Part Two: The Orgasm Cult

Robert continues to tell Jamie about Nicole Daedone's OneTaste, orgasm cult. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cold Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we
have uncomfortable conversations about section sexuality and the nineties, the
Bay Area in the early two thousands. It's going to
be awkward for everybody.

Speaker 3 (00:19):
Getting a lot of quadrants, hitting a lot of important quadrants.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
There, hitting a lot of big cues, big cues, a
lot of Robert ces. Jamie loftist our wonderful guest, back
in the saddle again to talk about the orgasm cults.
How are you doing, Jamie.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
I'm it's great to be back in the in the
the medical saddle.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
That makes you come oh okay, well yeah, I was.

Speaker 4 (00:46):
Like a weird choice today, buddy.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Look, we're all struggling to say things that sound like.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
It's weird, especially like again, this is all so adjacent
to like things I've done and were a part of
my youth that it's really kind of weird to me,
Like the reaction everyone else has to like the and
then they're doing like public sex demonstrations in front of
crowds of People's like, no, I've been to a bunch
of those.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
Actually, yeah, there's a lot of fine people at these events.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
M hmm. There's good there, you know. I we did.
We had one at one of the We did an
event one year where like the theme was because there's
different every year, bad idea and so like my roommate,
who is a lady and is a bit older than me,
I think she's like thirty, wanted to do like a
demo and like how to use like different like safe
sex objects and stuff like that because it's like a

(01:40):
big five day camping trip where bunch of people are
having sex. And she was like, well, there should be
an option for people to learn that in addition to
the weird kink camps that teach you how to use
like a fucking Saint Andrew's cross or a whip or whatever.
The problem was that the structure we had for it
this year was also made to kind of meet the
theme of a bad idea. So it was a big
like pyramid like tint shade struckture thing with like a

(02:00):
huge bed thing at the bottom, but the top was
like a disco ball that we had made by cutting
up hundreds of pieces of glass and putting them into
like a paper machet ball, and they were just kind
of glued on and it's like one hundred degrees and
so as it heats up as people are like cuddling
or doing the safe sex demonstrations or whatever, in their
pieces of like jagged glass are just like falling down

(02:23):
and we had put up like a tiny little net
to catch it. But again, it's supposed to be a
bad idea, so we didn't want to protect people too much.
We just made sure people were warned by the way
it rains glass inside the inside the This sounds like.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
A saw trap. What are you talking?

Speaker 2 (02:38):
It was about fun. Very few people got cut. It
was a really nice week.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
It was all a jigsaw's tracks. We were young.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
It was a good time and there were like maybe
four to five stitches required as a result of the
shattered glass disco ball. It was a great week. I
had a really good time. I've got bad idea attooed
on my fingers because of that week. It was great. Wow.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
From that was at the lore drop.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
At the end, I nearly killed a man with a flamethrower.
It was an awesome week.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (03:16):
Accidentally, guys, guarantina, let's move on.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
So if you type the words welcomed consensus orgasm, which
is remember the group that kind of descends from the
Moorhouse community the Welcomed Consensus. If you type those three
words into Google, as I did, you'll be presented with
the Amazon page for a video titled Deliberate Orgasm Expanding
Female Orgasm, Volume one. It currently costs one hundred and

(03:49):
thirty two dollars on Amazon.

Speaker 4 (03:52):
Two five stars, fifteen.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Reviews, two point four really.

Speaker 3 (04:00):
Oh, the color the cover is haunting. The car is
like what it looks sixty.

Speaker 5 (04:10):
Like.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
It's it's a naked woman and like a man who's
like straddling her and has a hand around her buttocks,
but he's wearing jeans. She's completely fully clothed in jeans.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
If it looks like a cropped Guantanamo picture, it's horrific.

Speaker 4 (04:27):
It looks like some ship from grape Thank you.

Speaker 3 (04:31):
I hate it. You have to really want I actually
do the financial barrier, not just anyone should be able
to look at that. You have to be a pervert
with money.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Are not ready? I also love that it's under the
special interests section of the DVD categories for Amazon. Is
indeed a special interest full jeans.

Speaker 3 (04:57):
So you're like, let's be clear, no one's comfortable.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
Nobody's having a good time. No one's having what you
would call sex right like.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
Rod jeans on human skin. Not for another. It's that
that that lady's gonna chafe.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, everyone's shaving. Yeah. This is one of several video
guides published by the Welcome Consensus. By the time that
Nicole didone, found it in nineteen ninety eight. She had
dated Erwin for a while, and while that didn't last,
her interest in deliberate orgasm did. She pressed Erwine to
connect her to more training, and rather than send her
to morehouse, he advised that she look into this splinter

(05:34):
group instead.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
And this is this pre like huge groups. This is
pre operating theater coming.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
No, they're doing that like the Moorhouse had done that.
Remember they'd done that thing where they said like it's
a three hour orgasm. Like they had done some demos
like that. Largely is like pr things to like bring
people in, and the Welcome Consensus did. It wasn't that big,
but they did do live demonstrations. Right. One of the
things that they because the Welcome Consensus is totally about
orgasm and pleasure and they declare it our birthright because

(06:07):
we were conceived in orgasm. That's like the motto of
the group essentially, and to bring in new members, they
do live demonstrations where a woman would be masturbated for
an hour, and they also sold really risque merch, like
they're very proud of how horny their merchandise is. They
have t shirts that brag life is too short for
mediocre sex. The Welcome Consensus didn't call new members marks. Instead,

(06:29):
they used the term benchmarks because it's just a little
different than the.

Speaker 3 (06:35):
Sounds less antagonistic.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
Yeah, one, this is the burger King of the moor House,
Like it's a burger. It's the burger King of orgasm cults, folks.
That's what the Welcome Consensus is.

Speaker 4 (06:45):
Life is too short for mediocre sex is pretty good.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah, pretty good shirt. It's a pretty good shirt. It's
not attached to a cult.

Speaker 3 (06:54):
Maybe I don't know, nothing's gonna nothing's gonna get me
in the door, like some fun, weird merch. So I
was like I too. Then I'm like, at what point
would I entertain going through the doors? And it is
the fugly shirt.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
It's the fugly shirt. Yeah, that's what they know. So
the Welcome Consensus again they call new members benchmarks, but
it only costs eleven dollars to visit. They've got a
they've got a compound obviously that's elsewhere in California, but
they've got a clubhouse in San Francisco and they do
like weekly game nights there. And these are games that
have been invented by the group that are and you know,

(07:28):
those like card games that are like, do you and
your spouse want to communicate better? This card game, we'll
have you talking better and you know, however long it
takes to play or whatever like that, right like, that
kind of thing. Those are the sort of games that
they're playing. These are like games they've created to aid
and communication intimacy, and that are also usually you know,
we did our episodes on Sin and On right like,

(07:49):
because that comes out of the self help movement that
all this stuff is related to a big thing in
Sin and On is these sessions where people sit arounder
the circle and like insult each other, and they're definitely
influenced by that. They've got some games that are like
we'll all sit around, we'll talk, we'll tell someone honestly
something about like themselves there, but it's usually supposed to
be positive, but often there's like a negative side too.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
Yeah, that's how there. I used to work at UH
now Closed Comedy Theater, and we would teach stand up
sketch and improv one of the most evil things you
can do, and on UH in the stand up classes,
the first day would always be just that to be you,
you would have to get on stage. I never took it,

(08:30):
but I watched each student who just wants to put
themselves out there, stands on stage, and every other student says, there,
what are some assumptions people might make about you? And
this is in Boston, Massachusetts, so you're hearing some really nasty.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
Stuff, wild stuff.

Speaker 3 (08:47):
Yeah, and then you're just told like, so, you know,
maybe that's something you might want to play up on stage.
You're like, it's just anyone who I don't know. The
Radical Honesty movie. Man, I'm just like, please less disastrous.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
We need to lie more. We need the lie more
to each other.

Speaker 3 (09:06):
You know, really for our own protection. Yeah, I don't
want to know.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
It's not that we need a lie more. We need
to just know less about each other. It's not lying
just to not tell someone everything. And we don't all
need to tell someone everything, you know, So most of
these games again just kind of yet like the dark secrets,
like tell me the darkest thing that turns you on
or stuff like that. Like that's a lot of like
the kind of games that they're playing and doing so
in public is really frightening but also kind of thrilling

(09:34):
and cathartic, and it creates this sort of stressful bonding
experience that other self help groups like you know, this
is all of them are doing something like this in
this period of time, and even kind of still into
the modern day. Everything is just kind of sent and
on when you get right down to it. Now. The
founder of the Welcome Consensus our Ja Testament, which sounds fake,

(09:55):
was a cowboy coded dude. He's always wearing like a
fucking cowboy hat. He's in like his fifties, and he's
What people will tell you about r J and the
COLT is that he's really good at calling people on
their bullshit. And here that phrase means he's really good
at psychologically abusing people, right, Like that's what that means.

