Inside the Sex Cult That Fooled Silicon Valley

0:00Many people told me that sales workers were often chastised if they weren't hitting their sales goals. But they would be told that it's not because they were asking the wrong questions or going after the wrong customers. It was because their orgasmic energy was blocked up.

0:20Welcome back to the Newcomer Podcast. I'm Madeline here with my co-hosts, Eric and Tom. And we're joined by Ellen Hewitt from Bloomberg to talk about her latest book, which just published, what was it, two weeks ago? Two weeks ago. at the store. Empire of orgasm, sex, power, and the downfall of a wellness cult. So salacious topic for the Newcomer Podcast. Ready to dive in. Ellen, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. I want to quickly say before we jump into questions, Ellen, I remember going to Eric's wedding, I think the last time or one of the last times you and I hung out, which is sad.

0:53It's been that long. And you were like deep in the throes of working on the book. And you were barely conscious, I felt. Things were intense for you. That was 2023? Yeah. 2022 and 2023 were, I would say, a moral low point for the book process, but overall, a very satisfying and rewarding and creatively challenging experience. If anyone ever wants tips on how to manage the soul aspect of writing a book, I can give you tips on that, Just hit me up. And Ellen was my deskmate at Bloomberg when you first wrote the Business Week feature that kicked this thing off. That is right. Eric and I used to sit right next to each other.

1:41And as I like to tell people, he spoke so loudly while on the phone that if I happened to be on a phone call at the same time as him, people thought that Eric had joined our phone call. They were like, why is there a third person on our call? I thought it was just us. I'm like, no, no. It's my desk neighbor. I'll move. who built an open office for the private active yeah i blame bloomberg on that one and anyway i can relate to this this to ellen quickly um when eric and i worked together at the information one time he sneezed and the guy on the other side of the line said bless you that is that 100 checks out i i want to be heard you know i have a podcast he's expressive He's expressive.

2:23Well, we're excited to see all of that come to its culmination with this book. So people who haven't followed this closely don't know the whole story. There's so much to it. I can give you the spiel. Totally. Yeah. So I spent the last five years, you know, I have been and am a reporter at Bloomberg. I'm a features writer. I write about tech and AI in Silicon Valley. But at the same time, in my nights and weekends, I have been spending the last five years working on this book, Empire of Orgasm, which chronicles the rise and fall of this sex wellness cult called One Taste. And One Taste was a company that was started in San Francisco in 2004 by a woman named Nicole Daydone.

3:06And it grew fairly mainstream, despite the fact that its main business was selling courses on a sexual spiritual practice called orgasmic meditation, also known as OM or OM. and orgasmic meditation is a 15 minute partnered clitoral stroking meditative practice in which a stroker usually a man who remains fully clothed puts a glove on his left hand and some lube on his left index finger and strokes the clitoris of a woman who is naked only from the waist down for 15 minutes exactly and the goal of the experiences for both parties to simply meditate on the sensations in their bodies during those 15 minutes and that's it and this practice om was promised, you know, if you were a regular practitioner, it was promised that you would not only have better sex, better relationships, better connection and intimacy with other human beings, but also that if you delve more deeply in the practice that you might experience a better sense of your intuition and your desire, and maybe even a connection to the spiritual or the divine erotic energy that apparently is in the world all around us.

4:13And then, you know, fast forward to today, the leader and the second in command of this group have actually been indicted by the feds and were convicted in a criminal jury trial this summer in New York and are currently in jail in Brooklyn for forced labor conspiracy, which we could get into it, but it's kind of a specific federal charge and are currently in jail in Brooklyn awaiting sentencing, which will probably come early next year. There's your afterward. I mean, there's so much to dive into with this topic, but I kind of actually want to start off with just you as a reporter on this because you've been a startups reporter, at least while you've been at Bloomberg.

4:57And I think before that you were at the Chronicle and were like a crime reporter. Yeah. And I worked at Forbes for a brief stint too, but yeah, I was a breaking news and crime reporter at the Chronicle. Yeah. But coming to this story, which you really do tie up into the history of cults and wellness in the Bay Area, but also startup culture. I mean, specific to the startup side of things, why to you was this a startup story? How is this wrapped into the Bay Area business community and the mentality of people who flock here for the very specific reasons that the Bay Area is you know, a startup world.

