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Coca Cola for the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers for the optimists, pessimists for long distance love for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers for old friends and new Coca Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca Cola at a store near you.
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The world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 copilot and Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
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Fascinating.
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It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Ferry unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts. Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind, the show that focuses on the overlap of psychology in religion and spirituality. I am your host, Dr. Dan Koch. I'm a licensed therapist and psychology of religion researcher, specifically a spiritual abuse researcher, which is going to be relevant to our conversation today. And what I'll say before I introduce my guest is this is maybe not a great episode to play with children or even maybe teenagers around, depending on how open your family is. In talking specifics about sex, we may be referencing particular body parts and of course there will be talk of exploitation and things of that nature. But specifically I'm just thinking of age appropriateness. So be forewarned, listeners. I am joined today by journalist Ellen Hewitt. Ellen, you're known for your work at Bloomberg, including co hosting the most recent season of the the Bloomberg podcast, Foundering, which is fun floundering founders of organizations and things like that, wework, et cetera. And Ellen, you are the author of an upcoming book, comes out next month. Well, we're recording this October, but it might come out around the time that this comes out. Empire of Inside One Taste and the Wellness Cult that Seduced Silicon Valley. And this book tells the story of Onetaste, the San Francisco company that built a devoted following around a practice that they called, quote, orgasmic meditation, which is a blend of sexual ritual, self help, and a spiritual promise that was very popular among Tech workers, entrepreneurs. Eventually it collapsed under allegations of exploitation and abuse. And since the book was finished, since it's not out yet, One Taste founder Nicole Dadone. I might be saying her name wrong.
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Yeah.
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And former head of sales Rachel Churwitz were convicted of a forced labor conspiracy in federal court. And federal prosecutors showed that they had coerced members into sexual acts and unpaid labor under the guise of spiritual or personal growth. And those of my listeners who have an interest in spiritual abuse, their radars are already pinging left and right. If you've ever seen or seen the little the tile on Netflix for a documentary called Orgasm, Inc. And, Ellen, I am sexually pure, so I, of course, have never clicked on this tile. That is not what Netflix is for. It is for family TV night. Anyway, that is about the same company, One Taste, so maybe people just would have come across that or maybe watched that documentary. That's what we're talking about. That was a long intro, but here we are. Ellen, thanks for being here.
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Thank you so much for having me. And yes, for those who have watched Orgasm, Inc. Or for those who might watch in the future, you will recognize my voice and you'll see my face. I'm kind of the narrator throughout that documentary.
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B
Oh, I didn't realize that you were that involved in the documentary.
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A
That's cool.
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B
Okay. All I had seen was that it was about the same group, but. Okay, cool. So you're a part of that too. All right, so there's kind of some stuff that I want to just throw out on the table that I'd like to get through in this conversation is getting some background from you about how this company sort of formed, and maybe if, you know, how they figured out this formula, this sort of in the middle Venn diagram of wellness culture, tech culture, spirituality, you know, sex. And then, you know, we gotta talk about the way that they utilize religion and spirituality specifically in their language. Wanna talk about parallels with spiritual abuse? I mean, I would just say that it is spiritual abuse, as far as I can tell. And we'll talk about more there and then some of the psychological dynamics. And eventually I'd like to get into, if we have time, some of the gender and women's sexuality stuff, as well as just the commercial nature of wellness culture and where that might have some natural tension with most of what we would consider spirituality, self help, these kinds of things. Wellness more broadly. So that's a pretty good table setting, right?
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Yeah, those sound great.
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B
Okay, where do you want to start? Just with sort of setting up a little bit of the story.
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A
Yeah. Let me give a little background about Onetaste and Orgasmic Meditation and how I got to be, how I came to write a book about it, just so people kind of understand who I am and what we're talking about. So OneTaste is a company that was started in San Francisco in 2004 by a woman named Nicole De Don. She had a co founder as well, but Nicole has always been the spiritual leader, the main face of Onetaste, just like the woman who started it all. And she's really the main character of the book Empire of Orgasm as well. And Onetaste started in San Francisco again in 2004 and it was selling courses on orgasmic meditation. And as a quick explanation of what orgasmic meditation is, it is a 15 minute sexual meditative practice that's done with a partner in which a stroker, usually a man who remains fully clothed, puts on a glove and a little bit of lube on his finger, and he strokes a woman's clitoris using his left index finger in this very prescribed way for specifically 15 minutes, no more, no less. And the woman is naked from the waist down and she kind of lies down and spreads her legs open. And they do this practice, which again, orgasmic meditation. They also call it om, pronounced Om.
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B
Now that is some fucking branding.
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A
Yes, and we will get to that.
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B
Before we move on.
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Hell of a name.
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B
If you just want to hint to someone who might know a little bit about Eastern meditation and culture that what you're doing might be connected to some deep millennia long spiritual wisdom. Naming it fucking Om is. Well, I mean, obviously it didn't pay off, but that is such a stroke of it.
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A
It was a smart move. It was a smart move. And it really. And there are gon a lot of these things and I'm glad you're picking up on them. But yeah, so basically, orgasmic meditation, Om, also called Om, is, you know, the point of the practice, and this is what drew a lot of people to it, is that it's a pleasure practice focused on the female orgasm with no goal other than to have both parties spend those 15 minutes meditating on and feeling the sensations in their body. So in that case, you know, there is actually, there are a lot of parallels to, you know, sitting meditation, this idea that you are simply noticing and not projecting kind of stories on what you're feeling, you know, and, and training yourself to study and better understand the sensations in your body. But in this case, obviously there's a sexual component. And for a lot of people who might have struggled with, you know, a lot of women have struggle. Struggle to reach orgasm or to have climax. A lot of men might struggle with performance anxiety and sexual. A lot of people might just feel that sex is really freighted with this baggage of relationships and expectations and performing in a certain way. For those people, OM is really appealing because it offers a totally different way to approach having a sexual connection, an intimate connection with another person. So that's kind of the basics, maybe.
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B
Just to kind of, like, motivate why that might have been so appealing for people. Because especially, let's just say that's all I knew. And I had no indication that there had been sexual coercion, that there had been sort of forced or free labor to build someone's empire. Allegations of maybe abuse of power within the organization, things like this. If I didn't know any of that, I would go, well, maybe as long as it's the right stroker, that that is the right person. A trusted loved one I would think might be safer than a random person. And, you know, we'll see where that goes. But, like, you know, like, just sort of like, hey, we know that you guys live in a world where. And actually thinking back to 2004, like, that's still in the kind of, you know, Maxim stuff magazine, FHM era checkup.
