oh, I think you should do this or that. And even within some of the Juan Taste residences, she would often give out assignments which you didn't have to do them, but people wanted to do them because they thought that again, doing the assignment would help them with their personal growth. And so it's this gray area. It wasn't like, you must do this thing. But she would suggest to people like, oh, your 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 witness this.

[Monica Padman]

Having sex, not doing this.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah, there was a brief period where they did study and try to incorporate om for men, which is kind of the gender flipped version of orgasmic meditation. It's basically a hand drop. A woman strokes a man's penis for 15 minutes.

[Dax Shepard]

Good luck.

[Ellen Hewitt]

This decision was exactly like. The idea was basically like the existence of this as a possibility created too much of an incentive for like tit for tat. And the whole point of orgasmic penetration is that you're supposed to be able to ask for home and like, no, not a. So they tried it briefly and then you're right, they put it to the side.

[Dax Shepard]

This doesn't work with you.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Now this is where it takes this really wild turn, in my opinion, which is she starts speaking more and more about honoring men's predatory nature. 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 like a route to that. This is where it gets crazy. I mean, I think it all ends with this speech she gives about her dad. But just how did that evolve?

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

And that rape is also potentially on the table.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Happening to you. Yes, yes.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Which is largely true.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Again, totally. That's what I found fascinating about this whole idea, is they have these ideas that have this really valuable kernel, and it's hard to know when it goes too far. So anyway, there's this idea that, you know, you should take agency and responsibility for everything in your life. The flip side of that is having a victim mentality is bad. Many people in one taste described to me how this was a lesson that was taught broadly and because they were also teaching about sex. And Nicole also liked to make provocative statements about sexual relations, sexual dynamics. There are video clips of her lecturing in courses where she talks about, I want to make sure I characterize this correct. You know, at one point she makes a joke to a course where she says, like, 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.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And she has also spoken about. She said something like, women who have experienced sexual assault recovered emotionally faster if they took responsibility for their role in the experience. Something along those lines. She also made a statement once. I was like, the true way to deflect rape is to turn on 100%. They often talked about turning on within onetaste. That one's a bit trickier because turning on had arguably a more holistic meaning to them rather than A strictly sexual arousal. Meaning. Regardless. A lot of people described to me an attitude within Onetaste that was sort of like, if you feel like you were assaulted or sexually assaulted, that's on you. Kind of. Yeah. And it is very complicated. And for a lot of people, that's really horrifying.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Well, there's a story in the back. 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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Close. Okay, so at the. 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 welcome consensus, which was a predecessor to Onetaste, a different group where they taught deliberate orgasm. According to people who were there, they had a belief that women were all powerful.

[Dax Shepard]

With their emotions.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah, with their emotions. That they were able to emit something that they called call, which was like an emotional signal to men, and that men received this call and only responded to it. And they drew a parallel between that and. And I guess the mammalian pattern of, like, a female in estrus emitting some sort of pheromones. They would argue that anything that a man does in response to a woman.

[Monica Padman]

She wanted Exactly.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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. And at the same time, it's obviously quite troubling because it suggests that men have no responsibility for the actions that they take.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

One of the ways that this shows up in an anecdote from that era is a man who was in the welcome consensus gets in an argument with a woman and he feels the sudden urge to hit her. And even though he has never hit a woman before, he hits her in the face as hard as he can.

[Dax Shepard]

He's been kind of encouraged to.

[Ellen Hewitt]

He described this to me and he said, like, I know it sounds horrifying, and you have to understand that on some level, based on the philosophies that we believed at the time, it made sense. He believed that violence was a form of emotional expression and that everything that he felt called to do was actually, like, in response to a woman's initiative. But, yes, that is a very complicated way of also saying, basically, like, she asked for it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

What if he was like, congratulations, that's what you wanted. You asked. I mean, that's what they're doing psychologically. Like, you might not know that you wanted it, but your body knew and it told him and he did it again.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Also. Money's in the mix now. Cause there's a point where this thing has generated $12 million totally.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

How much did they owe him?

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

And they're introducing new stratas all along too. We introduced a notion of a pre stroker.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah. So first there's courses. It's like the coaching program, the Nicole Deson intensive membership, which was basically a way to take any course you want over the course of a year. And then the priests and the priestesses, Those appeared in 2015, maybe 2014, when OneTaste held this immersive course called Magic School.

