Bittersweet Infamy - #20 - OneTaste

Episode Date: July 4, 2021

Josie tells Taylor about the Silicon Valley sex cult. Plus: the true story behind an urban legend about jazz musician John Coltrane.

Just a heads up, the episode you're about to listen to discusses sexual assault and rape. We also discuss sex pretty explicitly too. For that reason, it may be wise to listen to this one with headphones. Stay discreet. Welcome to Bitter, Sweet Infamy. I'm Taylor Basso. I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy, shocking the unbelievable and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, the stories are always sweet.

Bro. Oh, that's me? Rosie. Thank you. That's what I responded to. Rosie Britchell. There we go. 20 episodes. Yeah, dude. How do you feel about that?

I feel good. 20. That's like a nice round, kind of like juicy number. Yeah, it's a milestone. We're out of our adolescence. Thank god that's over. But I mean, when you were 20, did you really know what was going on? No, I didn't know shit. I just thought I knew what was going on. I think it's a little dangerous, to be honest.

True, true. I do feel that way about this show where sometimes I listen to old episodes and I'm like, ah, damn, thank god I know what I'm doing now. And then I'm sure 20 episodes from now I'll listen to this and I'll just be like, what a pleb. But I still think it's, you know, I don't want to bring it down. It's cool. We did it. We're still here. So I'm anti us being indulgent. But what's your favorite episode that we've done? Okay, it was the last one, Night Trap.

Night Trap was your favorite episode. I liked it, yeah. Wow, see I didn't expect that at all. I thought that I'd lost you with that story about that confusing video game that you would never play. No, but it was supposed to be confusing. So I felt right at home. True enough, true enough. You don't realize that I was target audience because it was like, ah, I need to confuse somebody.

It's like, oh, might as well. Might as well be Josie, yeah. For sure. Brocie, excuse me. Yeah. Yes, thank you. What was your favorite? What's been your favorite? I'll do one of yours and one of mine. My favorite story that I did was the twins episode 13, Flowers in Hell.

I just got really, really into the story and when I listened to that episode back, often when I'm listening to episodes back, I'll be criticizing myself as you do, but in that episode, I completely lose sense of anything but the story and I get really, really reinvested in it every time. Nice. And my favorite episode that you did, and I think a dark horse for our best episode ever, is we recorded it on the same day. It was episode 12, The Wealth of Hell.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I like that, yeah. I like those two as well. It was a fun story. You told the story really well. It was grounded in logic and science, but then it was also a little bat shit. So I really, really liked it and you can tell kind of listening back that we're enjoying ourselves. And I like those episodes are my favorites. Yeah.

Aw, look at us. Look at us. Well, I've prepared a surprise for you to celebrate our 20th episode. Oh, okay. Okay. I'm surprised. You did it. Wow. There you go. In fact, it's a special Minfamus and it's not for me, it comes courtesy of a special guest. The third member of the Bitter Sweet Infamy family are composer and residence, Brian Steele. Oh my God, what? Brian? Brian has contributed this week's Minfamus.

Oh my God. Okay, okay. A little starstruck, right? I was too. What? The Brian Steele? The Brian Steele of T Street fame. So Brian Steele is the composer and musician who is responsible for our intro and outro song, which is called T Street, the beloved anthem of Bitter Sweet Infamy. Whom we've never met. We've never met, Brian.

You haven't. Oh shit. Well, I didn't meet him in person, but I did reach out to him via email. Holy shit. He got back to me right away. He was super chill dude. He listened to the show. He listened to the Georgia Tan episode. Oh my God. Wait, someone listens to the show?

No, I know, right? Our first ever. It was Brian Steele. Oh my God. Our first ever listener, he described the show as this American life meets the moth. Did he listen to the show really? Yes, it was high praise. He did. He did listen to the show. Thank you, Brian.

I don't know you, just Brian's heart. He said cheers to you. He said cheers to you and Josie was how he signed off the whole thing. So he knows you exist. So he's from New Bedford, Massachusetts. He's not from New Bedford, Massachusetts, but he currently resides in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Okay, okay. He is a trained musician who's performed all over the world with names like Aretha Franklin, Billy Joel, Stephen Tyler. He's legit.