Speaker 6 (10:12):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (10:15):
R J was attended to by four women who were
his lovers and also helped run the group. This was
specifically framed more as polyamory than as polygamy. Uh and
one thing everyone got who lived at the group's ranch
was plenty of sex and a near total escape from
the real world. New members like Nicole were promised that
they too could escape the grind of regular life if

(10:36):
they just gave themselves over to the cause. They then
got to live on an organic farm, growing their own
food and orgasm at least five times per day. You
really are not allowed to do it. Less, you're not
allowed it.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
It's not sounding like there is an opt out.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
Okay, no, now can you lie? Of course they're not checking,
but oh you can lie. Everyone does.

Speaker 7 (11:01):
So.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
The WC framed their sex work as a sex as
sexual experimentation. Again, just like the morauses, Like, we're really
more researchers trying to learn, like you know, this math,
the scientific secrets of sex that have been locked away,
and their goal is to create like an elite level
sexual experience. They were actually more as much as they
were inspired by their self help groups. They're inspired by

(11:22):
like fine dining restaurants, like the French laundry. That's very
much how they like build themselves.

Speaker 3 (11:27):
This is like a orgasm.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Yeah, a Michelin star cup. Yes, so, Nicole was an
instant fit. In short order, she'd paid fourteen thousand dollars
for a two week class on how to feel and
acknowledge her orgasms. Hewitt notes that in her bio for
the group website at the time, she wrote, orgasm is
the thread that weaves my life together. There is nothing
but orgasm as much as I want. That's That's really

(11:52):
how a lot of the stuff in the later cult
that she's gonna make is gonna sound like they talk
about it like fucking mana right, like their wizards and
this is their magic power is orgasm, like like it's
a quantifiable thing. Like it's not it's not like a
moment that happens. It's like a quantifiable kind of energy
you just have with you and like do a Duken's
with It's kind of it's kind.

Speaker 3 (12:13):
Of like almost I mean, I know it won't be
for long, but it is almost kind of sweet. How
they're talking about orgasms as if it was their idea
and they're the first people to think of this.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, no one else thinking this out. So the older
group members noticed right away that Nicole was very good
at winning new recruits, at convincing people to join the group.
And to pay money. One of her first gets was
a young woman named Allison, who was referred to the
group by Rwan after meeting him at a rave. Again,
there's a lot of like after parties for Burning Man

(12:46):
and stuff that people are being like recruited for to
some of these groups and shit like that's that's like
a thing. And Irwan is kind of the thing I
get is that he's kind of like their floater, Like
he's probably I think, a good looking guy, and he's
going out to like parties and stuff to find women
like Nicole and Alison and you know, talk them into
showing up at a place like this. So Alison meets

(13:07):
Ariwon at the rave, and she goes to the Welcome
Consensus and at her first meeting, she meets Nicole and
she tells Nicole, oh, you know, I just got awarded
a bunch of stock at work, so I just cashed
in like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And Nicole is
like cash register signs, right, So she starts flirting with Alison,
and Alison falls in love with Nicole, even though she'd
always considered herself straight before. And I think this has

(13:29):
a lot to do with just Nicole is very charismatic.
She's very good at making you feel like you're the
only person in the world, and she's very good at
making you feel that, like, doing things that feel good
with Nicole are also like revolutionary acts that are helping humanity.
You know, that's kind of Nicole's superpower. Yeah, so we've
talked about, like we talked about the Greeks, we talked
about more House about how they went from like, you know,

(13:51):
when women orgasm, it's so incredibly powerful, and they've used
that as a way to like say, obviously that means
women always want it right and the same thing happens
to a welcome consensus right per the Book of Orgasm,
or sorry per the book Empire of Orgasm.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
For the book, because.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
Yeah, uh, they invoked biological generalizations about the way female
mammals and estress and nonverbal signals to attract mates and humans.
They argue this manifested through emotions. Women can therefore emit
emotional calls and induce men to respond. When men are
feeling turned on or at peace or enraged, that's because
they're responding to a call that a woman is putting out.

(14:28):
Right now, this means that women are responsible for men's
arousal for how men feel right, and men are not
for how.

Speaker 3 (14:36):
They responsible for making sure that they're taking care of
And that's actually feminism when you think about it, isn't it, ladys?

Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah. And as is the case with any
group that dedicates themselves to reimagining human relationships while fucking
on an isolated farm, they spiraled into madness as time
went on, as researchers the group decided to experiment with
violence and whether or not that might be a healthy
way for people to express emotions honestly. And the way

(15:05):
how this happens, Like RJ and a bunch of the
men are like, I get angry and just want to
hit women sometimes maybe that's good. Like that's literally the
thought process here and.

Speaker 3 (15:16):
At this university. We're choosing to explore things we already
know and they already do.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
God, yeah, it's fucked up. So one example Ellen Hewitt
gives is a male member of the Welcome Consensus who
gets into an argument with a female member and punches
her hard enough to knock her to the ground, and
she goes to RJ to complain and he says, hey,
you need to cop to whatever it is you were
doing that made him angry or I'll beat you up myself. Right,
And this is liberating, right yeah, because.

Speaker 3 (15:45):
That means you're powerful, and that's me acknowledging you're powerful.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
As me acknowledging your power. So RJ, this won't surprise anybody.
Was an aging drunk who went crazy with power and
was as likely to give his followers pain as pleasure
when he was doing these orgasm sets. Sometimes, if he
was angry at a woman that he was like stroking,
he would stroke her clitter is so hard that it
like was agonizing. And then like when someone would be like, hey,

(16:10):
you're hurting me, he would accuse her of refusing to surrender.
And it was not like he regularly would like literally
just slap or otherwise hit his partner's generals during these
if he got angry at them. So again, these are
not like nice times a lot of the time. Right, No,
I'm sure that's super shocking to hear.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
I don't know, so fun say more. No, not great,
And this is all happening in group set. This is
like there's no of witnesses.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
Yeah yeah, yeah, lots of witnesses.

Speaker 4 (16:41):
That just reminds me of that Samantha Jones quote from
Sex and the City when they're at the massage store
and there's a bunch of women there but are not
actually shopping for massage, but they're shopping for vibrators. And
she looks at this woman she goes, not.

Speaker 3 (16:56):
That one that will burn. You're cut off? Okay, perfect, Wow,
She's always with us, She's always with.

Speaker 4 (17:04):
Us, ahead of the times.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
So Alison, not long after Nicole convinced her to join,
became the target of RJ's ire. There's like an evening
where they're like there's several a bunch of people hanging
out at the property and Arjie gets really drunk and
he tells Alison like, get down on your hands and knees,
and he pulls up her skirt and he starts whipping
her with a writing crop and just like screaming and cursing.

(17:26):
He's just like a maniac. Right, Nicole does nothing, even
though Alison is very clearly frightened. And that's kind of
something to Cole takes with her, is that this person
who I thought was into me and was like it
convinced me that this was a safe place, brought me
into the situation and said nothing when this happened, right.

Speaker 3 (17:42):
It's I mean, you know, this echoes a lot of colts,
but it feels very nexium adjacent in the way that
we are being weaponized to recruit other women.

Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yes, and happening at the same Nicole's COLT is going
to happen at the same time as nexium. I mean,
this is too next time. I think get started in
the nineties some but they're very similar movements. Yes, there's
a lot that they have in common. Nicole would later
brag when she starts her cold that she was one
of the only women RJ never tried to hit, which, like,
I don't know what that says. Yeah. In two thousand

(18:14):
and one, after three years with the Welcome Consensus, Nicole
decided she had reached the peak of what they could
give her. Their top training course was called Validation, and
to pass you had to complete a three hour orgasmic
stroking session into a one hour public demonstration. To even
attempt this costs one hundred thousand dollars. Nicole doesn't have
that kind of money, so she goes to Aerwon and

(18:35):
is like, hey, man, you've just come into an inheritance.
Why don't you pay for us both to have the
one hundred thousand dollars class, and Airwon pays initially, but
then he gets cold feet and he backs out and
demands a refund of the money he'd put down, and
RJ refuses to refund his money. So Airwan sues the
group and accuses them of prostitution and says, and he
had been part of this, right Airwon was, but he says,

(18:58):
just selling sex.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
Yeah. So journalists start converging on the community, they get
a bunch of bad press and that Rgie's kind of
getting old at this point, so he just backs off
and they really reduce their recruitment efforts. He eventually decides
I'm just gonna like kind of fade away, right, like,
like I'm too old for this shit. I don't want
to have to like fight the outside world.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
And that's the abusive grift was good while it lasted.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
Yeah yeah, And that's when Nicole kind of decides it's
time to leave, right It's time for me. She can
see like, Okay, the welcome consensus is on its way out.
It's time for me to start my own orgasm cult
slash training program. And we'll talk about all that once
we finish these ads, so to find and start her

(19:50):
own cold Nicole knows she's gonna need money, right, and
she does not have any. So before she leaves, she
finds a married couple, Rob and Carol Kandall, who had
recently joined Welcomed Consensus. Yes Yes, very good name Carol,
Yeah ka n d e LLL. They want to spice
up their boring one percent er corporate life.

Speaker 7 (20:12):
Right.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
Rob is a successful businessman. I think he's I don't
know if he's like rich or just upper middle class,
but he's got money and he and Carol had lived
up this point a pretty standard life. Like they get married.
Rob is very successful. He works his way up the
corporate ladder, and then kind of when they're in you know,
the thirties with middle aged and agent sight, Rob is like,
oh my god, like we're boring, right, And so he

(20:33):
goes to Burning Man with his wife and they take
mushrooms and he decides he wants more out of life
than just like making money. And that's what brings Rob
and Carol to the Welcomed Consensus.

Speaker 3 (20:44):
Right.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
And Rob is because Nicole spots immediately that this is
the guy I need to bring with me when I
leave this cult. And that's because he's going to be
the model for the kind of dude that she is
going to kind of fashion her entire life around soaking
for cash. Unfortunately, she's often going to do that by
like making other women fulfill that guy's weird and sick desire,

(21:07):
so he pays her. But that's coming in a bit.
What she sees right away with Rob is that Silicon
Valley is filled with dudes who spend all their you know,
when they were in school, they were always studying, they
were big nerds. They didn't spend a lot of time partying,
they didn't do a lot of dating, and then they
start working in their workaholics and they don't spend a
lot of time dating too, And you know, if they
get married, they probably feel like they never got to

(21:27):
sew their wild oats. They didn't get to do enough partying,
they didn't get to have enough sex, right, and they
wind up bored and feeling like life is passing them by.
And she sees that in Rob, and she realizes this
kind of guy will do anything to prove to himself
that he's not just another middle aged, middle class white
guy with money, right, and I think that.

Speaker 3 (21:45):
This like personality profile too, is like there's always an
element of like revenge to having access to a lot
of sex and that it's been owed to you. You're
getting it back.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
Yeah I never got it in high school, right, And yeah,
he definitely a big part of what he feels is that,
like I will do anything to have sex with a
lot of young women. Right, that's what That's what Nicole
sees in Rob.

Speaker 8 (22:05):
Right.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
So she first enters Rob's life when he goes to
a benchmark gathering and she walks in wearing this elaborate,
sexy costume. He would later describe it as like a
moment from a movie where the music changes to mark
an important plot point, because all these guys want to
feel like they're the leading man in a blockbuster film
and like, finally, like my life is turning into a movie.
I'm no longer going to be like this boring slub
work and a job, right, And Nicole sees that and

(22:30):
sees like that's just what you tell him. You just
tell him this is a great adventure, Like you're the
protagonist of life. We're going to make like this is
like that's that's forever and now as long as you
stick with me. So for the moment, Carol needs to
be around too, because Rob is not willing to immediately
dump his wife, and Nicole manages to convince them both
that she can provide a more exciting and lucrative future

(22:50):
for them than the Welcomed Consensus. So she poaches these
two and two other students before leaving, and they all
move into Rob's house in San Francisco. Well, Nicole tries
to figure out what to do to differentiate her grift
from the ones that had come before her. Right, she
knows she wants to do something like the Moorhouse and
the Welcome Consensus, but she wants it to be her
own thing, and she wants it to be something that

(23:11):
can last and will not wind up pissing off a
bunch of like newspapers and stuff. Right, she has to
make it like somehow how do I make it work?
And how do I make it palatable for like people
in the nineties who are less sexists than these dudes
from like the sixties and seventies who had started the
other orgasm cults.

Speaker 3 (23:28):
Or at least a different kind.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, or at least a different kind. So before she
figures out what her grift is going to be. Well,
they're all still living at Rob's house. She knows. She
wants to launch a food donation charity called fill Up America.
And this is not an act of charity. This is
something she had learned because both the Welcomed Consensus and
the More House people did this right where they had
food donation charities and they would take food donations, but

(23:51):
the purpose of these were not to give out food.
It was so that you didn't have to shop. Right,
you take in, you make yourself known as like this
is who you donate food to, and people donate food,
you take out the good stuff and you use that
to feed everyone for free at your commune, and then
you give away the bad stuff to like a food
pantry or something like that. Like that's literally what it is,
and that's what Nicole is doing. It's very unethical.

Speaker 3 (24:13):
God, that's so horrible. Yeah, where it's just like a
gigantic shipment of like soaking wet peb and jas.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
Yes, yes, and you got out all the good ship. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:24):
I have to I have to say, like the future
sex cult having something called fill up America is so funny.
Fill Up America.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
That's gross. It's really gross. You had to know that, Nicole.
This was like the year two thousand and one, Like
we weren't that in the fucking what.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
You do fill up America? Nasty?

Speaker 2 (24:46):
It's It says a lot about Nicole that she's like, first,
even before I know what the grift is, when I
know what the colt's going to be, before I have
any like members or any classes. We've got to have
our fake food charity so we don't have to pay
for groceries. Right now. Nicole starts writing her own guide
to what she called orgasmic meditation, which pulled back from

(25:07):
the multi hour sessions the welcomed consensus had worked up to.
She realized it was more a lot more marketable to
sell lestoral stroking as a fifteen minute meditative technique, something
you can plug into your morning routine without much fuss.
She specifically says, I want this to replace coffee for
like young professional women in like the Bay Area and
stuff like, instead of your morning coffee, you have like
your morning fucking fifteen minutes.

Speaker 3 (25:29):
I do she already, I will say, basically prior other
than like she's it's a better hook than what.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
Vick is it's a way better hook.

Speaker 3 (25:38):
It's much coffee with coming.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
It's a great genius. It's genius in a way.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
Yeah yeah not Hey guys, did you know my wife
could come? Should we start a business? Like she's she
has learned?

Speaker 2 (25:54):
And what tells you how ahead of the curve she
is is like, in like twenty sixteen, you would have
written this as like a joke start up right to parody,
like the health and wellness culture and the body optimization
culture in the in the valley and the Bay. But
this is like twousand and one or two, right, she's
really ahead of the curve. She sees this part of
San Francisco before. It's as much of a meme as

(26:16):
it's kind of a come prem yeah pre goop. Now
there is conflict arises pretty quickly between her and Carol.
Carol is convinced that Nicole wants to make convince her
husband to abandon her, because that is exactly Carol what
Nichole is trying to do.

Speaker 3 (26:30):
Carol get out of there.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
So Carol gets pissed and she's like Rob and I
are leaving. We're gonna go stay in a nice place
in Jersey for like a couple of weeks and you
need to be gone when we get back. So that
Robin Carroll fucking bounce And before they leave, Nicole is like,
you'll regret it. Your life will be nothing but boring
once you get back home if you leave us, and
that says like she leaves, her little nascent colt leaves
and they try to find a new place to be,

(26:53):
and Robin Carroll come back and they do kind of
miss the cult. They are like, oh, it is really
boring without Nicole. I'm just kind of like making money
and living in like the bay. I kind of want
to be back in a cult. It's a lot more
fun than my life.

Speaker 3 (27:05):
So there's not a lot of good movies out right now. Yeah,
we'd like to read take acid and party.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
Yeah, we took.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
An prodcast and it wasn't fun.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
We want didn't fix things.

Speaker 4 (27:17):
This is two thousand and one. But is this two
thousand and one.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
Or so before nine to eleven or probably after an
leven Now I don't know, all.