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A
Artistry was really big at this time. And a lot of people who actually, a lot of men who ended up getting drawn to one taste had been involved. You know, like, the game was on the New York Times bestseller list in 2005. Like, they had started with pickup artistry because they wanted to understand women, but they were like, this feels mercenary and creepy. Orgasmic meditation. And Montes promised, you know, they promised if you take these courses, if you study om, you will understand. You will have better relationships, better intimacy, connection, sex. Like, these things that people really yearn for. And I think you're right. There was a time when people. That was a time, and people are kind of always looking for it, but particularly at that time, they were looking for kind of a maybe a more wholesome way to understand their sexuality, A way that was more mindful and intentional and had a bit of a spiritual edge to it.
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B
Yeah. And just against that backdrop of, like, you know, people are writing about Y2K culture and Britney and Christina Aguilera and just this, like, the total sexualization of teenagers at the very highest levels of pop music. And, you know, you just imagine something like this could feel like a total breath of fresh air and is correcting or filling In a correction of like a market niche that is very legitimate. So just in terms of, oh, why was this appealing to people? That makes perfect sense to me why it would be appealing to them. And that's not the problem.
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Yes. And in fact, I don't actually think there's anything inherently harmful about orgasmic meditation. That's, you know, I think the practice, I have no issue with it. I think it really has to do more with like, what the company and the culture and the people that were running it. And for many people who, who ended up being very involved in one taste and then leaving and feeling disillusioned with the group, they often bemoan the fact that this practice never got really the chance to live its own life separate from one taste. But we'll get to that. And keep in mind that the mid 2000s is also the time when the wellness industry is really kicking off. So Goop starts in 2008. You're starting to see this sense that wellness can be this commercial thing and in fact this commercial behemoth. And at the time, orgasmic meditation, again, it's being sold as this kind of this like one crazy trick to like really improve your life, to give you more vitality, to make you more in touch with your desire. It wasn't. It, it was actually in many ways prescribed as this, like, panacea of like, it's gonna, it's just gonna improve your life in these, in these really deep and meaningful ways.
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B
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
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Yeah. And then the brief story of how I came to be involved in this, which comes in much later, is in 2017, OneTaste actually pitched me to write a story about them. At the time I was covering startups for Bloomberg and they were like, oh, we're a fast growing woman led wellness startup. Are you interested in learning more? And I had read about them a few years earlier. Wasn't that familiar? Ended up, you know, like talking to the executives at the company and also doing my own research and finding people who told me that actually they had had a really terrible experience when they had been part of one taste and that they felt like they'd been exploited and that they had been taken advantage of financially and sexually. And it led to this, a bunch of reporting that I did for many months and wrote this big investigation in 2018 that was kind of the first piece to go into, into depth about these allegations that this group was, you know, former members were calling it a cult. Former members were saying that they had been exploited in these ways. And then several Months after that. That's actually when the FBI investigation picked up steam. FBI then investigated them for many years. Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment in 2023, which then led to the 2025 trial this past summer in New York, which led to the conviction. That's why that's how we are here today is like, that's kind of my involvement in it. And throughout those years then I was also writing this book.
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B
So they invited, they were like a unsustainable pyramid scheme. Like as a metaphor, they've got a house of cards. And they're like, hey, you know what would be great is to get an article about us in House of Cards Monthly and let's bring in this journalist. And then from that the thing fucking toppled. Like, isn't that kind of fascinating itself?
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A
It is fascinating in some sense. I can imagine understandably that actually what they were thinking is they had had plenty of media coverage in the 10 years before that when the company had been thriving. You know, they had had a big splashy spread in 2009 in the New York Times. They'd been featured in a chapter of Tim Ferriss book, the Four Hour Body. They, you know, Nicole had spoken on stage at the GOOP health conference the year before. Like they had had plenty of coverage. And in general it had been both largely positive and focused on this interesting question of what is orgasmic meditation? How does it work? What benefits? I mean, there's so much that's interesting about orgasmic meditation itself. I think, you know, it makes sense that a lot of coverage simply focused on that because you could write a lot of words about orgasmic meditation, what it stands for, what it represents and all that. So I think, although I imagine that in hindsight they wish they had not reached out to me. Yeah, I don't necessarily think that it was like a totally hubris filled question. I think they were just like, yeah, sure, like she might have something interesting to say.
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B
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, it's just. But you get your movie moment of you fucked with the wrong cop. You know, you got a little bit of that. Okay, so you called her a spiritual leader. She's the spiritual leader of this organization. You know, cult is in the subtitle of the book. You're getting that language early on from former members. We're not going to do the whole what counts as a cult thing here today. Sometimes I talk about that, but it's not the part I'm most interested today. I'm interested in the mechanics of the company and all that stuff. So what motivates that? Why are you calling her the spiritual leader? Why is she not just the CEO?
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A
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think, you know, for many years, she. She was pretty good at being both. Right. She was the CEO. And in fact, you know, also thinking back to the late 2000s, early 2010s, I was really like a big girl boss era. And I think that was part of One Taste's rise as well. This powerful woman leading this wellness startup about female sexual. You know, female sexual pleasure, female orgasm. A topic that has been, you know, unjustly ignored or demonized for thousands of years.
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B
Yeah, for sure.
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It's very commendable. It's like, really, you know, you to root for her.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And I think there was probably a period of time in which Onetaste also would have pushed back on the framing of Nicole as a spiritual leader. But in more recent times, I think actually since the indictment, they have been more willing to kind of re. Embrace Nicole as their leader, even though she actually technically stepped down as CEO and owner of the company in 2017. And actually, like, in. In 2024, I'm looking now at my book. There's a quote in which the current CEO of the company says about Nicole, she's the author of the sutras. She's the inspiration for everything. She's the source of all the principles and the foundation of what we're doing right now. She advises us as a visionary. We're deeply inspired by every single book and every single thing she creates. So although maybe she is not using the phrase spiritual leader, I feel like it's fair to say Nicole has always been the inspiration. Oh, yes. They have recently started. Nicole's been writing sutras. Yeah, yeah.
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B
Cause sutras, you know. Well, just in case people don't know, like, and this is not my field, but, like, that's the name for writings in the Hindu tradition.
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A
That is correct.
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B
Sutra is, in fact, the Kama Sutra is one. But the Bob, you know, that's all those writings. It's basically their scripture, kind of.