5:33Yeah, I both recognize that it looks different than a lot of startups. And, you know, I'm certainly not pretending it's exactly the same as them. But there are some striking similarities. Like Nicole really decided that the way to spread the mission and the message of this sexual practice that she believed in was not by starting like a media company or a nonprofit. It was by starting a for profit business that was going to proselytize this thing. And at one point, One Taste had the business mission statement of to bring capital O orgasm to a billion people. And to be clear, they redefine orgasm to mean more like a broad, broadly defined erotic energy.

6:14But nevertheless, the mission statement to bring orgasm to a billion people. And it doesn't feel out of place if you remember the era of the WeWork mission statement to elevate the world's consciousness or these things that, you know, you might you might laugh at it, but They were really in the water in the 2010s. Well, it's very Silicon Valley season one. Totally. It's very Silicon Valley season one. We are making the world a better place through B2B sales. They are. But in this case, actually much more of a spiritual, physical practice. Making the world a better place through orgasmic meditation.

6:44And they did lots of things that mimicked what tech companies and tech founders did at the time. Nicole gave this TEDx talk that was viewed on YouTube for more than 2 million times. She spoke on stage at South by Southwest for an hour. She and her company even hosted these two conferences in 2013 and 2014 at the Regency Center in San Francisco, where, you know, a thousand people showed up for the whole weekend and wore those lanyards around their neck that, you know, instead of saying like WWDC or like Google IO, they happened to say agent of orgasm because the conference was about orgasmic meditation.

7:25But if you didn't know what they were gathering for, it would honestly look like a developers conference. And there was this sense that they were tapping into some of the ethos that was also really popular in San Francisco in the 2010s. And to be clear, they were also in New York, LA, Austin, Boulder, London, Australia. But in SF, you think about people who were moving to San Francisco, people were, you know, exploring polyamory, people were doing biohacking. All of a sudden, this practice that is a 15 minute hack to a better life, it doesn't sound so out of place. And they even got endorsed by Tim Ferriss, who, of course, is kind of like a hero to a lot of people in tech who are looking for like peak performance, whether that's, you know, mental or physical.

8:10and they used to set up booths at like the early morning sober dance parties that I, you know, maybe you guys don't go to, but I definitely know people who have gone to those. And, you know, they would hold own workshops at Burning Man occasionally, or they would set up booths at like the Bulletproof coffee conferences. Like it was both interesting how what they were selling was quite fringe and I'll acknowledge that, but it was also, they found footholds in what was kind of this growing mainstream, both wellness and performance culture. It represents so much like the capitalism sort of ethos and aesthetic reached everything.

8:46I think once your sex cult decides, oh, we should wrap ourselves in like the world of startups and business. Yeah, it does say something in the culture about just the ascendancy of - And don't forget like the wellness industry was booming at the time. Nicole spoke on stage at the Goop Health Conference in 2017. I was going to say this is very Goop. Yeah, it's very Goop. And of course, they managed to get that clinch that most important endorsement. Gwyneth Hals is the queen of wellness alternative therapies. And at the same time, in the 2010s, there was also this desire to see female founders at the top of fast growing startups.

9:25Like, I hate to use the term CEO, but remember, we used to use that term like very seriously, girl boss, like there was just this energy that propelled the company, which was this mix of wellness, startups, female empowerment, female leader, you know, female leaders. And yeah, just this idea that we can improve our bodies through a practice like this. And Ellen, what's interesting to me, too, is you and I both grew up in the Bay Area. You're like, you're a Peninsula kid, right? I'm from Fremont. So it's kind of like Fremont. What is that? What is that? Southeast Bay. Okay. But yeah, I mean, like somewhere in Batura.

10:01Yeah, it's Bay Area, but I don't know which one you call it. It's an 880. You're an 880. Suburbs. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you know, you see a lot about what makes this area interesting is that there does have this kind of leftover hippie mentality, very like one battle after another. These people who, you know, try to change the world through cultural and maybe radical ideas that sort of settle into the sort of capitalist system that, you know, is very rewarding to people, but you still hold on to your beliefs, your somewhat leftist cultural beliefs. And they're always at conflict with each other, and you have to resolve the conflict in some way.