Speaker 8 (27:26):
Right, all right, I just want to I just want
to understand the cultural vibes of the time.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
Sure, So she Nicole calls Rob a few weeks you know,
into this, and is like, hey, you guys want to
come over and take acid, Like we're staying at this
new place, why don't you all party? And like they
do when soon they're back in the group and she
eventually talks Rob into leaving his wife, and she basically
does it by pitching him like, look, we're going to
create this new tech savvy community of orgasm entrepreneurs, and

(27:55):
we're going to sell this technique to all of these
like rich people in the bay and all these beauti
full young women in the bay. And I want you
to be basically a human billboard. Rob, You're gonna have
endless access to women's bodies as you just kind of
like help help help us afford this while we're getting
off the ground and Rob a grease kidd Yeah that

(28:16):
Rob takes the deal ultimately does leave his wife.

Speaker 3 (28:20):
I was trying to like drop myself into the experience
of someone making like telling me to my face they're
an orgasm entrepreneur.

Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah. I don't know that she uses that word, but
that is what they're doing, right, They're starting an orgasm business.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
And like do but I do believe that guys like
this would would feel so comfortable just letting that I'm
a bit of an orgasm entrepreneur, you could say, and
then my clitterist would just fall off right there.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
So around the same time that all this is happening,
Nicole has started gathering a cotterie of older men to
her right that she's at first she's going, I use
for money and then for like some of their knowledge
and advice. And in all of these cases she's kind
of like you get the some of it. Times it's
spelled it, sometimes it's not, But she's kind of offering
up her body in some cases to these men that

(29:14):
she needs something from in order to get pieces that
she needs to complete this cult. And that's going to
be relevant because of like what she's going to do later, right,
But that is a that is an aspect of this
that's not always directly discussed. But sometimes it's even just
like these old guys just want to like spend time
and feel like they're influential to this young, hot woman.
Sometimes they are getting something physical out from it.

Speaker 3 (29:36):
The first of these different version of the Elizabeth Holmes playbook.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
Right right right, exactly exactly my hot young ward yeah, yeah,
And the first of these men was the former Morehouse
founder Vic Baranco, who by this point was old and
dying and was living in Hawaii. He had just a
handful he basically again Morehouse still exists, but he'd kind
of given up and had just retreated to this like

(30:02):
nice place in Hawaii with a few of his closest followers,
right because he knows he's not going to last much
longer and he just wants to enjoy life. Wow, bless,
And she thinks that she convinces him over a couple
of days, and who knows what goes on to make
her his heir so she can take over after him
and like move Morehouse into a new age. But that
was just a lie, like he was he never meant that,

(30:22):
And she eventually realizes that she's been had and he
was just kind of screwing around with her, And so
she leaves with her followers from the Morehouse compound and
they rent another place in Hawaii for a while, and
they start like planning out, like what is our what
are we going to do? Like what is our course
curriculum going to be? And they start writing out obviously
taking these ideas from Warhouse and the Welcome consensus and

(30:45):
throwing in some of their own, mostly Nicole's and they're
putting stuff together. They move back to San Francisco, where
they meet the next of these older guys, who's a
forty five year old former musician named Don Mary's his
longtime girlfriend had recently died from some sort of cancer,
and Don is just deeply depressed. He's certainly not a
rich guy, but he's got a house of his own,

(31:05):
and he's got some amount of money, and they really
just need a place right. Nicole had known him when
she was in her early twenties and had been partying
and doing a lot of drugs, and you know, he's
a musician, so they'd kind of known each other, and
she latched onto him like ten or so years ago,
even though he was a lot older. And he'd avoid
getting entangled with her then because a friend of us
had told him quote, she's a monster. But she shows

(31:27):
up a decade later. He's really lonely and sad, and
she's like, Hey, we're doing this like fun thing. We're
going to start an orgasm business. Can we like do
it in your house? And he's like, okay, I guess
why not?

Speaker 3 (31:38):
Cool? Cool?

Speaker 2 (31:41):
She doesn't critically, I said, she doesn't say it's an
orgasm business. We're doing like a self help thing, and
we're going to come up with like a new training
program to sell people and start a business. Can we
do it in your house?

Speaker 6 (31:52):
Right?

Speaker 2 (31:52):
Right?

Speaker 3 (31:52):
And orgasms are what they're like the zenu of the operation,
like yes, oh, yes, by the way.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
You have to Don, Yeah, Don's gonna have to wait
to learn the orgasms or what this is all about.

Speaker 3 (32:04):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (32:05):
So while he's out working because he's still like a
handyman or something, Nicole and her friends are at his
house writing courses on argasmic meditation and platoral stroking. Don
is kind of only dimly aware of, like literally what
they're doing. He's mostly just happy to not be lonely,
it kind of seems like to me. And he starts
to become aware that, like whatever they're doing during the day,
Nicole seems to be flirting with him, and Don is

(32:26):
a smart enough guy to know, like, well, that can't
be genuine, Like I know, like I'm I'm way over
the hill. I don't feel good anymore, like this is
she's got to have an angle in this.

Speaker 3 (32:35):
Right, I'm grieving like yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
So one day she tells Don is in the room,
but Nicole is talking to Rob, and Nicole tells Rob,
I should may read Don. I think that would be
really good for the group if I married Don. And
she doesn't even say this to Don and they went
up taking acid later, and he kind of gets pissed
about this because again he's grieving, and he's like, you
shouldn't joke about stuff like that, and he like kind
of leaves for a while, but he comes back and

(33:00):
she keeps pushing him to spend more time with them
and to party with them and kind of flirting with
him more, and even after they eventually leave his place
because Rob gets a new place near San Francisco and
she's like, Don, why don't you come with us and
stay for a few days. And he's like, I know
something's going on here. I know this isn't on the
up and up, but I am old and sad and

(33:22):
I kind of want to take drugs with this hot
young lady and her orgasmical what might be an orgasmical?

Speaker 5 (33:27):
Right?

Speaker 3 (33:28):
He's going through a hard time.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
Yeah, She applies Don with LSD and he winds up
spending like more than like weeks there, and her followers
pitch him on what they'd started calling the Institute of
Monastic Understanding. They like because the acronym is I am
you right, Oh yeah, there you're seeing you Nope. Yeah.
So their food charity is in full swing by this point,

(33:53):
and they start recruiting people who volunteered to help them
bag and distribute groceries right to join the cult. These
people are here about the orgasms. Don still is not.
People come and go from the property, including Don's cousin, William,
who Donald calls Will up and Will comes down for
a few weeks and he writes a fictional book about
his time there and about like falling in love with

(34:14):
these like LSD cultists, and he would includes some lines
from it in her book. And this Don's cousin's writings
give a pretty compelling glimpse inside the minds of these
older men that she's bringing in and like, because this
is going to be relevant the whole growth of this cult.
This is what's always going on in the dude's heads quote.
Think of it, the endless excellent sex, the lively intellectual conversation,

(34:36):
the intense tripping, all the new people I was meeting,
and just the entire unknown adventure of it all, and
this community. More happened in a week every week than
what happened in three months back in the old world,
my other life, that place when I had an American
Express card a lifetime ago. Right, Well, don't you even
have to think about money or work. It could just
take drugs and have sex. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:58):
Right. But then also, priz that I feel so so
like crucial to these kinds of grips is to not
make it just sound like what it is. Just like, yeah,
drugs and sex and the illusion of power and access
and all this stuff, and being like this is a
spiritual mission and you're doing the bust at it.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yeah, that's that is what I got out of the
events I used to go to as a young person
because they were that they were totally honest. It was like, no, no,
for like five days, we're gonna do drugs and have
a bunch of weird sex, and there will be a
bunch of art and music to dance too. But then
we then you go home, then you go back your
life and it's cr and then you go home.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
And if you have a nice time, that's great, but
it does not make your God.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
You do, but you're not God, and you haven't figured
out the universe. You've just learned that doing drugs and
fucking for five days with your friends can be a
pretty good time, which, like you knew already before you
did it.

Speaker 3 (36:03):
Well, if you disinfected those cuts from the glass that
was falling from the ceiling, Oh say glass cuts.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
Whoever got hurt by glass other than the people? So
Don agrees eventually to marry Nicole, knowing it's a bad idea,
and Nicole admits to him at this point after he says,
let's get married, She's like, by the way, this whole
thing is all about orgasms, this is an orgasm cult
that we're doing, and he is. He's initially pissed, but
at this point he's agreed to marry her. Right, so

(36:32):
he forgives her and they have a weird wedding where
she kind of ignores him until they're married, and then
she tells him she turns him, and she says, actually,
you've just married everyone in this room and it's all
of the other cult members. Horrible time for Don and
her followers jokingly make Donn a shirt that says indignant
man kidnapped by love colt like a like a fake

(36:53):
headline as a joke that I love, Like they are
really poor, like don is he's getting sucked with. But
so they were just saying, what was happening, man, Like
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (37:04):
It's like at some point, well I don't I don't
even know. This guy can't catch a break and they're
caullying him.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
And they're bullying him, and I think his attitude is
kind of like I bought the ticket, I took the ride,
you know, like he's not the ultimate victim. His story
is just very funny to me.