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Yeah. In the past few years, One Taste has rebranded itself a little bit as using the word Eros a lot. So, in fact, Nicole has written some books called the Eros Sutras, which I love that those are, like. Those are two words that, like, shouldn't belong together linguistically. And they've just decided, like, yeah, we're gonna have the Eros Sutras. You know, one of these is obviously, like, Greek. The other one is like, you know, and so anyway, It's. You talk about other ways that they like to signal a connection between their current teachings and ancient traditions. The fact that they are, you know, publishing books called Aristutras is just one of many ways that they do that.
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B
It strikes me that a message they might be trying to send there by using that Greek word and then that Sanskrit word is like, oh, we're doing a kind of hybridization of east and west, maybe beyond those binaries. It's a non. Dual. You know, I was gonna say full frontal attack, no pun intended, to women's liberation and whatever. You know, it's like we're bringing the best of east and west in a modern, you know, shareholder friendly. I mean, the Silicon Valley episode of the HBO show is like writing itself in my mind. If you wanted to. If you were gonna lampoon this. Right.
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A
Yeah. And, you know, they have actually been doing this east and west thing for a long time. Like, again, in the early years of Onetaste, the niche that they were filling was essentially like Buddhist culture in San Francisco. This is how Nicole frames it, was that idea that, like, Buddhist culture in San Francisco at the time was, you know, quite thriving, but pretty desexualized. And I think she felt like there was room to have that kind of spiritual focus while also incorporating sex. And I think for her, you know, her whole life has been actually an exploration of trying to understand sexual energy and harness it and all that.
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B
Yeah. And, you know, I'm tempted to make the joke, like, could we get these. Could we get these Buddhist monks to show a little more skin? But it's really. There is an actual legitimate question within that. You know, I've learned a little bit about, like, mindful. Mindful masturbation is a technique that some men and women will use of sort of a way of using meditative and basic mindfulness practices, like, toward experiencing their sexuality. And I basically. I'm agreeing with you that there's obviously a way to bring those elements together that is not in itself problematic. You know, we use mindfulness for everything. You know, mindfulness is just a. Is in some ways just a way of talking about being especially aware and paying a lot of attention to what's going on inside you and, you know, do that with sex. Yeah, great. 10 out of 10. But as we're gonna hear, that's not all of it. So you said a little bit east and west. You know, obviously there's sort of tantra or tantric, at least, vibes here around the, like, you know, a long period of time, 15 minutes of a single activity, you know, sort of a single focus that has that sort of extended time. What else? Anything else to say about sort of the religious or spiritual traditions or practices that they brought in? Like, do we have a good grasp so far in this conversation on the breadth of all that?
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A
Totally. I mean, the first thing I'll say is I'm not a tantra expert, and I've actually had people remind me that often what people think of as tantra is a little bit more like what you'd call neo Tantra. And so I won't wade into the distinction.
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B
I'm sure that's true.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Of course there are echoes. I think what you said vibes is probably quite fair.
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B
When I say tantric sex, I can only think of it in, like, it's like a Simpsons episode version of Tantrum.
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A
Totally.
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B
Or Sting, you know, jokes about Sting. That's it. Yeah.
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A
I remember having, you know, having an editor who was, like, looking at this. He was like, well, is this like a spiritual form of edging? Like, there. Of course, there are different ways that people think about this type of meditative genital stroking. Like, we don't often have terms for it. All of that aside, I'll say there are definitely, like, Buddhist influences and tags that you'll find throughout One Taste. For example, even the name One Taste comes from a saying attributed to the Buddha that is something along the lines of, just as the ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so too, does the truth have one taste, the taste of liberation. And so this is the. You know, the backstory is that apparently when this group was trying to pick a name for their organization, they actually saw the Ken Wilber memoir that is called One Taste, which is a name in reference to the saying. And then they decided Onetaste was a great name, because I think it was like, you know, it's. It's. It's got this Buddhist, like, origin, but it's, like, a little suggestive, and they kind of liked that. And it was around the same time that they picked the name Orgasmic Meditation, which, as we've talked about, you know, to be clear, Nicole learned this practice from two other groups that taught a similar clitoral stroking practice. They were also based in the Bay Area, and they called it Deliberate Orgasm, and she specifically rebranded it to Orgasmic Meditation, which I think we can all agree was very smart, because meditation was really picking up this idea that it's a spiritual practice. Om. I mean, for all these reasons, it's a great name. So around the Same time, they picked the name One Taste in Orgasmic meditation. And years later, Nicole actually, in a lecture, talked about a second meaning of one taste, which was kind of like, for those who are in the know, this idea that. Actually, the reason we call it one Taste is because once you get this one taste of almost like awakening, you know, that's not the exact word she uses, but she basically says, like, your soul will never be the same again and you will always come crawling back. And so there is this almost sinister meaning to it in my mind, where this idea that, like, once you've tasted this experience, there's something that hooks you and that you. You won't really be able to be. Be free without it. And that was something that kept people staying. They were afraid of losing access to this spiritual experience that they'd had inside the group. They were afraid that if they left, they would. They would have this kind of deadened life outside, because that is what they were told. So anyway, so, you know, one Taste that has a Buddhist origin. And then, you know, Nicole had also studied theosophy, Kabbalah. Later in the years, she actually gets a little bit into Christianity, starts attending Agape Church in LA and starts talking a lot about God in kind of a, like, monotheistic sense. And anyway, there's a lot more we can get into.
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B
I want to. Yeah, I want to sort of focus in on what you were just saying there about, you know, that deeper meaning of one taste. So a couple things come to mind there. The first is that the sort of idea of a deeper secret knowledge for the truly initiated is not rare in religion or spirituality. It's probably. It's the rule, not the exception. At some level within those traditions, you're gonna find people making those kinds of claims. And, you know, the way that. The way that you had her, you know, you sort of in her voice, pitched it there of, like, once you've experienced Om, you know, things that don't sort of do the same thing will not be satisfying for you. And there's sort of a generic way in which someone like her could mean that. Or for instance, in parallel, a pastor of a particular church could mean, like, once you've seen the way that we do life here, you're never gonna wanna go back. And there's a version of that. That's fine, that's generic. So if what you mean by that, if what Dedon meant by that, for instance, was once you have experienced the fullness of your sexuality and engaged with it, with mind, body, spirit or some shit, like, that I could imagine people being like, yeah, that's true. Once I started engaging in that full way, I have not gone back. And that is the only, you know, I don't really want to have quicker, cheaper sex or whatever. Like, okay, fine, that's to each their own. Some people may go, yeah, I don't want to go back. And similarly, people who are at a local church that they like a lot of things about it and they go, wow, there's a really thick intergenerational community here. And once I've experienced that with, like a robust worship program, I don't want to go back. I don't want to be at a stodgy, you know, sort of buttoned down, you know, buttoned up church. I want to only be at that one. Fine. Once you start getting into. No, no, no. It's particularly what we do.