10:37And sometimes it just comes up that you're Steve Jobs, and you make one of the greatest, most successful companies of all time. And then there's also the kind of scammy aspect of it in which the two sides don't really meld all that well. And I think that's why something to a degree why like you know one touch only really could have existed in one taste i'm sorry that that one taste uh more than one touch um one taste could have only existed in the bay area because it's just it's it's something unique to the culture here and why it was also ultimately so destructive i think and so damaging this mix of yeah it's this mix of like spiritual pursuits plus like yeah this capitalistic energy that has especially over the last couple decades become, you know, an inherent part of San Francisco and the Bay Area.

11:25You know, it sounds kind of funny now because it's so ingrained in our thinking, but it was pretty radical 15 years ago to imagine using mindfulness and meditation to, like, improve your output at work. But that is such a bizarre combination that came about in San Francisco. You know, it's like what's interesting about One Taste is it does bridge these like older and like the sense of kind of the spiritual new age seeker side of San Francisco, which has been around for decades. And then it happened to come about at this time when people were looking at those influences and then also asking themselves, how can we use this to make more money?

12:06You can imagine like the Wisdom 2.0 conference or like Google employee workshops on mindfulness in the workplace. Like those are all examples of that melding. And I think that melding is also what helped One Taste be successful in this particular time and place. Totally. I did want to say also what I found, you know, when things, of course, inevitably take a turn with cults and sex and power, the blending of those two aspects of San Francisco culture were also apparent, right? People were simultaneously getting into these complicated sexual dynamics with power plays that were also corrupted by not hitting their sales goals by selling the courses.

12:45Right. So you would have simultaneously your cult leader also be your boss that's chastising you for underperforming at work. and kind of to blend that workaholic kind of capitalist ideal of bringing wellness to the masses through mass-produced courses saw many archetypes of the common takedown of a business that was run by an abusive boss just as much as it was a sex cult leader that was manipulating people through really harmful relationships. I think more so than other hypothetical groups that people might imagine when they think of cults, you might have this kind of outdated idea that a cult is like a bearded man on a rural homestead with followers who all wear the same clothing.

13:33No more. It's the wild, wild country. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. People are thinking of that. But the truth is, cults adapt with the times. This is one of the most interesting things that I learned while researching this book is that they are constantly changing to reflect what people value, what people look at, what feels current. And so, you know, when I talked to researchers who study cults, they were like, oh, yeah, we expect that in the future more than in the past, cult leaders might be women or that they might have a presence that is very online or that they might reach new followers through Instagram or have YouTube seminars.

14:10And you can see examples of these already popping up. And I think, you know, what's fascinating is to realize that, yeah, they are also going to, you know, they might end up looking more commercial. And what One Taste did was, sure, it was the spiritual pursuit, but it was also like a business where they were very much, as you said, pushing to reach sales goals all the time. And in fact, you would see how the philosophies that underlined their ideas of orgasmic living would also then push them to do more sales or they would be interconnected in some way. Like, for example, many people told me that sales workers were often chastised if they weren't hitting their sales goals.

14:49But they would be told that it's not because they were asking the wrong questions or going after the wrong customers. It was because their orgasmic energy was blocked up. And so the solution that would help you make more sales was often that your manager or some leader above you in the group would say, you need to go have sex with someone or you need to go have sex with your coworker. If two coworkers were disputing, people told me that they were sometimes instructed to go home together or have sex with each other as a way of like unblocking the sexual energy. So there's this unique mix of their spiritual teachings with this.

15:21Yeah, this very nuts and bolts like we need to be bringing in revenue to keep the business afloat. This podcast is sponsored by Google. Hey folks, I'm Amar, product and design lead at Google DeepMind. We just launched a revamped Vibe Coding Experience in AI Studio that lets you mix and match AI capabilities to turn your ideas into reality faster than ever. Just describe your app and Gemini will automatically wire up the right models and APIs for you. And if you need a spark, hit I'm feeling lucky and we'll help you get started. Head to ai.studio slash build to create your first app. Core to the crime here was what?