Speaker 3 (37:22):
Yeah, it's just like at some point it just gets
weird where he's like, well, yeah, it's just like someone
acting like they're wearing handcuffs when it's like, no, man,
you own the house.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
This is your house.

Speaker 3 (37:34):
Yeah, you are not trapped here. He's like, well, there's
nothing I could do.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
So the group, still going by IMU, starts offering courses
for money, and so for the first time, people start
paying them and attending. But they're not a lot of people.
This is not a big group yet, and they're not
teaching orgasm at first. In these classes, they're not doing
the stroking or anything of that. Instead, they're teaching Nicole's philosophy,
which is a bunch of warmed over bullshit from like

(38:02):
the middle of the last century, and basically, like basically
Nicolls that it is like life has no inherent meaning
other than the one that you give it, which sounds
like it could be fine. Right. People take that in
healthy ways. This is often the case of Nicole stuff.
There's a way you can interpret that healthily. But what
Nicole means by that is that if you have a

(38:22):
bad experience, that's because you're choosing to frame the thing
that happened to you is a bad thing, and you
don't have to do that. And the point that she
will tell in these in these classes to illustrate what
she's saying is that, you know, when I was a child,
I used to think that my father had molested me.
But now that I'm a mature adult and I've done
a lot of work and gone through all of the
coursework and stuff on this, I know now I seduced

(38:45):
my father. I was the one with powers. So she's just.

Speaker 3 (38:48):
Teaching SHARV like that's yeah, yeah, yeah, that is that's okay, okay,
because that's very upset. Yeah, it's really, I mean, especially
because it's upsetting yeah, because you're like, I mean, it's
like the VOT. You gotta feel for her that it's like,

(39:11):
if she does believe it, that's really tragic and.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
Really fucked up. Yeah, that I think. I don't think
that she. I think this is maybe she believes or not,
but I think this is consciously she's doing this because
she knows what she's going to be doing to the
people who are her followers, right, and she wants this
is a really good thing to convince everyone to believe
at the baseline before you start doing the other shit.
She's going to do that. If you think something's bad,

(39:36):
it's because you're interpreting it as bad.

Speaker 3 (39:37):
It's like a grouping tactic, like you've just taken a
course on why everything that's about to happen to you
is actually okay.

Speaker 2 (39:44):
It's fine, is good? Yes, uh yeah, And obviously that
that really like sends a message to her followers. Early
on in two thousand and three, after Carol leaves and
Don marries Nicole, Nicole brings a new guy in to
the fold, a new old guy. This is Ray Vetterling.
Ray Vetterlin had been a protege a vic at Moore

(40:07):
at the Moorhouse thing, and he he was like the
almost famous version of a cult leader. Like he'd been
pretty big in Morehouse. He'd done some cult stuff of
his own, but it had never really taken off. He'd
like done, he'd made some money, he'd done okay, But
now to industry, he's a working cult leader. Ray is right,

(40:28):
you take.

Speaker 3 (40:28):
It personally, man, it couldn't.

Speaker 2 (40:32):
Time, yeah, exactly. Yeah, But Ray knows the business right.
Ray knows if you're going to start a cult, here's
the things you want to do, here's how you build
the curriculum that you're going to sell, and all this stuff.
And so she brings him in and he writes down
a lot of his best tips and tricks, and he
helps her kind of plan the cult. She's going to
start from the ground up. And this is kind of

(40:55):
a situation where Ray is both going to get physical
access into Cole's body. He's going to be doing all
of these physical orgasm demonstrations where he's like stroking her.
But he also he gets to like he gets to
kind of live through her because she is young enough
and has enough energy to start a successful cult and
he doesn't anymore. And I think that's a big part
of it for Ray, Right, so he writes out a

(41:18):
document for her laying out how this orgasm cult ought
to function per the book Empire of Orgasm quote, some
of the lessons were nothing bolts. Practical teachers should be
in couples, ideally in their early thirties, big enough that
twenty year old students won't see them as mom and
dad making out. Host a law a day long intro
course twice a month, he said, and use a short
demo of a woman in orgasm at the end of

(41:38):
the class as a safe showstopper, a format that one
taste that's her later cult would employ for more than
a decade. The minute one woman sees another woman getting
off like that, they want to be there too, Ray wrote, Right,
So they spell this out all very directly, and his
pitch to her as to like why this is going
to work is that more House had failed because it
was too patriarchal, It was too trapped in the seventies

(41:59):
and eight eighties. Right, People today didn't want to hear
like a fucking dude with a mustache talk about how
much he's getting laid. They want the illusion at least
to feminism and gender equality, and they want to be
told that what they're doing isn't it just because they're horny,
It's because it's going to optimize their health. It's going
to make them more powerful. It's going to make you smarter,
it's gonna make you faster, it's going to make you
better able to compete in the cutthroat tech industry. Right.

Speaker 3 (42:21):
That is such a like it's it's the same sexual crime,
but being positioned by a woman who claims this will
optimize you.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
Let will optimize you're eating their drinking the right juice. Yeah, yeah,
super funny.

Speaker 3 (42:35):
I mean that's like that is even though it is
funny and a great pitch replacing, Like it's so Silicon
Valley brain to be like, I come instead of drink
coffee and it saves me time and it actually releases
more chemicals.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
It's me eight minutes a day. Right, Yeah, emails I've
sent it's the same as the AI thing, really, right,
any more emails I send than everyone else. I'm productive.

Speaker 3 (43:00):
They all they like, they're all in a language I
don't speak, but they send it. And that's what matters.

Speaker 2 (43:07):
That's what that's all that matters in business. Ray has
in this document, He writes, he has a line that
is one of my favorite things from this. Since we
are not yet selling the god hustle, what do we do?
What we have to sell is an organically healthy lifestyle
with sensuality and intimacy. Ray's really good at this. Like,
Ray's honestly a great mind in the in the con business.

Speaker 3 (43:30):
Wow, you know.

Speaker 2 (43:32):
Who else is a great mind when it comes to
conning people?

Speaker 6 (43:35):
You?

Speaker 2 (43:36):
Yeah, and the sponsors of this podcast and we're back.
So Ray wrote that anyone showing up to their classes
was by definition missing something right. This is like, because
this is something Nicole knows a lot of this, but

(43:58):
Ray's kind of writing out all of his lessons and
one thing he writes that anyone's going to show up
to like an optimize your Life fucking Orgasm class is
missing something right. They don't have everything they need. They're
not fully happy, otherwise they wouldn't be here. And the
one thing that Americans are more likely to miss than
anything else is intimacy. Right, So if you can create
situations that fake very sudden, very intense intimacy with a

(44:22):
large number of hot people, you can make a fuck
load of money because people will get addicted to that,
and they'll pay any amount of money to keep being
around it. And all you have to do is be
brutally honest about what they're doing wrong, at which point
they'll listen to whatever you tell them is the right
way to do things right, because they want to stay there.
They want to keep having these experiences, they want to
keep feeling that they're having revelations and stuff because they're

(44:43):
just doing things that feel good for their body and
that's nice, and people can't accept that. People can't just
accept that, like, oh maybe I like having sex and
like a fucking weird group situation, which is a perfectly
fine thing for people to do if that's what gets
you off. But they can't just accept this feels good.
It has to be opt amising me. This has to
be unlocking a secret hack in my brain. Otherwise it's

(45:04):
a waste of time because I won't make more money
at Apple right.

Speaker 3 (45:07):
And literally thing and it's like going back to the
fucking twelfth century is like this, This woman orgasming has to
have some sort of like crucial productive function where it
just nothing can just feel good.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
And that's that's really what drew me in to like
the fucking events that I like, these little burn events
that I went to was like the whole the whole
pitch was like, you know what sucks capitalism? You know,
it doesn't suck doing drugs with your friends in the woods,
Like where's that? Like the hedonism is important?

Speaker 3 (45:38):
Where's the this shit sucks?