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A
It's just us.
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B
It's just us. That's where it goes into. That's much more dangerous. There's much more likely likelihood of exploitation. And now, in part, what's interesting about that is it, you know, and I don't have her whole talk and all her writings or whatever, and I'm making up this pastor in my mind. But, you know, context would matter. But there's also interpretation. So people will interpret what you say. And this is something that spiritual leaders have to be careful about. This is why I study, in part why I study spiritual abuse, because it's hard to be sufficiently careful because of the power that spiritual leadership inevitably gives you in a certain type of person's mind, for whom the type of authority that you represent is important to them. So that's why we have to have all these buffers and things in the way of exploitation because of that interpretation. So even if the pastor or leader or whatever has all good intentions, just noticing there that there's two different ways at least of interpreting that phrase that lead to actually quite different outcomes based on how you're taking that. So I wanted to kind of throw that out there and get your take.
- [28:04]
A
Yeah, I totally agree. And I actually went and looked, looked back at the book and what she specifically. Part of what she specifically says is the truth is if you get kicked out, your soul will never relax again. And contextually, she's talking about one taste specifically, not like a way of living.
- [28:23]
B
Right. Just briefly, there's an item on my spiritual abuse inventory, and it's like basically being taught that leaving this particular church will lead to these spiritual problems. Not the church, this church. And there's a Huge. That is a very important distinction in terms of the messaging that a leader or church or organization or group gives. It's the exclusivity of the larger message. Okay, maybe God's kind of exclusive, and God has these requirements that all these various churches can meet. Okay, that could still be harmful, but it's very different than saying, no, no, no, we've got it, and only we've got it, and everything else is a bastardized version of this. And that becomes significantly more toxic just on the other side of that line.
- [29:14]
A
Totally agree. And just as an example, within one taste, you know, former members have told me over and over again that once people left one taste, the specific company or organization, they would. You know, insiders would then call those former friends of theirs. First of all, they would stop talking to them. They would call them Muggles. They would say that they were dead asleep. I mean, they would have these conversations inside where they would be like, wow, I feel so bad for that person that they, like, left. They are going to be living, like, a pitiable existence outside. Whereas, like, we have the magic in here. They liked to use magic, witches, wizards, that kind of language. And therefore, then Muggles for people outside. And the other thing I was going to say, actually, that came up when you were talking about this responsibility for spiritual leaders to understand how their words are interpreted. Something that I found fascinating about how Nicole set norms and set expectations for her followers is that she was very good at actually rarely making any sort of explicit order request or anything like that. She was kind of the queen of implicit. Like, she would never say to someone, you have to do this thing or else you'll get kicked out. In fact, that would be kind of crass and, like, underneath her. In fact, what she would do instead is she would, you know, heap praise on someone who did the thing that she wanted them to do. Or she more like, more implicitly pull attention. Yes, pull attention away. Or, like, say, subtly, you know, kind of subtly negging someone who, like, didn't do the thing. And as such, you know, a lot of people then after they left one taste would tell me things like, well, no one, like, told me, like, I have to do this thing. But I felt all this, you know, pressure or, like, if I didn't do it, I was, like, shamed or cut out of meetings or, like, if I did do it, like, people all of a sudden were like, you're the best. And it. It's. I think that's actually much more powerful because it makes the individual believe on some level, that they chose to do it, and it makes them want to ignore the subtle but powerful pressure and coercion that they might have been in. And so just, you know, just as an example, you know, Nicole. And Nicole also knew that people really looked up to her and that the choices that she talked about, having made in her life would implicitly be broadcast and understood as, like, things that you should do if you'd like to be as enlightened as me. And so, for example, Nicole would talk a lot about her experiment in unconditional sex, which was an experiment that she would tell her students about in lectures and in courses in which she either spent two years maybe having sex with a different person every day or having sex with a man every day or maybe 200 men in a row. It's a little unclear what the specifics are, but the gist was basically that she found sexual freedom and kind of a new level of sexual freedom through having sex with no conditions. That's why it's called unconditional sex. This idea that you could have sex if you want to, if you didn't want to with someone you did want to, someone you didn't want to. And this idea that doing that kind of activity would lead you to, you know, a new level of spiritual and sexual understanding. And she. All she had to do was talk about the fact that she did it and that she had done this experiment. I don't think she even probably told people, like, you should do this thing too, right? But I would talk to women who had been students and followers of hers who then found themselves so confused about their own choices because they were like, well, you know, they were in a situation where maybe they felt a little bit of pressure, like, they should have sex with this person, but they kind of didn't want to. But then they were like, well, Nicole had done. You know, Nicole can do unconditional sex, and look where it got her. Like, she seems to have everything figured out, and I'm gonna do this thing too, I guess. And then it's like, well, anyway, I. I just find that the. The subtle and unspokenness of the way that some of these norms and expectations were put on was. Was. Was quite powerful. And I was surprised by the fact that almost the less explicit they are, the more powerful they are. And keep in mind, like, one taste also had some explicit things. Like, for example, there are many women who told me that if they decline, you know, if they were told by some of their higher ups to om with a particular male customer or something, if they you know, they didn't have a partner and needed a partner for the OM exercise. If they said no, they would sometimes be shamed and called out. They would be like, you know, you're, you're too, you're too attached to your preferences. You have a golden pussy. That was like a shameful thing. It's like, oh, you think you're too good to, like, have people touch you? You should be being a yes. It's like, you know, so resistant of you to be not being a yes. Anyway, so there were also, to be clear, based on what people have told me, there were also explicit shaming, explicit things like that. But many times the pressure was also implicit. I found that very interesting as a way for a spiritual leader to operate.