Holy cow. Brian Steele. Brian Steele. Brian with a Y, Steele with an E at the end. He has a new album out called Mosaic. Give it a listen. Good title. So, there you go.

I asked him a few questions. You're so into this. I love it. Wow, I know. Yeah, this is great. I asked him a couple questions about T Street specifically. That he answered, and so here's the story. This isn't the infamous, but here's the story of T Street. Okay.

It's from an album I recorded when I first moved to Massachusetts from NYC called 4271, which are the latitude and longitude of the town that I moved to, New Bedford. Cute. T Street was named after the studio that the song was supposed to be produced in, but the record label went belly up and I ended up producing the album myself and releasing it on my own label Bruno Steele Music. Anti-climactic, I know, but such is the world of music. The big takeaway for me was to be able to record and release my own music. This opened up a whole new world of possibilities that have shaped my career since. Cool. I'm so glad that he kept on with the project. Imagine if he was just like, no, never mind. Then we would never be where we are today.

T Street, yes. I was into that because part of why I've enjoyed this thing, this podcast as an artist, is because we're very much in control of the means of distribution, right? It's not like you're sitting here writing letters to a publisher or an agent or a granting agency or a theater or whatever it is to try to get our stuff produced. We can do that on our own, and so I think that's really cool. And then just to kind of sign off the email, I said, why don't you tell me your favorite infamous story? And I read his response and I was like, you know, this could work as an infamous, so that's what we're doing. Oh my God! Quote, there are a few stories in my life that come to mind. I still live in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which is in this at once famous and yet unknown part of New England.

Many people from Boston don't know where the city is, only an hour to the south. The whaling capital of the world, Moby Dick was written here. Boom! Lizzie Borden lived in the next town over. The Salem Witch Trials were not all that far away. But as a saxophone player, one story that always stuck with me was when the legendary saxophonist John Coltrane was trying to kick his heroin addiction, which many musicians of his time shared, he locked himself in a closet and practiced his horn for days on end until he emerged and claimed himself clean. Apparently he never went back to using after that. What amazing willpower. He is my all-time favorite musician, so this story, whether true or not, gives me hope.

Whoa! Since Brian and I are bros now, I thought I would roll up my sleeves and do a little digging in to see if John Coltrane really did blow himself clean in a closet. First warning before we even start, don't try this at home. If you are listening to this podcast while doing heroin, no judgment. The world can be tricky. And you're thinking about getting off of heroin, speak to a medical professional, whatever your relationship is with your trumpet, or your saxophone or your instrument, I promise it's not as profound as John Coltrane's. No offense, but yeah. Yes. So a little bit about John Coltrane, preeminent jazz musician and saxophonist. He was born in the 20s and was at the forefront of the growing bebop music scene and expanded into more avant-garde stuff later in his career.

I'm not doing the man justice. Highly influential musical genius gives some of his stuff a listen. Imitate some of John Coltrane for us? So we have like a little flavor. Boop, boop, boop, boop, wow! Like that's my jazz. That's all I got. That was good. Thank you. Coltrane started doing heroin in the 1940s, which as our friend Brian indicates, is not an uncommon story. It was apparently quite popular in the jazz circles at that time. In 1957 he was fired from a quintet by famous trumpeter Miles Davis, and a month later he quit heroin cold turkey. I can't verify the exact specifics of the story insofar as did he literally go into a closet with a trumpet, I don't know.

Yeah. But it was apparently a brutal withdrawal during which he heard the voice of God and became a deeply spiritual man for the rest of his days. Okay. And the version of God that he heard seems like a pretty kind and universal God who loves everyone regardless of race or religion and... Oh, I'm glad that's the God who was speaking to him. That's great. You don't know, put it to you this way, when you're coming down off heroin you don't know which God's gonna get in your ear. No. And it seems like a good one. Found John Coltrane.

Yeah. He said, it was a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. Oh. He seems to have stayed clean. He died in 1967 at the young age of 40 from liver cancer, which some attribute to hepatitis that he may have incurred during his needle drug habit. Right. I don't know how legit, if there's anything to that theory, but it was something that I encountered. Yeah.