Speaker 2 (45:42):
They had that back in more House, but it got
really again, if there's also a guy that.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
For the experience, Yeah, that's.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
The other important thing is that. And there's not like
a guy, Like it's just a bunch of people hanging out,
Like no one's getting rich off of this. Like as
soon as there's a guy, and as soon as you're
paying thousands of dollars, like things get very quickly problematic.
And but but if you're paying thousands of dollars, then
it can't just be something that feels good, because like,

(46:09):
actually feeling good can be really cheap. I get like
I had to sit on the couch like with my
partner and we both have a really like feel really nice,
like watching a movie. But nobody makes money off of that.
You can't tell a fucking yeah, they can be worth anything.

Speaker 3 (46:23):
They have a meeting at the beginning of every day
do not tell people they can just comm at their house.
Do not tell them.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
Don't tell people that. Don't let them know they can
just actually find love and companionship without like paying money,
because that you can just start.

Speaker 3 (46:36):
A conversation with someone and see what happens. Don't tell
them that shit.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
Don't let them know. Don't let them know. So Don
and Nicole and their little group are living at Ray's
place at this point, right, they moved into Ray's house,
and they're helping Nicole explore how to make her They're
basically prepping. They're they're going to be doing these public
organism demos, and they're they're they're training, right, They're doing
they're like preparing for like these marathon public orgasm sessions, right,

(47:01):
And this means that Nicole every day is lying down
in a room full of mirrors while Don and Ray
and Rai's in his seventies masturbate her at the same time.
And Ray is supposed to be kind of like teaching
Don how to do it, because the idea initially is
that Don will do this because he's her husband in
the actual like public classes, and Nicole is she's not,

(47:22):
you know, she's she's having these with a lot of
her followers, like they're all practicing these masturbation techniques. And
Nicole is keeping a blog in which she writes about
her experiences in lurid detail, and this is gonna give
you an idea of like how she's because she you
can't ever talk about it like sex. You should never
describe the sexual sensations or what you're seeing or doing

(47:44):
in a sexual manner. You don't want it to be hot.
You want it to sound like a fucking poem or something,
right like, because that makes it not gross. So for
an example that here's one description that Nicole wrote about
how it felt to be masturbated by Ray, this elderly
cult leader. The laughter welled and weld inside of me.
I became swollen with laughter, and then like champagne pouring

(48:06):
over the sides of the bottle, tears began to flood me.
Right And again, the key here is that there's nothing
about sex in there right that makes it seem profound
and also marketable.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
Some Lna del rey ass I was like, like, whatever,
writing sex poetry is fine, but if that's like a
hard rule, then it starts to feel kind of like dissociative.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
But also that makes it feel very different from these
prior cults. There's no guys going and this is so hot,
isn't it? Like because they're not they're being like no,
it's like champagne pulling over the sides of a bottle.

Speaker 6 (48:36):
You know.

Speaker 2 (48:37):
It just feels more intellectual and thus safe, right, right,
that's the basic idea, And part of the idea here
is that like, while she's being stroked for an audience,
she'll call in like people to put her hands, their
hands on her and describe how they felt. And the
idea is that like this is such a like a
powerful spiritual thing that like everybody is affected by it

(48:58):
in the room right, and gets everyone to buy into it,
and it makes them feel connected and included and helps
make it an addictive experience. Soon she's got like twenty
or so followers, but she's not making money off of this,
and she feels like the group is incomplete until one
day Ray is like, hey, Don's not working for like
the sex demo stuff. Nobody's gonna want to watch Don

(49:20):
do this. I think you should bring Irwan back because
Irwan's hot and he's really good at doing these these demos.
Don cannot you should bring him in, Ray fucking Don.

Speaker 3 (49:31):
He's so fired from the manipulative sex local theater truths.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
So sad and Don he's growing increasingly disillusioned. He hears
over what one day he overhears Ray and Erewan talking
because she brings an erawon and Ray and Erewan called
Donn a throwaway person.

Speaker 3 (49:50):
Okay, in there is like a Eugene Levy invest in
show quality to Don.

Speaker 2 (49:57):
To me, he's just like, it's really funny. Gene Levy
twenty years ago would have been the guy to cast
for Done.

Speaker 3 (50:03):
For Don be like, hey, so oh, you're really bringing
down the vibe at the sex cal.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
Done. So Don flips out and Don leaves. Nicole divorces him,
and by the time she and Erwan do their first
public demo in front of an audience of forty, he
is all but forgotten. This first public Don good for you,
Bye Don, Bye Don. This first public like stroking demo
happens in August of two thousand and three. He wits

(50:34):
book describes the scene and detail and I don't feel
the need to tell you what Irwan did to this
woman's vulva step by step. I appreciate that Ellen does.
Her book is very good. You learn a lot about
this group and exactly what they're doing. We don't need
to talk about that. You get the idea, right. What's
important is what he tells the audience after Nicole has
a massive, shuddering, hour long orgasm in front of a crowd. Quote,

(50:57):
it's pure euphoria. You can have as much of that
sensation as you like. You can feel it in your
body as much as you want. If she can do this,
so can you. And then he invites audience members up
to touch Nicole and this works like gangbusters. Right. People
love this, They tell their friends. Soon more folks are
signing up to go watch the orgasm class right.

Speaker 3 (51:17):
Doing like a horny Arena Abramovic thing. It just feels
like it's like a it's like a performance art thing.

Speaker 8 (51:24):
It's yeah yeah, And he's like the made treaty. He's
the he's the you know, guy with the microphone.

Speaker 4 (51:32):
Y come first, come all.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
And that's gonna be a problem, right, because Nicole she
got into this to be the one, right, she's the
cult leader. If Airwan is like the star of the show,
because he's actually doing the demonstration and talking and she's
just kind of like mutely, not mutely, but like she's
not making like she's not speaking. She's she's supposed to

(51:57):
be having an orgasm, right, She's kind of a secondary
figure in the demo that is not going to work
for Nicole.

Speaker 4 (52:04):
One she has details to add here is that this
man's name is definitely Irwin, but Robert.

Speaker 8 (52:10):
Keeps calling him arrow on like the grocery and I
E R W A N. And I've been enjoying it
the entire time, but I think, but I think we're
about I think we're about the last of this man,
and I wanted to get it in.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
We're not going everyone's not gonna be around all that
much longer because Nicole Nicole is basically as soon as
this first demo goes the way it does, Nicole has
like a team meeting, like a cult meeting, and she's like,
you guys got to choose him or me, Like she
has enough, She's got the instincts where she's like, if
I let this get established is the way we do things,
he's going to be the cult leader, right, and I

(52:48):
don't want that. That's not okay.

Speaker 3 (52:50):
This is such a Silicon Valley approach to cult leading.

Speaker 2 (52:56):
It's it is a wild very much. This is like
meeting ship. Yeah, it's the PayPal mafia with weird orgasm
fucking teachings.

Speaker 3 (53:07):
So he's nuked, he's gone.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
He's nuked. Yeah, the colt picks Nicole. Nicole wins, and
one leaves the picture. Irwin whatever you want to call him.

Speaker 3 (53:15):
Ray is kicked out, Irwin, whatever your prices are high,
great produce.

Speaker 2 (53:22):
Sorry, and uh Ray gets kicked out right after that,
not long after that, because Nicole no longer needs any
old men like hanging around the right. She's figured things out. Yeah,
the Grift is now ready. This is a fully operational
battle station. The Grift is now ready for the prime time.

Speaker 4 (53:41):
Farewell of You're sorry. I just like that. She's kicking
out all these.

Speaker 3 (53:49):
So far.

Speaker 2 (53:51):
Yeah. In March of two thousand and four, Nicole finally
settles on a name for what they were doing. One taste.
It was taken from the title of a book by
a philosopher and attributed to a statement by the Buddha.
Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste
of salt, so also this teaching and discipline has one
taste the taste of liberation. Yes, one taste, the taste

(54:12):
of liberation. He's talking about that Budda talking about I
guess Buddhism. Oh yeah, but she's like one taste. When
you have one taste, not pussy. Yeah, they're not doing that, Jamie.
But when you have one taste of the life we
offer you, you'll never want anything else for yourself, right,
That's how it's supposed to feel, you know. So. On
July thirtieth, two thousand and fourth, the One Taste Urban

(54:33):
Retreat Center opened in San Francisco's Fulsome Street, which is
probably the most sex positive neighborhood in the US at
the time. There's a big street fair on Fulsome that's
like a bunch of leather daddies and like some really
depraved public sex acts. If you really want to see
some shit, go to the Fulsome Street parade.