[Monica Padman]

What is happening now?

[Dax Shepard]

We're getting into the occult, Monica. They make videos that look like seances. It starts getting rid of really occult. I'm asking you kind of to psychoanalyze or maybe you don't have enough of the deets where 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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

She's getting more confident.

[Ellen Hewitt]

I think that's probably fair to say.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

It doesn't happen overnight.

[Dax Shepard]

The boiling frog.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And you're going to some geriatrics house. Yeah. But some young man.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

You can't finish. It has to always be.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Can we add too? Nicole's a great performer. So she steps in a lot of times to put on these one hour demos.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Where she has this orgasmic trip through the cosmos and you all watch. She's also a performer.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And what's interesting about that is in the early days, she would participate in an OM demo as the woman who was being stroked. And then later on she actually replaced herself and she would make herself the stroker. She would stroke a different woman on stage. And so in 2013 and 2014, OneTaste hosted these big orgasm conferences in San Francisco. And the big headliner event would be Nicole stroking one of her, like, deputy subjects. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And I think that's really interesting because she probably look, I don't know. This is speculation. But my guess is at some point she realized, like, she's the CEO of this company, she can't be the one on the table. It's a pretty vulnerable position to be in. And so she kind of elevated herself out of that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so is it that or. Okay, 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.

[Monica Padman]

Power dynamics, you mean?

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

I have this impact on somebody.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, this is where you get into the trauma. And again, I'm saying how much I want to reveal.

[Monica Padman]

But I see.

[Dax Shepard]

If you have a. A guaranteed pleasurable outcome that you can access with somebody.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And you are afraid of people's emotions otherwise. And this is a way, you know, you're fucking safe. This person will be receiving pleasure. They'll be grateful, they'll like you. I get it, is what I'm saying. And the fact that her trajectory goes there. I'm just curious what is at play.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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 of it.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

That's probably what I relate to.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

What drove her to. From being the strokey during these demos to the stroker. I truly don't know. It's inside her head.

[Dax Shepard]

I just think there's something really juicy there.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah. And it's possible that she was also just trying to rise to a form of leadership by taking over the man's role, which is kind of a 2010s era. Women in power move very.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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, us men on it. So, I mean, there's some part of it that's comforting to me that's like, oh, yeah, you put a woman at the top of a cult. And guess what? She'll be a terrible person at the end of it. 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 scrambled. And that the people here didn't really understand his kind of basically, enlightenment. So she is on record and out loud, basically saying it was the other people's fault. And my dad really is fine.

[Monica Padman]

Not only fine. He's special.

[Ellen Hewitt]

He's enlightened. Yeah. She calls him expansive.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, dude, that's fucking.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

It's deeply, deeply confusing to a child.

[Monica Padman]

They spend their whole life trying to figure out how to make that make sense.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And this is how she did it.

[Monica Padman]

I think that's so sad.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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, like, a little girl who is trying To. Yeah, when you said it's deeply. You only get one.

[Dax Shepard]

And she wants that one to have been a goodbye hook or crook.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yes, I know that story.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. 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 much.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And other people who have studied under Nicole have described to me that she also put forth theories like there is no such thing as. As pleasure or pain or good or evil. It's just all variants of sensation. Again, there's a hint of some of that in sitting meditation. Mindfulness. This idea that no feeling is necessarily, like, good or bad.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's kind of Buddhist.

[Ellen Hewitt]

But you can also see how that type of idea might have served this part of her that wanted to make sense of her dad. What kind of thinking is gonna allow her to say, I never thought of my dad as a bad person?

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

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 react.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