- [34:18]
B
Just like a brief sort of psychology and therapy note on implicit versus explicit messaging. When we're talking about our families of origin, for instance, in the therapy room, there are explicit messages that we get. You know, like, and this is true even for things that are not very fraught. Like, I'll give an example from my own family growing up. That's nothing. There's nothing wrong either of this. So one thing I was explicitly told by my dad when we talked about is this expensive to go to Disneyland. Is this expensive to, like, be bringing these friends out for dinner? And my dad would say, money is for people. And so we're going to Disneyland with these people because we love them and that's why we make money. Okay, that's an explicit message that I then took into my own life, in my own marriage and family. And now I have to think, okay, to what extent do I agree or disagree with that? Whatever. Then there were implicit things like, I picked up our house has a revolving front door. Nobody said that. No one said, we are a revolving door. Anybody is welcome house. We did have a. As for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord cross stitch, probably somewhere, but we didn't have, as for me and my house, we shall involve a revolving front. We shall install a revolving front door. But that was an implicit message, again, not a problematic one. We had people that lived with us, like my parents. Old, young life kids from when they had been young life leaders would stay with us. Other people during transitions in their lives. They hosted things a lot. They hosted a lot of parties. But both were powerful. I would say I got those messages equally powerfully. One was explicit, one was implicit. Now, of course, you can do that for negative messaging, for messaging about what makes us enough, what is our role in our family system. All these Kinds of things. I just want to normalize that a little bit and put a little bit more meat on that bone. Because it comes up all the time that we get messages about how we ought to live, how other people ought to live, how society should be structured. We get them explicitly and we get them implicitly. And we're working with both all the time. So we're in the realm of sort of moving past the explicitly spiritual, religious language into some of the psychological stuff. So I just want to sort of ask you straight up. I know that your training is not in psychology, and so you can feel free to defer to me for terminology if you want. But, like, what were the psychological dynamics that you think were sort of most central to the patterns at Onetaste?
- [36:56]
A
I mean, I think, you know, a big one was kind of first, this. This emotional yearning, like, people came. Often people came to Onetaste really seeking help or answers or some sort of solution to something that was really personal to them, that there aren't that many places to go to. So let's say it's like, you know, you are someone who maybe you've been in a marriage for 30 years, your marriage is falling apart sexually, and you just don't know where to go. You're like, I want to reconnect with my wife. I don't seem to have any of the tools to do this. It's like, there aren't. Like, you could buy a book, but, like, a lot of places just don't talk about sex. You know, maybe if you even had, like, you know, a religious institution. It's like, it just might be a hard place to go to get this specific help. And to be clear, like, intimacy is something that people all yearn for. And so it's one of those things where that's universal. Totally. So, so many people who came in, they had this, like, deep core need to understand their sexuality, to fix their relationships, to better understand this, you know, this, like, essential part of themselves that often doesn't get a lot of airtime kind of in our, like, you know, our work or, you know, it's just not something that we often talk about. So that was like, one thing where I imagine people felt some scarcity, where they were like, I need to find a place like this. And Onetaste is offering me answers. Like, that pull was very strong.
- [38:16]
B
And the further we go back to the founding of the company in those mid 2000s, those conversations have gotten so much more normalized in broad culture in the last 20 years. Like, come as you are. And all these books about, you know, sexual self understanding and the rise of sex therapy and sexologists becoming certified and stuff. And just like, I mean, especially within the psychological world, like just that's all become a lot more normalized, but it really wasn't. And then of course it's context dependent. What kind of culture do you happen to be in? But if I go back 20 years, that motivation feels even more powerful sort of in historic memory than today in 2025.
- [39:01]
A
Yeah. And keep in mind that the leaders at one takes were often subtly projecting this message also of like, hey, some of us have had sexual trauma in our past. You know, this is something that both to different degrees, Rachel and Nicole, you know, Nicole and her second in command, Rachel, have talked about, you know, kind of advertising this, this practice on some level that one taste might dispute this about how explicit they were about this, but this, this subtle suggestion that like, hey, you might have some really serious baggage in your sexual history and like this is a place where you might, that might be able to be healed. You know, I talked to people who joined onetaste who had been sexually abused as children. That is like unfortunately a not uncommon pattern among people who were, who were joining. And to be clear, there were also people who came with like much more healthy histories and stuff. But to be clear like that is. That is one of the polls is for sure is like this promise.
- [39:50]
B
I have to just, I have to respond to that just as a. Because the ethics and all that of my profession are screaming out to me along with the spiritual abuse research. It's just like not only the sort of. The obvious point here is that people who are not trained and licensed to treat trauma should not advertise themselves as being able to treat trauma. That's a kind of a very basic point that of course the average person doesn't necessarily even know the distinction between those things. And that's why it's sort of incumbent upon the individuals to not do false advertising. But the second thing I would say, Ellen, is that in the context of them not being therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, you know, any of those sort of professions that we understand in America are licensed to work with trauma, the spirituality sort of religious element is gonna fill in that space. To the extent that this is a spiritual leader and that this is connected to deep spiritual traditions and wisdom, well, maybe that will really have the kind of stuff that can heal trauma separate from the modern sort of evidence based approaches and stuff like that. It's like it's making the whole thing more Plausible. And it's almost like you don't even have to explicitly connect it to. In that conversation or part of a talk or part of a teaching to the spiritual aspect. But, like, that's going to fill in. In people's minds because they're. They have this deep pain. Maybe they've tried other things that haven't worked. It's unresolved. And now this has a little. It's got a spiritual gloss to it, and they're going to make that connection in their own mind. It's going to increase the power of the claims.
- [41:44]
A
Yeah. And, you know, another pattern that I saw was kind of like, you know, once you started getting involved in One Taste, the kind of the acceleration and the deepening of that connection quickly led to a situation where I guess you would call it, like, maybe sunk cost, like this idea that you're really invested in this group, and then it becomes harder to leave. So as an example, like a typical story of someone getting involved in One Taste, especially if they were kind of on the younger end, like in their 20s. And I spoke to many people who had this story. Basically they stumbled upon One Taste through some way. You know, for example, there's this woman who, like, learned about it through her yoga teacher training course and took a couple classes. She had never had an orgasm before. That was part of what was drawing her there. She was to understand this part of myself, which, by the way, according to some research, 10 to 15% of American women have never had an orgasm.
- [42:33]
B
Like, yeah, there's real problems here that this was totally claiming to address.