Miles Davis, who's firing of Coltrane, may have been a motivator in kicking the habit, had a really similar story three years prior. He, too, locked himself in a room for 12 days and quit heroin cold turkey in 1954. Whoa. So that, I guess that's just what, if you were just like a profoundly gifted jazz musician in the 1950s and you had to kick your habit, you just went into a room. Yeah. Damn. That is wild. One last note.

Oh. Yeah, no, that's super wild. One last note from our friend Brian Steele. He added after all of this that his favorite hoax, because I said, oh, you know, an infamous thing can be, you know, a murder, a natural disaster, a hoax. Right. It can be whatever you want. Yeah. Person, place, or thing.

Just to kind of. Just give us a noun. Yeah, exactly. Just trying to give him some context. And he replied that his favorite hoax is trickle down economics. Fuck Reagan! Bær, bær, bær, bær, bær, bær, bær, bær, bær, bær, bær, bær, bær, bær, bær, bær, bær, bær. Oh my.

Beautiful work. You're a musician too. Oh, you know. Nothing like Brian Steele. But wow. No. Nothing like Brian Steele. Thank you very much, Brian, for being a cool guy and for the song.

Thank you. That's so dope. How did you find his email? I went to his website. Oh, right. I googled Brian Steele. Brian Steele came up and I left a question in his little

visitor box. That's so cool. He was lovely. That's so dope. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. Thank you. Out there, Brian.

And thank you, Josie, for 20 episodes. Thank you, Taylor, for 20 episodes. All right. That's enough of the wank part of the show. It is the bittersweet summer.

We are bringing you a new story every week until the end of July. And that means that you get some extra love in the form of a story from Josie Mitchell right now. Josie, what's the story?

All right. Hot and sweaty summer, bittersweet summer. Taylor, today, I'm going to tell you the story of One Taste, a San Francisco-based company turned sex cult that tried to monetize the female orgasm as a

tech-inspired life hack with, as you could probably guess, traumatic and disastrous effects. I'll say it now. The FBI investigation is still ongoing. I've never heard of this. Really?

Oh, yes. OK. OK. Because at the end of the day. You love slipping one by the goalie, eh? Well, this is the first fucking time.

I think because all the other ones, like, you've either, like, known exactly what's happening or you, like, have heard of it. And it's, like, Yeah, no, I don't. This is brand new to me. This is brand new.

Brand new. OK. OK. Going to pop your One Taste cherry. Perfect. Oh, God. So, imagine, if you will,

Taylor. OK. Wait, what? I said, OK. OK. I will. Good. I'm glad.

Imagine that it's the summer of 2011, the year we graduated from university. Oh, yeah, it is. Imagine that I did not stay in Vancouver. But instead, I moved back home and imagine I'm living in my

childhood bedroom that I've totally outgrown. I'm a millennial with a creative writing degree and absolutely no clue how to lead the life I want. Been there. Uh-huh.

So I'm taking me right back to 2011. Yeah, I know, right? What were you doing? This. Well, so far, not what's upcoming, I'm hoping. So I'm experiencing a bad case

of writer's block. I don't know what's going on, right? I'm looking for jobs. But even as a college graduate, I'm not having any luck. Who knew that once you get your degree, you're not a shoe

in for the work that you want to do. Oh, it's hard, hard realizations. Yeah, I have no friends who still live in town who I can speak candidly with. And one day, I see a sign

in a coffee shop. And it's for this class group thing that is all about radical connection and community. I'm intrigued. I vaguely like hippie-dippy shit. It's also free. It's a free gathering.

So I'm like, OK. What have you got to lose? Yeah, exactly. I go to a session. There's no coffee being served, but there is herbal tea. And I'm like, hmm, suspicious. But they said coffee.

But everyone in the session is super nice and open and friendly. It's a relatively small but diverse group of people. So there's men and women all different ages, ethnicities. And people are just like fucking

happy. OK. Leading the lives they want to lead. They're encouraging when I'm talking about my experience. They're just like good vibes, good vibes, good vibes.

Good hang to to borrow a Josie Mitchell phrase. So at this meeting, we play these games and I'm not really a big fan of games at parties because like, you know, don't tell me what to do. But the games are fun.

I love games at parties. How do we hang? I like because I love games. I like when the game gets going, like when we're in the game. I don't like when someone's like who wants to play a game. I'm like, I don't like that.