It's like, doesn't compute.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it won't compute.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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. 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 onetaste, I knew the FBI was investigating, but that's all I knew for many years. That's all anyone knew for many years. And five years later, after much investigation, they charged Nicole and Rachel Cherwitz, who was her second in command, with forced labor conspiracy, which is a federal crime. And then two years later, there was a criminal trial this summer in Brooklyn and went on for five or six weeks. And in the end, the jury unanimously decided that both Rachel and Nicole were guilty of forced labor conspiracy. And so they had been out on bail. The next day, both women were taken into custody, and they have been in a federal jail ever since. They are awaiting 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Whoa.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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. And at the same time, you know, when I started reporting on this group, it's not like I was a cult expert. Now I feel like I've done a lot of research, and I kind of understand both this group and then broad patterns generally. And I think I would say that it's not about smarts. It's about your yearning and your seeking, and everyone has something that they are looking for. And if that right match finds you at the right time in your life, when you are maybe having just gone through some sort of life transition or you moved to a new city or you went through a divorce or anything like that, you are at heightened vulnerability. So I think that some people are more vulnerable than others, but I do not Agree that there are people out there who are like totally immune to this risk.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I agree.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And I think having some humility about that is actually probably protection. Because if you assume that this will never happen to you, you might not recognize it when it does. And cults look different now than they did 40 or 50 years ago. I don't mean to be like fear mongering, but it's just more about understanding that by nature humans are searching for things. And I think if someone promises an answer, that's like a very tantalizing thing. One of the major things that I found interesting is about researching and understanding one taste is just how much status games play a role in why people did certain behaviors within the group. All of a sudden, if you become really emotionally invested 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, your moral compass was set by your peers already. That's how we work.

[Ellen Hewitt]

There's no objective, you know, observers will look at some of the choices that people made when they were inside onetaste and they might judge and they might say, I would never do that. I would never agree to that kind of arrangement, or I would never stand by while my friend was being punished for. 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 like, reflect on. But more so than that, it's like in your daily life, it is interesting to try to be aware of how frequently you are making decisions based on wanting approval or status or avoiding disapproval or pain.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

And what's interesting is I, the author has passed away, but she wrote this kind of seminal book about cult behavior. One of the things that really stuck with Me is, she said, we're such finely tuned social creatures that we don't even need to be told what the rules are. We are so good at looking around and just inferring what we should be doing. And within one taste. Nicole rarely commanded. She would just pray 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

I mean, legally, they're consenting.

[Ellen Hewitt]

At the trial, the defense attorneys would often cross examine witnesses and ask them questions that, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Look, it's a tricky one because we all want liberty.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Of course, we gotta draw these really continuous lines.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Someone at trial said something that I think sums it up really well. This was like a former onetaste 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it fair to say she hated you?

[Ellen Hewitt]

I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, again, you were never in her head.

[Ellen Hewitt]

She had just been indicted. And I happened to be in New York for work. She had a procedural court hearing. And I went to the courthouse in Brooklyn, and I walked in, and if you've ever been inside a federal courthouse, there's a lot of security. You have to hand over your phone to the security guard. You put all your stuff through a metal detector and a scanning. So I went through that, and I was standing in the lobby with my notebook. I knew she would show up. I just didn't know when. And she shows up with this whole entourage. So it's her and her co defendant Rachel. They're attorneys, probably like, close to a dozen onetaste supporters, some of whom I recognize her faces. And they're going through the security line, and Nicole spots me. She immediately smiles and waves.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

And she calls out, hi, Ellen.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, these leaders are good.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

It's fucking powerful.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Keith Ranieri. When I watch that doc, I'm like, this is your dude.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

This guy's a volleyball and a judo champ.

[Monica Padman]

Come on.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah. Or, you know, maybe one way. I forgot about how much volleyball there is in next season.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, he thinks he's, like, funny Olympic volleyball player.

[Ellen Hewitt]

He loves volleyball.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah. People describe having worked with her and then looked through the delivery window of the food and caught a minute of her eye contact and felt more connected to her than anyone else they'd ever.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I, of course, was just like, oh, I want to meet her as, like, a challenge. I want to see.

[Monica Padman]

Just out of curiosity.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I want her to try to, like, woo me.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Then when I was covering the trial, I saw her every day, but we didn't talk. And instead, I would be sitting in the courtroom, you know, for hours at a time. You can't bring in any devices, so you're just there with your notebook. It's very meditative. And what I would do is I would also watch the people in the courtroom. You're watching the one taste supporters who's showing up on the other side every day, and the lawyers and the jurors. And then mostly I would watch Nicole. It was funny because Rachel, her second in command, who was also a defendant, not very expressive, would look straight ahead, and neither of them testified. So, you know, she wouldn't really talk very much. And Nicole was the opposite. Anytime someone entered the courtroom, she would turn and, like, be like, who is it? And then she recognized them. She would put her hands on her heart. After the trial was over, I interviewed a few jurors, and all of them said to me, they were like, nicole kept looking at us and trying to make eye contact, and she would often smile. She would sometimes laugh. She would whisper to her attorney, like, she's a very animated person. She's very alive. Like, you know, you're around her and you're like, whoa, this person has a lot of energy. So, yeah, I would observe her. I mean, I'm not sure I came away with deep conclusions, but it was fascinating to watch her even. Even as she's not in a speaking role, try to, like, project kind of her energy out to the people around her.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, man.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow. Well, the book is called Empire of Orgasm, Sex Power and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult. I love when journalists who write mostly in short form write books because the pace is so fucking good. It's like reading just a super compelling article. The information's coming so quick and concisely and cleverly written 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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

So fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Thanks for coming. Who are you gonna take down next? Who's next?