- [42:38]
A
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, typically it's like, yeah, they. They come with some need and they. And they become interested and they take a few classes. And then what happens is in pretty quick succession, they just. They get really involved. It's like they start taking more courses. They start volunteering for the company. They will move out of where they currently live and move into one of One Taste's communal residences. They will quit their job, start working for the OneTaste sales team, which was like the main economic backbone of the company, was like selling, having sales workers sell courses to other students. And then, you know, they would just naturally end up distancing themselves a little bit from their friends, family, who might not understand or approve of this, and spending all their time with these other people. Of course, this is a familiar pattern. Definitely not unique to OneTaste in any way, but the way it functioned was like, yes, all of a sudden, this organization is your lovers, your friends, your co workers, Your housemates, your employer. Like all these things at once, the idea of leaving becomes quite intimidating and terrifying. And you also, you don't want the cognitive dissonance of, you know, if many people are then, you know, enmeshed for a long time, and if they start thinking about leaving, you're faced with this incredible. Not only like this fear of loss, which of course we know, like people are primed to feel loss aversion quite strongly, but also this. You want to avoid this cognitive dissonance of, like, wait, I just invested all of these aspects of my life, my time, my energy, my relationships, my spiritual beliefs in this group. And like, for me to leave means to accept that I was misplaced, that that was, you know, that. So for many people, that is a really hard part. And then on top of that, there are these philosophies that were quite prevalent within one taste that I think are very interesting from a psychological point of view. As an example, they would often teach that you are basically like 100 responsible for your experience of life. And this idea that, like, if you are feeling like a victim, like, if you feel like someone has wronged you, well, that's kind of your choice. And that, you know, being thinking of yourself as a victim. Many people told me they were taught that, you know, victim mentality was seen as a very bad thing, as kind of a, you know, you're being really weak. You're not taking responsibility for your own experience. And that would lead people to really question and doubt themselves. If they felt like they had been harmed by someone within the group or harmed by the group's teachings or its culture, they would be like, well, sure, I don't feel good about what happened, but I couldn't possibly be a victim. That would be like such a shameful thing. And so that, I think also stopped people from seeing clearly about what they now later might describe as an abuse of power. At the time, it was very hard for them to see it because they would just be like, well, I couldn't be. I was choosing this. I'm responsible. And so there were all these principles that made it hard for people to leave. And then even within one taste, structurally, there were also these methods by which people knew quite intimate things about each other. They would play these communication games in which people would share these vulnerabilities. Or often members were like, coaching each other. Like, they would be coach, you know, they would have be a coach and like, another one to student would be their client. And former members told me that there would be times that they would Exploit these, you know, intimate knowledge of each other in order to sell more courses. So, like, let's say I was coaching someone else and I knew that they were really insecure about XYZ thing in their life. And I knew that if I really kind of made them, if I really poked at that insecurity, I might be able to get them to flip, to buy like a five or $10,000 course. And I would get to then report back to the sales team that I had, like, just gotten us, you know, 10k in revenue. I would get a lot of approval. And, you know, so there were these, like, ways that they, you know, people told me that they now recognize that they manipulated each other within the group for financial gain and for social approval when in the company anyway, I could talk about this for a long time. There's many examples in which social pressure, peer pressure, these incentives, approval and disapproval, like, these things, these very human desires. We all have these very human desires to be approved of, to avoid disapproval, to feel part of something. What I found so fascinating and honestly what has been quite applicable and useful in my daily life is understanding just how powerful those social pressures are and how within a group they can be weaponized to make people do certain things or to stay or to pay money or these kinds of things.
- [47:21]
B
There's a principle in religious studies, I guess it's psychology of religion that I'd like to throw into the chat here, and that will help us kind of transition to some of this more commercialism, individualism aspect of it. Because in the 90s there was this sense of thinking of religion. And America's an interesting ground for this kind of research, because we have basically a marketplace of religious ideas here. There's no state church unless you, you know, you might be raised ethnic Catholic, and that might be as good as a state church. But generally people have a choice. They have a choice what church to go to, if they want to go to church at all. And Protestants, especially in the United States, do a lot of church shopping in a way that's kind of unique in some ways to the US and to the west. Anyway. There was this assumption that religious systems that required less of their adherence would outperform sort of higher demand religious groups, because in a marketing and. Or I guess sort of just like a economics type of a sense, like you're requiring less. It's a lower barrier of entry. Right. And what they started finding, researchers in the 90s started finding, is actually, you know, up to a point, a higher barrier of entry will end up making Religion more sticky because you're asking more of people. And if they do, if they don't want to do it, they will exit. But if they do want to do it, they will be more bought in. And so that's true of, you know, so you could think of groups like Hasidic Jews or, you know, or observant Muslims who, you know, don't eat pork and these kinds of things that to outsiders are like, you know, kind of random. And like, what does that mean? It serves to strengthen identity and therefore strengthen connection to not just the ideas and beliefs, but also the other members of the group who have made a similar sacrifice to be there. It's not unlike people who join the military and put themselves through boot camp and all of that stuff, or I think about Navy Seals training and all that. And then you get on the other side and like, man, you already connected to these people because you've already kind of done this stuff together. So there's that kind of thing going on. And what's interesting is the reason I say that that kind of brings us to the consumerism thing is because there is this real clash here with one taste, where on the one hand, from my perspective, tell me if this is wrong. They seem to be utilizing a lot of the tactics of higher control, higher demand religious groups like Jehovah's Witnesses, et cetera, that do shunning and they make it hard to live life outside the group. You know, cults are a classic example of this too. And then on the other hand, they are following the rules of low barrier to entry. We need products we can take to market. You know, so there's that sort of normal economics. It's almost like they are a company. Maybe this is not true, but it's like they're just gonna lean into only the sort of higher demand, higher requirement, higher price products. You could tell me, like, I don't know if they sold skincare or like sex toys or like, you know, individual consumer goods that anybody could buy. The sort of low barrier of entry goods. If I want to purchase a sex toy, I don't need to have a relationship with the toy company. I just go to the shop and buy one. But if I want a $5,000 course that's very different, I am going to need to have a relationship with the organization to trust them. So I don't know that, that I. I thought I could maybe bring that in and see what that would get us with that conversation.
- [51:09]
A
There's a lot there. And the first thing that really comes to Mind is that when you're talking about that research, which is so interesting to have it articulated, because of course, that's the sense that I have walked away with after doing, you know, five years of reporting and research on this group. But a classic, you know, a specific example from within One Taste is many people who worked on the sales team told me that Rachel Chorwitz, who again was Nicole's second in command, kind of her right hand woman and the head of sales.
- [51:36]
B
Head of sales, who was also very powerful person within.
- [51:39]
A
Yes, very powerful person within one taste. That Rachel had this philosophy about people within OneTaste and its members, which was kind of, if they're a little bit out, you push them all the way out. And if they're a little bit in, you push them all the way in. That she would have these moments where she would kind of force people like, are you in or out?
- [51:57]
B
Make a decision?