I don't like the transition. I'm always I'm who wants to play a game. Maybe that. But baby, I think that's why it maybe works because I like you. So when you say it, I don't I don't dislike it. You know what I mean?

There's less resistance. Yeah, fair enough. Taylor likes the game. Then I just maybe I had too many experiences where the game was like, not fun. It was like, let's play Monopoly for the next five hours.

Like, I don't want to do that. You know? Yeah, that's so. So we play these games and they're fun, if not a little intense. I feel bold enough with this cool group of people

to share something that's pretty intimate with this group. And the response I get to what I share is really overwhelming. And like, everyone's really positive and I feel like light and fluffy inside and something ensconced in love really clicks

for me exactly. And I like, yeah, ensconced in love. I get a feeling of what it looks like to be on a right path, which I haven't been able to see. So I go to a few more of these sessions

and I get to know more and more people. There are a lot of people who work in tech. There's a registered nurse. There's a teacher. There's a woman I meet who's also a writer.

She's really cool. OK. She's like, send me your stuff. I'll like, see if my agent wants to see it. Oh, is there is there any is there any more gratifying sentence to a writer

than send me your stuff? Yeah, exactly, exactly. So imagine through these meetings, I learn that one of the aspects of this community, my community, is this interest in female sexuality and female pleasure

through meditation. And this is going to sound weird, but the meditation practice is built around female orgasm. And I'm like, OK. You didn't clock that. You didn't clock that from the first meeting.

Like they're they kind of bury the lead a bit. So yeah, chill. Yeah, got you. It's like like third meeting in. I'm like, oh, oh, OK. Oh, my pussy. Oh, OK.

I got you. Yeah. And they use the word pussy a lot, which like I don't like the word pussy. I don't like the word pussy in reference to sex, to intercourse. But cats, cats, you're fine.

Cats, I'm fine. Pussy hats, I'm fine. Pussy riot, I'm fine. Cats and like any female empowerment, I'm fine with the use of pussy. But is it is your issue with the word that you just don't find it sexy or is it that you find it

infantilizing? Like what's what's your problem with it? I guess whenever I hear the word, I hear it out of like a man's mouth. Pussy. Yeah.

Yeah. So I guess I want to hear it in terms of like pussy hat or pussy riot. Then it's like, well, those are, you know, connected to like to a female voice in my head. But any other.

Right. But these people love the word pussy. Right. Yeah. Yeah. They use it all the time. This female empowerment group,

which I mean, I feel like I probably will find out at some point that some women are being very disempowered. But they're flying the pussy flag. They got the hat on. Yeah.

They're having the riot. Got you. Yeah. So my writer butt in the group, she tells me that the whole orgasm thing kind of freaked her out at first, too. But it's not weird or anything

like that. She says it's super fun. It grounds you. And it doesn't. It's not like this intense, like hours long meditation or whatever. Like it's like 15 minutes.

She said it made her feel like empowered. And I can tell like from all the women in the group, too, that like they have this good vibe, right? They have this like strong, confident vibe.

And I'm like, well, maybe that's part of it. A sisterhood. Yeah. And so because I'm trying to be more honest with this new group of friends, I tell my writer bud that I can't

always orgasm and that I've been told by numerous sex partners that I need to get to know myself better in order to achieve orgasm better. So male partners have told me this. And so I have this idea that I

enjoy sex, but I've always felt like there's something more to enjoy that I'm not accessing. I can relate to that. And part of it is like sex based anxieties. Part of it is it depends on like what kind of sex education

you've gotten in your life. It depends on your cultural background. It depends on it depends on any past like, have you been sexually assaulted? It depends on all of these things, right?

Exactly. Yeah. And so I share this and everyone is like, dude, this practice is definitely going to help you. You're going to be able to understand and connect through orgasm completely.

Like you won't feel like you're not accessing. You're going to be able to access everything. Oh, tearing down the walls. Tearing down those walls. I scrounge up $150. OK.

And I pay for the introductory course on this meditation practice. OK. I go home. I watch a TED talk. A TED or a TEDx? TEDx.

It's TEDx. See, that's that's fake. That's fake TED talk. That's anybody you could you. Yeah, you or me could do a TEDx. Fucking Michelle Obama does a TED, I think, is the difference. Wait, let me let me double check

because I didn't know. Yeah, this is TEDx San Francisco. I mean, I still. I'm sorry if I'm getting the specific details of the difference between TED and TEDx wrong. Please don't sue me, TED. God, no.