[Ellen Hewitt]

Oh man, I.

[Dax Shepard]

You can email about me. Just ignore.

[Ellen Hewitt]

I promise I won't look too hard. But you gotta find out if you ever had a Juicero.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. On the fact check. We'll get down to the nitty gritty on the Juicero.

[Dax Shepard]

There's just so much many devices in the house. I don't know.

[Monica Padman]

Honestly not be surprised.

[Dax Shepard]

No, it wouldn't be surprised.

[Monica Padman]

She just loves the juice. Was good wellness.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

But that's just a smoothie packet delivery really. That's a different business also. Sorry, I got 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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

You're totally right. It's like, why does this need to be this huge engineering. They were selling like a juice subscription. The juice machine was WI fi 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, safety.

[Ellen Hewitt]

But again, you could just squeeze it with your.

[Dax Shepard]

The big three around this time was like, we gotta stop thinking about these as car companies and think about them as tech companies. I'm like, no you don't. I need this motherfucker to drive me to point B. I don't need a subscription.

[Monica Padman]

I don't like this screen.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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. Yes. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

GM's never going to 100x in the next 20 years. It's just not going to happen.

[Ellen Hewitt]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

All right, take care.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Hello.

[Dax Shepard]

Hello. How are the.

[Monica Padman]

Good. It's almost the weekend.

[Dax Shepard]

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, or I was on the west side, which I never am. And I've been meaning to go look at the Palisades in Malibu.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah?

[Dax Shepard]

Have you been.

[Monica Padman]

No, I haven't. Well, no.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

So crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

It's so crazy.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Are there.

[Monica Padman]

Is there, like, construction happening? Did you see?

[Dax Shepard]

So in the Palisades, it's insane. How many houses are framed there already?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, there are.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Yeah. I think I had this very pessimistic fear that, like, given the restraints of building permits and stuff in la, which can be brutal.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm like, when will they. And will people even try?

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And there's just houses everywhere.

[Monica Padman]

Like, so you are seeing them, even.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

I know. Speaking of that, I'm coming real. I'm close. I'm close, everyone. Ticky tock to moving in. I mean, I'm like.

[Dax Shepard]

Like what's left.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, what pretty necklaces you have on today.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you. I have two necklaces on. I'm like, less than two weeks out.

[Dax Shepard]

No way.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. And it's really exciting. Callie came to visit me yesterday and she was telling the designer. She was like, you know, Monica and I built our. You know, we had to design our dorm room, and now this is where she gets to live. And she was very proud and happy for me. I'm lucky and I'm excited. And I. I also, though, I keep having nightmares.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wonderful. What type of nightmares?

[Monica Padman]

I don't know. I'm not a big nightmare gal.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I don't really have many, but I've been having a lot more lately. And I. I think it. I assume, has to do with this big, huge transition that's coming. That again, I'm so grateful.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

To be able to do. And so lucky.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, like you're afraid to be in.

[Monica Padman]

The new house by myself.

[Dax Shepard]

Uhhuh.

[Monica Padman]

So I think I already. It was. That's been lingering a little bit for a long time. Like. Like it's. That's a big house, you know, and now it's coming. Like I'm about. It's. And. And it feels a little. It's so exciting, but it is a little scary. There's so much. I feel like I shouldn't even say this on here, but there's multiple entry.

[Dax Shepard]

Points close 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?

[Monica Padman]

That'd be great.

[Dax Shepard]

Or go to your pool.

[Monica Padman]

I feel like I should. I should lock up the rest of. I should make it hard.

[Dax Shepard]

Board it up.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ellen Hewitt]

I know.