Speaker 3 (54:49):
San Francisco in the two thousands is still like kind
of hanging on to.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
Still pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Speaker 8 (54:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Yeah. So Nicole and her followers ran there orgasm demos there,
but they also like this is like a big warehouse basically,
and they've got like several different businesses that they operate
out of it. They've got a yoga studio, they've got
a massage parlor, they've got like a cafe that sells
fucking frozen yogurt because it's two thousand and four, and
they're also hosting workshops, not just the orgasm stuff, but

(55:19):
they've got some very Bay friendly subjects like conscious cuddling
right where again it's and you get a lot of like, oh,
people think you have to pay to like cuddle with
a bunch of people because they don't know they don't
have any community. Like that's a bummer. Again, that stuff
was just free. When I was younger, we didn't have
to pay to fucking do a workshop next to a

(55:40):
fro yo stand. So the orgasm stuff was kooky and
out there, but for the most part they blended into
the scenery of San Francisco. At that time, One Taste
was a business, and her cult members are also all employees,
although they are not receiving regular or sufficient Bay for
the fourteen hour days that they're putting in Valley. Paid

(56:01):
an experience, paid an experience baby.

Speaker 4 (56:04):
Since you mentioned froyo, it does One Taste does sound
like a bink berry.

Speaker 2 (56:12):
It would be funny if they hadn't become a criminal cult,
which is where this ends, and it had just pivoted
hard into fro Yo. I was just explaining the origins
of a popular frozen yogurt company.

Speaker 3 (56:22):
It was just like, wait, so we just realized Froyo
is where the money is. So we're dropping the sex call.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
We'rep It's like if you were looking up like the
marble slab creamer, like, oh, they used to fuck on
the slab. I didn't guess that. I guess the ice
cream was a better business. Yeah. McDonald's just to used
to just be a guy named McDonald in a bedroom.
But then he started serving burgers, and you know, one
thing led to another. So morehouse starts having weekly sessions

(56:51):
where though again they're playing communication games to draw in
the normies.

Speaker 7 (56:55):
You know.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
Instead of calling it the mark group or the benchmark group,
she called this the in group, a term which I
think deeply revealing to the social dynamics that are at
play here. Because most people, most of us, weren't cool
at high school or at any of the schools that
we went to. And some people grow up and they
enter the wide world and they find their place in it,
and we forget that we ever wanted strangers to think
that we were cool. Other people don't get over that,

(57:18):
and they particularly never get over a lot of men
never get over seeing like the cool hot guys at
their high school hang out with the cool hot girls
who didn't know they existed, right, that like eats at
them the remainder of their lives. And so that's why
she's calling it the in group, right, is it's kind
of to be like, you're one of the cool kids
if you're hanging out with us, right, Like you're one

(57:39):
of the cool kids if you pay for our classes.
This is how to be that because we're having lots
of fun, experimental, weird sex. Now, it would be very
unfair of me, I should I should note just to
say that, to talk about because I've largely been talking
about what is drawing like these men, particularly these men
with money into this group, right, what is bringing them in?
And it'd be really unfair of me to say that

(58:00):
and not talk about what the women who are joining
the cult are getting out of this because most of
the cult leaders I think are women or cult members
are women, right, and they're women of all ages. They
are really heavily recruiting younger women, but there are women
who are in their forties and fifties who are joining too,
and so it's important, like what are how is Nicole
reaching them? Because I can understand the marketing to middle

(58:22):
aged men thing, right, but I don't know, like what's
drawing these because it seems like a lot of vulnerability,
a lot of putting your body on display, a lot
of like risk and anyway, I looked into a bunch
of like their advertising videos and I found some of
those that I think make that a little easier to understand.
Sophie's going to play a video for you called Overcoming
Depression through Orgasmic Meditation, and it shows one example of

(58:44):
how the cult sold themselves to women.

Speaker 7 (58:48):
Yes, I didn't know another way of being Like I
was like, oh, everybody has this, everybody has these thoughts
and feelings, but you have to keep them hitting.

Speaker 5 (58:58):
When I see how people are treated for depression, now
it breaks my heart. The very last thing you need
is a diagnosis that comes onto you like an additional sentence,
because most people who are depressed feel guilty.

Speaker 7 (59:15):
My whole life, I struggled with depression. I never felt
a lot of joy like I didn't have a big
range of emotions above sadness. I'd come home from work
and lay on the couch. I would drink, I would sleep,
take sinking feels, to anything to make the thoughts in
my mind stop and to not have to feel what

(59:35):
I was feeling, I'd take an anidepressance. You know, many anidepressants,
many anti anxiety medications, and the best they did was
just numb the feelings a little bit. The thoughts were
still there, the doubt, the fear, the lack of joy
or happiness was still there. So it didn't seem like
those provided me with a solution. I wanted to actually

(59:57):
have a full of the full life that I wanted
to live.

Speaker 5 (01:00:02):
What is aimed to heal them in their depression actually
just numbs them and has them feel that much more
disconnected from life.

Speaker 2 (01:00:13):
So okay, first off, you see the pitch, are you
depressed and sad? We have an answer. Boy. Medication isn't
always pleasant, and it kind of the diagnosis can feel
like an anchor. There's a lot of anti medical stuff
in that video, right, and she describes that like many
people are have like suffer both from the disc It's

(01:00:33):
not just depression, is suffering people suffer, sure, but then
when you get on the drugs, it disconnects them and
that's the kind of suffering too, right.

Speaker 3 (01:00:41):
I guess it's like I it's it's very new agey
bullshit and like trying to separate you from potential tools.
But also I don't know. I targeting women in their
forties and fifties is interesting to me because I'm wondering
if if it's connected to possibly you know, when women

(01:01:02):
hit midlife, they're treated like they don't exist as sexual
beings and that that's like not something that is.

Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
I think so well, and especially older women in this
period would have grown up in a time that was
even more sexually restricted, right, and people are starting to
talk openly. That's kind of part of why like people
are so affected by this. Is like, if you're someone
in that situation and you like lay down and there's
like this hot young guy who like tells you, like

(01:01:28):
looks at you and tells you you're beautiful and then
starts massaging you like that, I'm not surprised a lot
of people get very addicted to that and they're like, yeah,
this did more for my depression than than therapy was doing. Right,
They would feel like that in the moment, and then
it get wrapped up in a cult that causes much
much more damage. But it's just the.

Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
Way that they're targeting people is very particular. That that
was a freaky ad.

Speaker 2 (01:01:51):
It's really it's about to get freakier because Sophie's gonna play.
You continue playing that, but from can you play? From
one thirty two to seven from the same video Sophie.

Speaker 6 (01:01:58):
Thank you. Many have turned successfully to her gasmic meditation
and attention, a training practice with defined procedures in own
a partner strokes a woman's clutteress for fifteen minutes with
no other goal than to feel what is present in
the moment.

Speaker 8 (01:02:19):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
Yeah, so.

Speaker 3 (01:02:22):
They did her dirty in that edit. Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (01:02:26):
Yeah, so this is a bummer. Yeah, it is a
little it's a it is a bummer. Yeah, it's depressing.
Now a big thing that Nicole is doing here. She's
recruiting and stocking her events with a lot of attractive
young women and some attractive young men, but most of
the guys in the group are like closer to or

(01:02:47):
past middle age. And when those other dudes saw that,
like the guys who were in the cult, giving clatoral
massages to twenty two year olds who are also like
in the cult or like just playing card games and
laughing like close friends with these same girls. Their brains
go right back to the eleventh grade, right only now
Nicole is there with an offer, which is pay me
for classes and you get to be in the end group,

(01:03:08):
right right, and they're you know, that's kind of part
of it, is like, yeah, you get to be cool
and you get to have this these new cool friends
who are all like free with each other's bodies, with
each other, and people are just so fucking lonely, Like
this is very appealing to some folks, right, It's a bummer.

Speaker 3 (01:03:23):
It's not. It's it is really sad, and I know
it's like not necessary. It does feel like very American
to like monetize the idea of community like this, and
you know, just like whatever, hyper hyper target people who
are made invisible by the culture they're in and be

(01:03:44):
and being like Okay, you're seen, now, you're valid, you're attractive,
you're loved. That'll be five thousand dollars and then call
that unity. It's just like yeah, and a.