I don't want TED after me. He's a fucking big guy. So I go home and I watch the TEDx that is by the woman who founded the practice. And in the video, she's super funny, really well-spoken. She says in her talk, she says,

I really, really don't like anything, woo-woo. And so I'm like, oh, OK. OK. Yeah. I see that. Well, if she doesn't like woo-woo, then this must be some like

legit vaginal meditation. Exactly. That's yeah. Yeah. She also says, and this is a direct quote, just try it. I mean, really, the worst thing you have to lose is 15 minutes

of your life. That's how long the practice is. 15 minutes of your life. They could get me with that. The best thing you have to lose is that sense of hopelessness that you ever, she says, that you will ever be reached

deep inside. Yeah, OK. 15 minutes and that hopelessness is gone. Yeah. And I also think, well, I've paid for the class, so if I go and it feels weird, I'll just

like, I'll just leave. It's fine. That's OK. I like her double entendre on reach deep inside. That's very clever. So imagine, if you will, Taylor, I go and I learn more and more

about the practice. I go to the introductory class and it does sound kind of weird. But there's a lot of people there and I'm thinking like, if they're in the nine men, that's OK. And also I'm thinking, you know, there is a societal insistence

on the male orgasm or male pleasure, especially in terms of like heterosexual sex. We're very newly into the idea that women derive any sort of pleasure from sex. Yeah, within the history of human people.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think maybe concentrating on female energy like this is pretty cool. And I remember that time that I went to see the vagina monologues in college and how funny and cool

but like how it felt kind of subversive to me. And this kind of has the challenging of the patriarchy. And I'm thinking, you know, when we challenge the patriarchy, it is going to feel weird because the patriarchy is

Yeah. the dominant voice, right? So towards the end of the class, there's a demonstration of orgasmic meditation, which is what the group calls O-ming, O-M-I-N-G, O-ming. OK.

And I'm going to describe to you I guess ritual or like what entails O-ming. Please. This is I mean, this is the moment I've been waiting for. Let's go. It is a super regulated

ritualized practice that happens between two people. It must be between two people because just like you can't make yourself laugh. You can't like tickle yourself and make yourself laugh that way. You can't allow or make yourself

lose control. So two people, there's a stroker who can be a woman, but by default within one taste, it is a man. Like all the instructions say like the man does this and the woman lies down,

that kind of thing. Homophobes. Yeah. So the man builds this nest with blankets, a yoga mat, and pillows, which at a certain point you could buy like a whole pre-made thing on the One Taste

website of like your little nest. That sounds gorgeously comfortable to proceed. So the man builds this nest while the woman takes her pants off. She only takes her pants and underwear off.

She leaves her shirt and whatever top she has on. Hot. Yeah. The man is fully clothed. So what about socks? Where are we on socks? I think socks can stay on.

They don't have to stay on. I've dated a couple of tall boys with poor blood circulation. They always left their socks on. Oh, OK. Fun fact. So she has her pants off. She lays down in the nest

with a pillow under her knees, under her head. And she butterflies her legs open. That's the verb that's used. Pretty. First, there's a grounding. Or I should say the man is also sitting beside her.

One leg is over her torso. His other leg is under her legs or beside her feet, because they're butterflyed, right? So like, scissoring a bit almost. Like, he's got her between his legs. Yes. Yeah, but.

But like, from the side. And she's kind of. Yeah, and his legs are also open as well. So. This is very complicated. It's very. It's ritualized. It's highly regulated.

Yes. I feel like I'm doing an immunity challenge with the spatial awareness, trying to picture this in my head. Truly, I'm really, I'm really trying to put this puzzle together. Right. Well, and that's why when you go

to the basics of omen class, there's always a demonstration. Sensible. Very sensible. Don't want anyone to break their dick in half. Well, I don't think that could happen, because dicks aren't involved. So first, there's a grounding where the man

massages her legs and thighs. And then, once that is completed, he gives a description of her pussy. And I'll say pussy there, because that's the term they use. He describes the colors, the shapes, just everything. And that's, you know, just like a few sentences in response. She says, thank you. Yeah.