[Monica Padman]

I'm thinking about that. I'm thinking about trying to. To do the. You know, kind of ease my way in and have some people stay. I just. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

My prediction is you'll be shockingly comfortable very quickly. I hope so. I think you're. Yeah. That the unknown of it and the thought of being in that big house by yourself is quite scary. But, But I think very quickly because I had that. Moving from our old house to this house, it's just like a new thing. And 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 in apartments as they do houses.

[Monica Padman]

Well, yes and no. They probably don't because I bet robbery is much higher in a house than in an apartment because the items.

[Dax Shepard]

But robbers don't kill people.

[Monica Padman]

Well, if they're in there.

[Dax Shepard]

No, robbers aren't killers. Robbers come to rob stuff. They hope that not interact with.

[Monica Padman]

They hope to, but sometimes when they.

[Dax Shepard]

Do so if you don't go confront them and try to stop them, they're not there to kill anyone. Those are killer. People who are in the market to murder someone are much different than people who want to go steal.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I understand you think that's helpful to say. But, but it's not. I, I, I, I don't want to be robbed.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, of course.

[Monica Padman]

And I don't want to be robbed when I'm in my house.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Or when I'm not.

[Dax Shepard]

It's very scary, the thought of being robbed. But if you read a statistic that robberies never end in murder unless the homeowner confronts the assailant. If you read that statistic, would it comfort you at all or.

[Monica Padman]

No, but can, but like, can. If they come in my room and I'm in my room.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I didn't go.

[Dax Shepard]

And you just lay there.

[Monica Padman]

I, I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

It's in the. Trying to stop them where they think they might get arrested, where you have problems.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but they're not like, I want.

[Dax Shepard]

To go murder someone. They're like, I want so I have money so I can get the thing I'm trying to get right. Murder's not going to help them in that at all.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but you also have an alarm at your house, which you don't have it here.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. That's right. And a lot of security. Yes. I, I am definitely more protected.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

In the house. But it's just new. And I do remember when I first moved into my apartment, that first night, I. I slept at Cali's.

[Dax Shepard]

You did? You left your apartment?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I couldn't do it, so it'll. But it'll be great. And it's. And it's a big, big old chain on the horizon.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I'm excited for you.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you. Me too.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. Doctor Mike's coming over tonight.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, he's in town, so he's gonna join us for family dinner. And then Frankenstein, which I haven't seen.

[Monica Padman]

Ooh, I haven't seen it either.

[Dax Shepard]

And I've gotten my children willing to watch what is, on the surface, a scary movie because Jacob Elordi's in it. Oh, God bless his handsomeness.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It'll buy you a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

No, I. No, I want to.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I want to see it.

[Dax Shepard]

I also didn't know that was a Guillermo Doro movie, and I see all of his movies and he's a genius, so that all of a sudden I was like, why haven't I seen. Seen this movie?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I saw a movie that I want to shout out. Eternity. It is Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller and Callum Turner, and it's a rom com ish. And it's so good and so sweet and heartwarming and I just loved it.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, good.

[Monica Padman]

I really recommend if you want. Want like a feel good.

[Dax Shepard]

Where did you stream it?

[Monica Padman]

I rented it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I think soon it will be out to stream.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

It was just out in theaters like in November or something. But I highly recommend it if you want something that makes you feel good.

[Dax Shepard]

And you want to cry, but in.

[Monica Padman]

A happy way and a sad way and. But also a happy way. I recommend that.

[Dax Shepard]

I have a recommendation, too. And it's kind of a funny, circuitous route to this recommendation, which is I had dinner with Malcolm, who was in town, which is great. And I had remembered that he is. He kept going to Alabama to do a story on a murder. The last time I had seen him in New York. And I said, hey, how's that story coming? And he said. He said, oh, my God, it's so good. It turned out so good. It's out.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

And I go, it's out. And I. 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.

[Monica Padman]

You gotta subscribe.

[Dax Shepard]

I do subscribe.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, then it should pop up on your Spotify.

[Dax Shepard]

It doesn't.

[Monica Padman]

Huh?