Speaker 2 (01:03:56):
Big thing Nicole is doing because when she's like recruiting,
particularly the younger people who are going to like be
like doing most of the work in this is she's
a bit older than them, but she seems like she
has her life together. She seems like she has an identity.
She's offering an identity. And all you have to do
is like a whole bunch of plaittoral massages and sometimes

(01:04:17):
open yourself sexually to a bunch of like weird older
men who are giving the cult money. And this kind
of in this period makes the transition from previously to
kind of get the things the cult needed. Nicole that
add to either sleep with directly or at least like
offer pieces of herself up to these like older and
wealthier men that she needed something from. Now the cult

(01:04:37):
is established increasingly, what she's going to do is these
younger women and some of the younger men she's bringing
in because she does abuse a lot of younger men
this way. Now, hey, the group needs you to have
sex with this person because they will spend a lot
of money if you do that. Right, That's the route
this goes on is from I am going to make
that choice for myself to I am going to kind

(01:04:58):
of convince other people to make that choice to make
me money. Right, That's the journey Nicole has gone on
in this story thus far. So one of her big
teachings that she's because in addition to the orgasm stuff,
there's always way more convoluted philosophical stuff. And she's teaching
her followers life is a game, and it should be

(01:05:18):
viewed as a game. And in a game, you have
to explore all the nooks and crannies and try everything
to solve different kinds of puzzles, right, or find power
ups or whatever. And so when she would ask a
member to own or to have sex with somebody that
they didn't find attractive, that's a game. Oh you don't
like this like rich, older dude who's kind of like
weird and lecherous to you, Well, it'll be a game

(01:05:40):
for you to figure out how to have fun, you know,
Like that's the game. Like when what yeah, like exactly,
And she'll do this will be very directly. When wealthy
men or women will like walk into a one Taste
event and Nicole will notice that they're like attracted to
her hitting on a specific member of the cult, she'll
tell that person go flirt with them, right, maybe you
don't have to have sex with them right away, but
convince them to like take a class to sign up.

(01:06:02):
They'll get to hang out with you, and she'll put
She'll give some of our followers free your discounted classes
to make sure they're in the same class as like
these dudes who were joining because they never know. Most
of the cult is pretty there's a lot of women
in it, but most of the people paying for classes
are paying to get physical access to the bodies of
the younger female cult members, and there's not enough women

(01:06:23):
paying for classes for like that. Like Nicole has to
constantly putting people in and that's just prostitution, right, go
in and they will pay money to touch you right right.

Speaker 3 (01:06:36):
But it sounds like what if there was a model
for sex work in which only Nicole was making money
makes money, Like that's not how that works, and that
no one has technically consented to be doing this sex work.

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
No. Now, a big part of the game is to
keep people talking about one taste, you know, hype and
a lure spread by word of mouth, and so Nicole
starts offering because they've got this yoga center, they offer
naked yoga classes which get newspapers. There's a bunch of
stories about it, you know, like it becomes like this
oh San Francisco sort of thing, right it he helps

(01:07:13):
drive more people to the business. Maybe they come in
to see the naked yoga class, but they find out
or gasmic meditation. What's that, right, and so they take
a class. Now, as you've probably heard by now, they're
referring to ohm orgasmic more meditation. They're pronouncing it ohm
like you know, the ohm right, the meditative you know
chant thing. At the same time, they have turned the

(01:07:37):
actual like clatoral stimulation massage thing into this almost sexless procedure.
In one of the ten books the group would publish
under Nicole's name, she described orgasmic meditation as quote a
structured attention training practice described in concrete terms as one
person stroking another's clitterist for fifteen minutes according to specific instructions,

(01:07:58):
and that language which works really well in terms of
getting newspapers and other media organizations to treat one taste
very differently than they treated more House or the Welcomed Consensus,
both of which were described accurately as creepy, weird sex
clubs for perverts. One taste is going to be treated
like a startup right, or at least like a massively
popular alt health practice. And to kind of make that point,

(01:08:21):
here's a segment from a two thousand and nine New
York Times article by Patricia Ley Brown and Carol Pogish. Quote,
at seven am each day, as the rest of America
is eating cheerios or trying to face gridlock without hyperventilating,
about a dozen women, naked from the waist down, lie
with eyes closed in a velvet curtained room while clothed
men huddle over them, stroking them at a ritual known
as orgasmic meditation owming for short. The couples, who may

(01:08:45):
or may not be romantically involved, call one another research partners.
A commune dedicated to men and women publicly creating the
orgasm that exists between them. In the words of one resident,
may sound like the ultimate California satire. The notion of
a San Francisco sets commune focused on female orgasm. It's
part of a long and rich history of women being
public and empowered about their sexuality, said Elizabeth A. Armstrong

(01:09:07):
and associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, who has
studied San Francisco's sexual subcultures, and I find that that's
really interesting because liked, not only did you all fall
for it, the New York Times kind of repeated their
ad pitch where like other people are stuck in traffic
and going to work, you're just coming all the time.
If you join the culture.

Speaker 3 (01:09:29):
The first time, it's so it is how I mean,
how instantly. And I like, Nicole is really smart to
do this. If you're trying to do this, like just
like co opting any feminist talking point and the history
of feminism in the area is like thing number one
to do it. It's like it's from straight from the

(01:09:49):
Sandberg playbook. Yeah, like don't read too carefully.

Speaker 1 (01:09:53):
Yeah, I see the puzzle pieces, You've got the border
set up where it's going to end up in part
three being very I see the Silicon Valley of it
all happening.

Speaker 2 (01:10:04):
And as you note, Jamie, like Professor Armstrong isn't like
wrong per se sure, but also she wouldn't have described
Morehouse as part of a long and rich history of
women being public and empowered about their sexuality role. And
this is the same thing. They've just dressed it up
as a text start.

Speaker 3 (01:10:21):
Sure, and I'm curious about I mean, like what I
guess this does feel very like Silicon Valley, clinical to
like mask something else but removing all of this. It's
like all of the sexy parts of sex but keeping
all of the vulnerable parts of sex. Interesting I'm trying

(01:10:43):
to I mean, it's it's leading to something, obviously, but
it's just interesting how quickly we're People at the time
were like, so this is great, right, yea, like the
least sexy sex that you could possibly have, and it's
expensive and.

Speaker 2 (01:10:58):
It costs money. Well, part of what I want to
be clear, it's only the classes where it's deliberately not sexy. Okay,
outside of the classes, there's a lot of regular sex happening.
Is we'll talk about in the next part. These people
are living together for a chunk of this, right, for
a lot of this, and Nicole is also telling them
to pair up with people that like, I think it

(01:11:19):
would be good for you to have sex with this
guy who's gonna give us money. I think it'll be
a growth experience for you to like fuck this this
guy or this lady who we need something out of it. Right,
But that's in the that's happening underneath these public sterile
sex demos, and so the law who comes is going
to be like, well, whatever this is, it's not prostitution.
They're clearly not horny, and they're ignoring all of the

(01:11:40):
straight up prostitution that's happening in the background right right
off either, they're clearly not horny. Let's keep yeah off
to find somebody else. It's also important I note kind
of at the end here that the image of this
is that what's different about One Taste is that Nicole
is running things. The boys aren't in charge. So this
really is feminine and empowering. But that's not really what's

(01:12:03):
happening either, because by the time they start doing demos
in San Francisco, Nicole is the stroker who's performing most
often in front of these large groups. That's what they
call it, right, And so she's often when the media
comes by, she'll often do the demo that they see
of this these meditative techniques. But she's the only woman
in the cult who regularly got to perform as a
stroker for classes and demonstrations. The other strokers in public

(01:12:26):
are almost always men. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:12:29):
Yeah, So I mean she has yeah because it's like
she has every other woman works under her, right, there's
no at this point, she's she has gotten rid of
everyone who can be considered to equal.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
Yeah, there's definitely gonna be some other women who have
power in the cult that start like forming because she
has to rely and delegate a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:12:46):
But yeah, yeah, okay, Well I'm looking forward to part three.

Speaker 2 (01:12:51):
Well that's part two.

Speaker 3 (01:12:52):
Yeah yeah, I mean, guys, really, it's going to get.

Speaker 4 (01:12:57):
All plug some pluggables.

Speaker 3 (01:13:00):
Let's plug baby.

Speaker 2 (01:13:01):
I Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:13:02):
You can listen to Bachdaelcasid Weevan Housed every single week.
I've got a book coming out next year that I'll
be able to talk more about soon. I can't talk
about it. Yeah, follow me on Instagram, Jamie Christ superstar.
Hell yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:13:18):
Excellent podcast is over.

Speaker 2 (01:13:22):
We're done now.

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Speaker 3 (01:13:36):
You get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 (01:13:38):
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