- [51:58]
A
Totally. Because you're exactly right. This idea that like, well, if they're, if they're not into it, like, they don't need to be here. And if you make the, the demand a little higher, the people who stay are, you know, that they're locked in. So she would have these different ways of, you know, you know, a specific example, you know, there was a woman who told me she wanted to move into the residential house that One Taste was running. And Rachel was at the time approving everyone who was a new resident, of course. And she wanted to move in because her girlfriend had moved in. She wanted to move in too. And she says that Rachel told her, you know, she let the girlfriend move in. And then Rachel was like, you know, you, I sense that you're not committed like, that you don't want this enough that you don't even really understand what we're doing here. You can't move in. And this woman freaked out and was like, wait. So I mean, she had been a little uncertain, but now that that was taken away from her, she was like, I need to prove myself in order to get in. So she, you know, it served to deepen her loyalty and to like hook her more strongly to the group. And so I think that what you're talking about makes total sense. And I've seen it in these examples that are in the book about the specific examples of how those manipulation tactics worked. And then I would say more generally where you were talking about this idea of was OneTaste going for this kind of high demand audience or were they also trying to be mainstream and approachable? I actually think they somewhat Successfully did both. For many years, they ran introductory courses that were very tame. It was like, you come in, there's no sex, no general touching. You come in and you just play an evening of communication games that were like, a little sensual, a little suggestive. They had one called hot seat, where you would come in and one person would be take turns being in the hot seat for five or 10 minutes. And you would sit in this hot seat in the chair, and everyone would ask you questions, and all the attention was beamed on you. And people talked about this, again, experience as being transformative and almost like, you almost feel drunk on the attention. The sense that people, all these people are asking you questions, they're so interested in you, and, you know, it's not sexual, but sometimes the questions would be a little sexual. Like, they would kind of play with it. There's this very gentle introduction, and people would kind of get hooked on the attention and the social connection in the sense of, like, wow, these people are really awake. They're really interesting. They seem kind of sexy. Like, I kind of want to come back. And onetaste would also, you know, they were really pushing to be mainstream, part of the mainstream wellness business. So again, they would have these conferences that were all about orgasmic meditation as this wellness thing. You know, they brought in, like, again, Tim Ferriss, Gwyneth Paltrow, Khloe Kardashian. These are all people who kind of endorsed OM or spoke at their conferences or that kind of thing. Steven Kotler, who wrote about flow, they would have, like, you know, they just managed to get people to come in. You know, Neil Strauss, again, who wrote the Game, like, came in and spoke at their conferences. Like, they really made it kind of this, like, flow hack, peak performance. Like, that was kind of the energy of the 2010s, of course, with the tech industry was really booming in the Bay Area. And again, one takes was not San Francisco only. They had offices in la, New York, London, Paris, like, Australia. They were all over. And they really did manage to make it. You know, they were featured on the Today show. Like, it just was this idea that, like, 15. It's just 15 minutes. There's this very prescribed process. Like, you know, you could do it with your monogamous partner, or, you know, if you're feeling more adventurous, you could do it with other people. Like, they really thought of ways to brand it as, like, it's spiritual. It's not too sexual. Of course it is, but, you know, it's not. It's not sex. It's a Spiritual practice, it's meditation. You know, Nicole always had this vision that one taste that orgasmic meditation would be put alongside yoga, meditation and om. And this idea that these would be these three pillars of kind of mainstream wellness that okay, that, yeah, they just really managed to pitch it that way. While if you got more involved then you would experience some of these more intense social dynamics within the company.
- [56:04]
B
That strikes me as a potentially narcissistic idea that to in any way explicitly or implicitly communicate that, you know, yoga and meditation, these like as far as we know, 10,000 year old, like the most robust of world wisdom traditions that your slickly marketed single 15 minute like Intervention is going to join the Mount Rushmore of East west wellness or some shit is like the fact that she would have said that at any point is I wonder how illustrative that is of sort of her personality and whatnot.
- [56:55]
A
Well, what's funny is OneTaste had a corporate mission just like any startup that was quite grandiose and it was to bring orgasm capital o which by the way, they redefined as not the moment of climax, but kind of this connection to sexual energy overall. But they wanted to bring capital o orgasm to a billion people. And you might laugh at something like that. But in fact, you know, Again, in the 2010s I was covering all, you know, I covered we work. I wrote about all these companies that were, you know, wework's corporate mission was to elevate the world's consciousness. Like it's not at all out of.
- [57:31]
B
Scope through sharing refurbished old sharing offices.
- [57:36]
A
Downtown to elevate the world's consciousness. There is truly. Yeah, it is not at all out of scope for one taste to have had a mission statement that said to bring orgasm to a billion people in that era, why didn't they say five? No, I'm just joking. But I think, you know, dream a little bigger.
- [57:50]
B
Guys, come on, Nicole, right?
- [57:52]
A
In some sense, like I love the way that this somewhat fringe practice, like, you know, Nicole really thought and believed and I think she was correct for a long time that the best way to spread the message of orgasmic meditation was by building a startup and by making it a company. Like that is so 2010s of her and I kind of love it because that is the way that the world around her was operating. At the same time they were like, oh, you have this great idea. You want to proselytize your business, your philosophy, whatever. It's like, build a company. Don't start, you know, don't start like a Non profit.
- [58:33]
B
Don't start a church or a nonprofit.
- [58:34]
A
You want scale? Yeah, you want scale. You want to be a founder. You want to be like a thought leader. And she really leaned into it and it worked for a long time.
- [58:43]
B
Yeah. Maybe one last sort of note to hit here. Unless you. If there's anything else you want to get to. I'm happy to. Is like where this intersects with just the wellness industry in general. It's a bit of an uncomfortable place to be a therapist in our current climate around this stuff because it's just a big mix of good and bad. And you know, like, take a term like self care. I have a specific way that I use that with clients and that I think of it for myself even that is like really helpful and like very directly related to a lot of the specific goals my clients have for themselves or that I have for them. And then there's ways in which that term has been totally bastardized and can mean sort of anything to anyone now if they say it in a convincing enough way. And connected to all of this is of course the monetary stuff, the capitalistic element of it, these markets. I think it's really. I like what you're saying about. Yeah, back then, what do you do? You start a company that might still be what people want to do today in terms of like, you want to get venture capital behind you if you really want to change the world. And so it just like immediately gets messy at the moment that the dollars hit the wisdom, you know, like, or whatever. And it could be complicated for a therapist. You charge for your services, you know, you'd love to give it for free and all this stuff. But of course, you know, we have licensing boards and we can lose our licenses and all that stuff. And. And wework and Theranos, which is another one of those sort of culty startups. When I've watched documentaries about those businesses. Similar vibes here to Onetaste. It's like so much of the insights from the spiritual abuse work that I and others have done that you just swap out a few terms and you're looking at a very similar structure. But most churches, you know, there is money involved and there can be financial exploitation. It is a form of spiritual abuse, is financial abuse of congregants. But it's much more closely tied in with stuff like wellness. Right. These are almost everything someone sees in their day about wellness is tied to a specific product with a price tag. So I just. I wanna spend a little time there and kind of get your thoughts. Any response to any of that.