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe I'm not using it correctly.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

But suffice to say, I. 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. Murder show. So I go and I see, like, 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 like, there's distinctly two types. And one is the archetype's 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, so impressive. And then there's Cezanne, who's also the master of all masters. And his paintings, the ones you've seen, have been redone sometimes like eight, nine times, and they've taken years.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And then he uses this parallel to talk about Leonard Cohen and his music. And like, hallelujah. He wrote that song for 10 years and he made like four or five failed versions of it before it becomes the one that we know. But even more interestingly, we really know the Jeff Buckley version.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. So it's like it's then Jeff Buckley's interpretation of this thing that is now really. Everyone that's doing it now is doing his. Yeah. So it's just like this complicated route iteration to perfection. And I'm fascinated. It's great. I love listening to it 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 these concert. Yeah, yeah. It's very cute. And I'm going, when will he seamlessly integrate a murderer plot line into this? And then the next episode starts, and it is about sad songs. And then on the rolling stones top 50 songs of all time, he goes through them. It's saying, there's almost no sad songs on this list.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Weird.

[Dax Shepard]

And then he goes into this whole thing about country, how country is really fearlessly explores sadness like no other genre. And. And the hits in country are often like their alcoholism and their death and their divorce, and they're all these topics. The thing that was so fascinating about it is, like, he then references this other guy who put the 1500 songs into this algorithm he created that would. What it would do is it would. Basically, it could listen to the song and then tell you what percentage of the lyrics are unique and which percentage are replaced, repeated. Does that make sense? Like, through chorus or whatever, they're repeating stanzas, whatever. Yeah. And so it turns out, like, that rock is like. I want to say it was like 60% is new. And then 40% of all the lyrics are repeated.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And then in country. Oh, and the other point he had made before, he makes this point is that the heartbreak. He compares Wild Horses is a sad song by the Rolling Stones to this country song. And. And he says the reason this country song is so much more heartbreaking is. Is the specificity of it. It's like emotional emotion coupled with specificity really results in this emotion. And country music has far less repetition. Then he goes through this fascinating thing where he reads a list of, like, the top 100 country songs ever.

[Monica Padman]

100. Lucky.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Oh, him and I need to have a podcast where we just read 100 lists.

[Dax Shepard]

But he didn't. But he didn't go through the whole list.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

But 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.

[Monica Padman]

In the country list.

[Dax Shepard]

In the country top 100 of all time.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

They're all written by Protestants. They're white Protestant Southerners from almost just three or four states. The entire list, if you look at the list of all the top rock songs, it's people from everywhere in the world. Right? And he said, so rock as a genre is way more diverse, which is why rock iterates way faster. Rock changes a lot more than country has changed 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 the all. All of it. And he said the only other genre that does that is hip hop.

[Monica Padman]

I was about to say rap does it?

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. That's interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

That's very cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, I definitely think we've. I've said this a lot. Like, the more specific you get, the more universal you get.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Which is counterintuitive, but it's true.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So that applies here.

[Dax Shepard]

All to say I'm like, wow.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

So I wonder. And then I get more fascinated with why. What about what did he get out of his heart and his mind in this one that he feels so proud of? But I wasn't even on the right fucking wall. I see. Wow. Okay, I could make a little up on my pedestal point I've been thinking a lot about lately.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, let's hear it.

[Dax Shepard]

I think no one likes paying taxes.

[Ellen Hewitt]

You think?

[Dax Shepard]

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. 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.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

That had, you know, all of the stuff. I think we all, it's, 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.

[Monica Padman]

Also, if you.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what you're paying for is the. As a place where one can be prosperous.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Right, Right.

[Dax Shepard]

You're. You're safeguarded. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

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, and the way that this country was built is, is, is because of the common good.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And that's what taxes go to. And we wouldn't have a country like this if we didn't have that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Like, people like to make a big deal out of the fact that Elon did successfully move Tesla to Texas.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

But it's a little unfair because it's like he couldn't have made Tesla there.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

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 could. You should kind of give back to the system that allowed you to make the thing in the first place. Like the second, you can be independent from it to some degree where you.

[Monica Padman]

Were able to innovate it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is.

[Ellen Hewitt]

That's a good.

[Monica Padman]

I like that. That's a good soapbox. I read, I. I read a quote. I posted it because I thought it was nice. That's very in keeping with what you're saying. That said, I also posted about Veronica Mars. It's on Netflix. People should go watch Veronica Mars on Netflix.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, just got there.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, it's very exciting. One of my favorite shows of all time. Okay, so thinking today about the park ranger and Muir woods on Thanksgiving Day 2025. Who told us that redwoods distribute water to other trees and plants that surround around them because they know that if they hog all the water from themselves and let everything else go dry, they're at greater risk of burning in a wildfire? I don't think that story was just about trees. So same concept.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's nice.