No, there's a whole, like, practice to where people say shit to each other, and they can only say thank you in response. But anyway. So the description, and then the latex gloves go on. And you whip out the one-taste branded organic lube. Yeah. And then dip the lube, dah, dah, dah.

And then you set a timer for 15 minutes. And the stroker starts by putting his thumb at the vaginal opening, the entroitus. And then with his left index finger, he strokes the upper left quadrant, which is the one o'clock position of her clitoris for 15 minutes, with the same pressure that you might put on your eyelid.

How could you come? That's the thing, my dude. But all of this, this is too much. This is too, like, there's a latex glove. What is happening? Latex glove, or I read in certain settings, too, that men would be instructed to go wash their hands and then return.

I get the latex glove for safety reasons. I don't get the spiritual enlightenment part yet, but maybe I'll get there. Right. So that's a 15-minute up and down stroking, with, like, two minutes left. The man strokes just in the down position. And then the woman, during that time, should not move.

She is not meant to move whatsoever. And she's supposed to focus on the sensation, simply on what she is feeling. No emotions, just what she's physically sensing. OK. After 15 minutes, the timer goes off. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Very sexy.

The man grounds the woman, which means he firmly presses his hands against her pelvis, like against her pelvic bone. Right. And then they share frames. And a frame is when each person who is oming tells the other a moment in the oming practice when they felt something unique or of note within the practice.

So it would be, like, halfway through, I felt like this electricity come up through. And then that concludes an oming session. Right. So. And it's always the same? Always the same. Always the exact same?

Always the exact same. OK. So I'm in the oming basics class. Oh, yeah, I forgot you were there. That's tough. I know. I see this being demonstrated. And I'm like, OK.

Feels a little, like, inappropriate. And I'm like, OK, OK, OK. But I'm remembering something they said earlier in the session, which is that oming is not sex. And it isn't even about the orgasm, as in the way that we know orgasm. It's about sexual energy and tapping into that energy. And I'm quoting the TEDx by saying,

it's not going to be that fleeting moment of climax that seems to take the whole rest of the act hostage. It's going to be a definition of orgasm that actually works with the woman's body. So rather than trying to stuff a woman's body into an ill-fitting definition, we have a definition work with what the woman's body does. And when you have this, the whole notion of fragility

or a woman being an orgasmic flies out the window. And what it's replaced with is an entire lifetime journey of discovering who you are and how your particular orgasm works. She makes the case well. At the end of the class, when it comes time for first timers to try oming, I think, well, the least I can do is just try it, right? What do I have to lose, 15 minutes?

She didn't say what was going to happen in those 15 minutes, but go ahead. Imagine an older guy who I've met a few times in these meetings who said in one of the games that we played earlier that he was divorced, previously divorced, and he went bankrupt a few years ago only to make really, really good money in software. So I kind of know a little bit about him.

I didn't know some more personal stuff. So it's like, OK, he asks if we can ome together. And I'm not really attracted to him, but I've learned that it's not about attraction. It's about meditating on the moment and feeling the moment. It's not about him. It's about me. So I say yes.

He builds a nest for me. And I look around the room, and there's all these other women who are taking their pants and underwear off. And I'm like, well, I've been to a sauna. I can do this. It's fine. And for the next 15 minutes, we ome.

I'm very nervous. But everyone says it's totally normal for me to be nervous. And it takes practice, like anything that's worth achieving, right? They talked previously about how that nervousness might just be my societal understanding of sex, masking my own desire anyway. So I walk away from the meeting, feeling a little weird.

But I also feel like that weirdness might just be a sign that I need to focus my attention on this. And it is something that I want to do. So when the next class costs more than I've ever seen in my bank account. Yeah, that's, yeah. I apply for my first credit card. And it's fate, Taylor.

I'm given an offer on a line of credit. So I pay for a series of classes. Don't do it. And then I hear, by coming to these meetings and these classes, that a spot in an ome house has opened up. An ome house. An ome house. Yeah, where people do.

I know what a fucking ome house is. You don't need to explain it to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, well, I can't live in my fucking childhood bedroom any longer. I'm not a child anymore, anyway. I'm a woman. And I move in with 10 other ome practitioners.