- [61:18]
A
Yeah. Well, one of the things that I think is most interesting about one taste, when you zoom out and look at it in a historical context, is that in some ways, it set a playbook for what we see happening now or maybe in the last five or 10 years about, like, wellness influencers. And as we've generally seen people move away from or move toward, like, distributed distrust of health institutions, distrust of science, kind of the. These kind of organizations that once held a lot of influence and sway in our health decisions and our personal decisions about our wellness, people are now instead turning to, like, singular charismatic influencers who are promising, like, I have found a solution, and it's going to fix these problems in your life. And I think you know, something about cults in general that I learned through, again, interviewing lots of people who are experts on this and research them, is that cults adapt with the times. And I think this is so interesting. If you think about what this image you might have of what a cult looks like, you might be thinking about, you know, the people from wild, wild country. It's like, well, they live in a rural commune. They all dress in the same color. Their guru has a big beard, like, it's a man. You know, there's like, maybe weird stuff happening behind the scenes. Like, that is. That is increasingly an outdated image of what a cult looks like. And I would argue that today and in the future, what we see is gonna look really different. And it might take a while for people to catch on to what, like, a new cult looks like. But I would say that certain things that you can. You can imagine might happen more often is the cult is led by a woman. The cult has a big presence online. The cult maybe is more focused on, like, health and wellness or, you know, and it still has those key elements, like a charismatic leader, a promise of, like, an overarching belief system that's going to, like, fix your problems. This idea of, like, in and out, you know, we. Those who understand the truth agree to this truth, and those who don't are outsiders. And I think. I think just like a cult is shifting, like, the idea of what a cult looks like is shifting. I think one taste, you know, you can argue about whether it. And we get into this in book two, but, like, you know, is it a cult or not? I actually kind of reject this idea of a binary. But the idea that, like, it's set a playbook for what a modern cult could look like and something that we need to be aware of in the future, I think wellness is an industry where it is ripe for exploitation for people who come in and say that they have an answer and are asking you to give them their money, give them your money, in order to get access to that answer through them exclusively. That's the new form. It's fitness, it's companies, it's these. You know, a cult is going to shift. And that's what I think. Wellness is going to get mixed up in that. Because, of course, there's a lot of great ideas and helpful ideas in wellness. And this idea that, again, in wellness, like, you're kind of looking to like, the people. It's a very, like, people are the leaders rather than institutions. And I think people are going to be more vulnerable to exploitation in the future.
- [64:30]
B
I have sort of like a family friend, sort of a mentor. My parents age. He's a doctor of psychology, is retired now, but practiced for 40 years or whatever as a therapist. And he said something that you're making me think of. He's like, when a new client comes into my office, one of the things that I would always say as a part of that first session is, I can help you. And he's like, I didn't say that to be glib about it. It's not a flippant thing. But he's like, dan, when someone first comes to you, they almost always come because they are really struggling and they are really looking for help. And I thought of that when you talked about the people who joined Onetaste or who were interested, who attended something like, people have deep, deep needs, desires, problems, pain, and there will always be a market for solutions to those problems. And this is what I. This is why I chose to go into a field with a licensure board and official training and certification, because those are the only real protections. You know, basically, they're consumer protections. You know, they are somewhere between consumer protections and like, whatever protections you have with your health care or something in your. Whatever constitutional rights you have around health care, you know, hipaa, it's stuff in that kind of world. Your, you know, your confidentiality, things like that. And it's like you just. You can't. You can't maximize benefit and minimize harm without fairly robust institutions to help buffer that and to lay the hammer down when needed so that bad actors have consequences. You know, in my world, that I come out of evangelicalism, you know, five years ago or whatever, there was this, maybe fewer, three, four years ago, this huge expose podcast called the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill about Mark Driscoll, this spiritually Abusive pastor, plagiarizing scandals, church fund scandals, you know, paying himself upwards of a half million dollars a year, you know, totally disgraced, Moves to Arizona, starts a new little church there. And for a long time he's doing much, much less. And now he's just like fucking hanging out with J.D. vance. He rebranded himself as a MAGA guy and he's probably more powerful than he's ever been. So there, you know, it's like there will always be markets. There will always be people who can say the thing that people need to hear, and there will always be people who do that, who make sure there's nobody who can actually take their power away from them if they do it wrong, you know, so that's kind of where my brain goes in just, you know, bringing it all, wrapping it all around to sort of the stuff that my community is more familiar with and has dealt with more. But I really, I love getting this sort of, I love getting one taste of this through the more entrepreneurial, you know, wellness startup culture because there's obviously so much overlap.
- [67:45]
A
Well, and, you know, one interesting final note to end on is like one taste has in the last year, especially as it was leading up to Nicole and Rachel's trial and actually after the reelection of Trump, they have leaned pretty hard into reframing themselves as a religion and arguing, you know, trying to argue against their, you know, the federal prosecution against Nicole and Rachel by arguing, first of all, that it's an example of prosecutorial overreach, but secondly that it's an example of threat to religious freedom. And that is a drum that they have been banging very consistently for the past year and getting a lot of pickup in right wing outlets that are sympathetic to that argument. And it is fascinating to me. I think reading between the lines, it's probably fair to say that they would be quite open to receiving a pardon, a presidential pardon. And I think it's just interesting to me this idea that, yeah, you can, you can try to put on this like, we're a religion hat when it, when it might suit you, this idea that all of a sudden if we're being targeted, it's, you know, it's a religious freedom issue. And yeah, they continue to be active in that way today and arguing for this and actually continuing to offer courses even though Nicole and Rachel are currently in jail awaiting sentencing.
- [69:08]
B
My goodness. Ellen Hewitt, thank you so much. What a fun conversation. The book which will be out the month that this will be released. November.
- [69:18]
A
Yes. Empire of orgasm on shelves November 18th.
- [69:22]
B
Yeah. Awesome. Well, this was a really fun conversation and I hope to be able to have you back for some of your other reporting interests, which I think many of which are quite aligned with the stuff that I'm interested in coming covering on the show. So thanks so much.
- [69:35]
A
Yeah, super fun. Thanks for having me, Dan.