[Monica Padman]

Same concept.

[Dax Shepard]

I like that. Let's do some facts.

[Monica Padman]

Ellen Fax. Ellen Fox.

[Dax Shepard]

Something that could be a name. Ellen Fax.

[Monica Padman]

It could.

[Dax Shepard]

Like a news reporter. Some of these reporters, you know, they like to give themselves a name that seems really on brand. Brand with what they do.

[Monica Padman]

It's true.

[Dax Shepard]

Like Dallas Reigns.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Meteorologists seem to do this more.

[Monica Padman]

But yeah, I agree.

[Dax Shepard]

You could be Ellen Fact, you could change your name to Monica Fax.

[Monica Padman]

Moths. She had an issue with moths. And they are the bane of my existence.

[Dax Shepard]

Of sweater collectors.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, exactly. Now it says to get rid of closet moths. Deep clean the closet by vacuuming and wiping surfaces. Treat infested clothes by washing or freezing them to kill eggs and larvae. I hate the word eggs and larvae. And use natural deterrents like cedar and lavender. My. My closet has so much cedar all over.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And like balls.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

You need it along with pheromone traps to bring break the breeding cycle. I hate the word breeding cycle. And prevent re infestation. I hate moths.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, now you might need to publish.

[Dax Shepard]

A list in descending order of fear your most hated animals down to moss. I do. I of course want to know our moths above or below dogs.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Snakes. Oh, there's so many of these animals that you hate. Microsoft. Nice. Where we need a comprehensive.

[Monica Padman]

Are we going hate or scared up? Because those are actually different.

[Dax Shepard]

But break that down for me.

[Monica Padman]

So I don't.

[Ellen Hewitt]

I'm not.

[Monica Padman]

I'm not scared of a moth. Of a moth exactly. But I hate them.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

I've tried.

[Dax Shepard]

Or with a object? Yeah, they just turned to powder. They're. They're like made of powder.

[Monica Padman]

Well, okay, so. So there's moths and then there's these tiny guys that kind of look like moths, but they actually come out of your rice. Oh, and those are. They're so easy to kill that it's actually like. It's so disgusting. And then they do. They just like. They're just like nothing.

[Dax Shepard]

They turn into a little pile of cotton dust.

[Monica Padman]

It's.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like clear that they've been eating cotton.

[Monica Padman]

What the seahorse is. It's like that dust made into a.

[Dax Shepard]

Seahorse returns back to a powder. Ew.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Ew.

[Dax Shepard]

Rob. They're kind of pretty. No, the pantry moth. A pantry. Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Those are the ones that get in the rice. Oh, I don't want to look at that anymore. 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 bag startups fail, while only a tiny fraction around 9% generate all the industry's profits. Most VCs expect only 1 in 10 funded companies to be truly successful. Okay, is the actor's way. Is IT courses? Yes. 10 lessons. Holistic online acting course. Okay. Erewhon. I wrote down Erewhon. I don't know why I wrote that down, but. Oh, because his name was Erwan or something and we thought it was Erewhon.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I just wonder if people even know that Erawan is like nowhere spelled backwards.

[Dax Shepard]

I did not know that.

[Monica Padman]

That's what.

[Dax Shepard]

That's intentional. Do you like that?

[Monica Padman]

This is very stupid.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, okay, okay.

[Monica Padman]

But I like.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know where to. I'm just going to keep my opinion to myself. If you are super gun ho about that.

[Ellen Hewitt]

No.

[Monica Padman]

It feels so pretentious. But I do like Arowan. I have to be honest about that. And I know it's like absolutely ridiculous. It's ridiculous. Like it's so expensive. But I like it in there.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, people do. People like travel here to go and.

[Monica Padman]

I like, like their pre made. They're like pre made food is good. Uhhuh.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, you get what you pay for, and you.

[Monica Padman]

And.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you don't. You don't get upset.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

It's my adage. I have that tattooed on my small. In my back.

[Monica Padman]

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 liked that a lot. I checked to see if Kristen had a Julie Arrow. She did not. Okay, so that's a feather in her cap.

[Dax Shepard]

Now I know what to get her for her birthday come July.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. That's all for the facts.

[Dax Shepard]

All right.

[Monica Padman]

Love you.

[Ellen Hewitt]

Love you.