15:59Employees having sex with Nicole's boyfriend, who is basically a tech guy who is like throwing money around and keeping this thing afloat. Is that a fair gloss? Right. Wasn't he their major angel investor or basically their main investor? Yeah. So in the early days of OneTaste, the company, as many startups are, was not profitable. Relying on some guy. It was losing money. They were paying, you know, expenses like rent and money that they needed to run the business. And they weren't bringing it up through courses. And one of the ways that they ended up supporting the business and keeping it afloat was that Nicole happened to meet in the mid 2000s.

16:40This man named Reese Jones, who is a venture capitalist. He had sold a company to Motorola in the early 2000s for about 200 million dollars. and he later became involved with Singularity University. Like he was very interested in esoteric topics and like the singularity and, you know, sort of science-y things like that. And he was also interested in OneTaste and he and Nicole started dating. And what he did is he would pay for certain business expenses for the company. He would loan them money and his repayment instead of, you know, maybe shares in the company, and this is documented in court testimony as well as in my reporting, He was rewarded with sexual favors by One Taste employees, and that often looked like, you know, these elaborate BDSM immersive sexual experiences for his birthday, which, again, according to court testimony, were themed after things like the Seven Deadly Sins or the Wizard of Oz.

17:39and he was also arranged to have a sexual handler someone who was you know there was a rotation of people who took this role but they would do something like live with him take care of some household tasks maybe take care of his dog and then sexually service him every day and this was you know so in some sense again it's like yeah a startup finds an early angel investor who believes in them and helps get them off the ground but of course the arrangement is is very unusual and and not something that I, it's true of most of our startups. Did it make good money at any point? Like how, how did one taste the business?

18:14They have said that at their peak, they brought in something like 12 million in revenue in one year. So again, in the grand scheme of companies that are often discussed on this podcast, small potatoes, but you know, they had no outside investors. It was actually, you know, at some point, I believe Nicole was something like the only shareholder. So in the end, when she sold her stake in the company in 2017, that was before I had done any reporting on them, she apparently walked away with something like$12 million. You have to wonder what percentage of people who... There's so many randos in tech that have sold their business for like$200 million.

19:01dollars and to have that much money i some huge percentage of them have to be like trying to create like schemes like you know have little worlds that like revolve around them of different degrees of like sexual depravity but you always wonder is this a good and obviously we're all talking about right now you know right yeah exactly this is did was this guy just sloppy you know it's like other people were like you know had their lawyers more involved or were more buttoned up like who knows i couldn't say but yeah truly if you if you have you know if you have enough money to be post-economic i think as we've seen with many people in silicon valley you can then you're free to explore lots of interesting things like i you know there are people who then you know go off and do a bunch of meditation or they get really into like designer watches or they start another company or you know it's like that's the freedom that that kind of money can get you is you can pursue your interests right i mean there is sort of this like i wouldn't call them middle class, but the kind of like an archipelago of, of, of Deca millionaires and, and maybe some centimillionaires in the Bay Area that you don't think that much about, but that's, you know, a huge amount of money to fund your pursuits, whatever they may be.

20:12Fund your Burning Man camp, fund a very, very expensive art car that you can trot around the playa. Look, I'm sure that there's someone who's done that. A good, a good percentage of people do just fund it towards that, right? They funnel their money towards extremely elaborate Burning Man experiences. And that's, you know, relatively non-destructive. It's hard to say. That's probably its own book. Hey, they pick up the flyer, right? They probably just start angel investing, yeah. Yeah, well, you can do both, really. I mean, ideally. I can't believe I'm the one asking this question here, but it's just something that kind of came to me as we were discussing this topic.

20:46But, you know, like the mystification of the female orgasm, I feel like is this thing that has been going on for some time. I mean, this idea of like, oh, it's this mysterious thing that contains spiritual properties to it. And it's more than just a biological act. There's some sort of mystical thing going on here. Obviously, that's a big part of female empowerment, I feel like. And look, in your book, you also talk about pickup culture being sort of interwoven into this culture too. So it's like in one sense, there's like high-minded feminine ideals, but also like the most misogynistic impulses of men on like how to break women down.