We ome several times a day. And when we're not doing that, we help to sell classes to other students. I learn how to use. It's a good massage MLM. Yeah, yeah. I learn how to use Salesforce software. Oh, good for you.

That'll look good in your resume. Yeah, exactly. And then if we're able to take enough courses and pay for those courses, then I can take a course where I can learn how to teach others how to own. So I'm very excited about that. So I keep taking courses.

I'm paying a small amount of rent to live in the ome house. But my commission on my sales of the classes, I should be able to pay it off. But I also think, I think the mission of oming is so important that at a certain point, I decide to hand over my income. Never be putting your money back into the one that's given you their money.

It doesn't work economically. Brian Steele has some thoughts on these economic flim flams. It's true. I only talked to my mother to ask if she could pay for more of my classes, because my wellness is really important, and I deserve it. I learn how to communicate openly and freely with others. And I mean, I guess you kind of have

to when you're sharing a bed with three other people. Why? I learn how to resolve conflicts and how having sex can really help with that. Having sex with the person that you're having a conflict with. I also learn how much power I really have as a woman. I've sold a lot of ome classes to people, because my orgasmic energy is really full and strong.

I can tell. Yeah. And if I'm really lucky, one day I'll be able to meet and talk with Nicole de Dome, the sexy woman from the TEDx talk. But right now, she's really busy, because OneTaste has been written up in the New York Times, and Cosmo, and Marie Claire.

And we're all working really hard and long hours to spread the message of healing and hope that is oming and OneTaste. Taylor, OneTaste is going to change the world for the better. And I get to be part of it. Congratulations. Thank you. May I ask a question?

Yes. Which Josie am I talking to here? Is this fake Josie or real Josie? Oh, this is, now we're back to the real time line, where I'm a 32-year-old woman who is fine in her sexuality, and join a sex cult. OK, good. Thank you.

Welcome back. Thank you. Congratulations. So OK, the New York Times, or whoever is you, what are the list of publications you just said? New York Times, Cosmo, Marie Claire, and then a few other things that kind of syndicate out from those.

But none of it is like this is a cult cult. It's all this is a meditation class or whatever. Yeah, yeah. It'd be like a write-up on a vijay shawl or something. This is kind of weird and strangely subversive, but it's trendy and powerful, and like peloton, and soul cycle, and OneTaste. Yeah, I got you.

I got you. OneTaste is the peloton of soul cycle, I agree. Question mark. Yeah. OK, so thank you for introducing me to sex cult Josie. That was a hell of a literary device you pulled out of the bag there. Notice how I described Oming not from my point of view?

No, I was wondering. I was like, no, I was waiting for it. I was like, how far is she going to go with this gimmick? Because I wanted you to. I was like, tell me about getting owned as a weird fraught version of your younger self. I couldn't do it. I wrote a version with that, but I couldn't do it.

Well, you know what? Something I've learned after researching this? What? Trust your instinct. Trust your own boundaries. Yeah, for sure. For sure. The most severe gut.

So the founder of OneTaste was this woman named Nicole Daedon. I couldn't find too much about her personal life, because right now she's more or less in hiding. But also as a leader of a sex cult, the less that is known about you, it's probably for the better. So I don't think that there's a lot there. She is from California.

She studied gender studies and semantics. She opened a gallery sometime in the early 2000s in San Francisco. And then in about 2004, she started putting together this OneTaste company. The name OneTaste actually comes from a Buddhist saying that is, just as the great ocean has OneTaste, the taste of salt.

So also this teaching and discipline has OneTaste, the taste of liberation. I know. Lofty. Yeah. It's all about vaginas, and it's called OneTaste. And you're just like, wait, what? Like there's something very intriguing about that.

She can kind of write in a cheeky, but also spiritual, winky, kind of knowing, sexy kind of way about this. Exactly. That gender studies degree did her well. So that 2011 TEDx talk, that kind of launched things much more in terms of OneTaste. Right. In it, she is super well-spoken.

She's like just enough self-effacing, but she's still very confident. So she has the really good balance of that. She talks about experiencing oming for the first time because she met a guy at a party who showed it to her. What kind of, what the fuck kind of party was this? San Francisco, baby. Yeah, true enough, true enough.