21:29And the people coming into this community have been familiar with the pickup artist world, right? Wasn't that part of your book? I mean, there were, yeah, essentially just to kind of situate One Taste in time, it's like, there were some men who maybe started off in the pickup artist community and then actually drifted toward one taste because they thought they didn't like the sort of misogynistic attitude of the pickup artist world and wanted to have something that was a little bit more spiritually inclined and but certainly that wasn't like a majority thing but it just if people remember what the energy of the world was like in 2005 when Neil Strauss's The Game was like at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

22:09It's kind of like a marker in time. But Tom, to your question, or at least what I think you were getting at, I think that a major selling point, a major selling point of orgasmic meditation of these courses that One Taste was offering is that sexuality is for a lot of people this puzzle that maybe they've had a traumatic or complicated past, or maybe they're one of the estimated 10 to 15 % of American women who struggle to have an orgasm, or maybe there's someone who struggles with performance anxiety during sex, or maybe you have a fulfilling partnership, but the physical spark isn't quite there or something has changed.

22:46Like, I have a lot of compassion for people who were looking for answers as to these deep and really personal questions, in part because there are very few places where you can go to talk about them. And One Taste was one of the few places I was really putting up a banner and saying, we will have straightforward, like really direct conversations about your sex life. And we have a promise that doing this practice, as confronting as you might consider it, is going to help. And so for people who are looking for answers and not finding that many places that are offering them, I think it made them more likely to want to see what one has had to offer.

23:27And maybe even if they had some misgivings to continue with the courses, because it's such a deep and primal human need to feel connected to other people in that way. Which is what makes the exploitation even more gross, right? Is that these are people who are seeking. Yeah. Orgasmic meditation, the practice has a lot that is commendable about it. And I hope that, you know, readers of Empire of Orgasm, like, come away with a nuanced understanding of what was being offered here. Like it was a radically female focused pleasure practice. We don't have a lot of those. There was this commendable desire to kind of correct what they saw as an unfair focus on male pleasure in sex or an unfair conditioning of women to feel like part of their job is to provide sexual pleasure to men rather than to like receive it.

24:15and so there's a lot that I think was genuinely valuable about the practice and that people even those who feel that they were mistreated or harmed by one taste they've also expressed to me that they mourn the fact that this practice never really got the chance to shine on its own separate from the startup entrepreneur listening to this podcast you think you know one taste was just too soon like you know it's like Andreessen Horowitz needs to you know back the next version You think there are, you know, avoid a couple of the, you know, pitfalls? I mean, look, I think sexuality, like it's a tough business and you'll probably struggle to like get banked by, you know, and deal with payments and stuff.

24:59That being said, like I, you know, over the course of my time as a reporter, I have occasionally talked to people who run companies and startups that are trying to help people like improve their sex lives or have like they're really well intentioned. And it is it is a tough business. But these people are often quite motivated by the idea that it it is, I think, if you can crack it, a huge market. And I think it's it's. Do you remember when we went to South by Southwest together? I think you and I as reporters went to some party where it was like an app that was clearly like, I think a sex worker app.

25:33Were there always these? Do you remember that? You know, I'm talking. I vaguely remember that. I mean, it's like, you know, people with good intentions are trying to do this. Yeah. When I was in college, we had a founder. I think this was, you know, about, you know, seven years ago, but we had a founder who had gone to Barnard and had founded like this really feminine focused like sex toy company and had raised some good venture capital funding and was, you know, like packaging this, you know, it was super packaged goods as a company. It was DTC, but it was, you know, is part of this sexuality wellness push.

26:10And her, you know, talking about it did come from a very, you know, understandable and somewhat noble place because, you know, this this is a gap and this is a need that needs to be filled. And there is a market for it in a healthy way. And so more morally redeemed than gambling or whatever is, you know, the prediction. Right. Right. What's your view on capitalism now? You know, you work for Bloomberg. We all write about money. Like this, this was sort of peak capitalism ethos. Like, I don't know what, yeah. Where do you think this is headed? Is, is it like just like whatever, you know, this real need to sort of demystify, I don't know, the female orgasm or help people with sexuality.

26:52Like, is that a market? Will the market ever solve that? Or you think it needs to exist outside of a company or any observations about the role for companies in these deep human. Yeah. problems. I think it's an interesting question because if you spend time in the, oh God, in kind of the like sexual, spiritual communities, and there are a lot of places that will offer workshops about sexuality, people do sometimes debate the idea that like, can you sell this in a way that is never going to corrupt the offering? And I don't know. I mean, I believe that capitalism is pretty effective. Like I, you know, I, it's hard for me to see that that is inherently going to doom some project.