Some iterations of her story, she just says it's a guy. And another one, she says it was a Buddhist monk. Yeah, and she herself actually was studying to be a Zen Buddhist nun. I feel like a Buddhist monk fingered me at a party is like a party story. I don't know if it's a business. That's because you're not thinking outside of the box enough.

Apparently not, apparently not. We're inside the box, waka waka. Yeah. One thing I did find about her personal life was in her early 20s, her father went to prison for molesting young girls. And when she was 27, he died in prison. She did say, and this is a quote,

I have a legacy to bring light to an area of the world where there's a lot of darkness. Ah. So. God. Yeah. We're all just the traumas that our parents visit upon us at the end of the day, aren't we?

Fun. Love you, mom. Love you, dad. Love you, mom. Yeah. So what she was studying and what she kind of built into one taste is not new. There has been numerous sex cults, especially

in the San Francisco Bay area. And one supposed, well, I'll say this, he was a cult leader. And he was a sex cult leader. His name was Victor or Vic Barranco. He was a former collector for the mob who decided one day that he solved the mystery and the meaning of life, which was basically that everything

should be governed by pleasure. These hedonistic cults are so common. At the end of the day, people are really receptive to messages in the vein of you can do whatever you want. Exactly. Yeah. But that's the initial message, right? And then.

And then the message becomes a lot more perverted than that. And this was definitely the case with this guy, too. He came up alongside Landmark Forum and Scientology. And he was the one who, I guess, ritualized or packaged clitoral stroking as a practice. So Vic Barranco has since died. But there is still a few houses around what he calls more houses, this idea of living life for more.

More house. OK. Clever. The More House Lafayette is still running because his kids and his widow are running it. And it's in Northern California. It's not that far from San Francisco. So apparently, our gal, Nicole de Donne,

she took a few classes with Barranco when it was still going. And then there are some reports that she took classes with some other people who studied under Barranco. So she's like, she's in this world. She knows. Does this prove the lie to her some guy showed it to me at a party?

Or is she saying that happened after this? Or before this, sorry. It's the one thing that has come out of her mouth. But reporters have found that she did take these other classes. And da, da, da. That's yeah, yeah, yeah. So she started when it tasted about 2004. And as a company, she always had it as a company.

And it really was always broke. It had to be underwritten by all these people all the time. And she apparently got sick of being broke. And in 2011, turned up the gas and really turned it into a company. All the pricings for the classes went way, way up. She got written up positively in the New York Times, Marie Claire Cosmo.

She gets the TEDx talk. She has a talk at South by Southwest called Orgasm, the Broadband of Human Connection. Stop it. So she's very much entrenched in this tech world. Wow. OK, San Francisco. Exactly.

So instead of the acid, crazy hate Ashbury San Francisco, where it's like, just live your life, man. Like, instead of that, she's in this new San Francisco that's like, we're going to life hack the fuck out of things. And we're going to think outside the box. And we're the smartest people alive. It's a Silicon Valley click code. It's a Silicon Valley click code.

Exactly. That's tough. Exactly. And she really does treat it as this human interaction that is an algorithm or a code. And one taste is going to teach you how to crack that code. It's a technology. Oming and what one taste represents is a technology.

It'll make you more productive. It'll make you happier. And yeah, what she kind of does is she takes this clitoral stroking thing that comes from the 60s, 70s, sex cult vibes there. And she puts it into these very, very precise ritual. You know how I was saying, like, the finger goes here and 15 and beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, like all of that.

And each change she makes to allow more and more people to take part. Because this thinking is that the ritual set of steps creates a safety and it builds association. So if you think about it, flirting is always kind of vague. Like, what does that mean? Can you cross a line? Especially imagine being a tech guy who doesn't have

a lot of interaction with women. Like, having some type of script go by is really helpful. Just bang on her clip for 15 minutes. Boom. Done. Yeah. But it's also this idea that, like, oming is so ritualized that both parties are going to know

exactly what's happening. That's nice in theory, but that doesn't really bear out how people handle sexual encounters. Exactly. Yeah. But the other thing too, you know, when you say sexual encounter, oming, and they make this point very explicitly, it is not sex.

I get that on the wrapper it says that it's not sex, but it's sex. I got a chance to watch this Zoom writing conference. And this really great author, she's a nonfiction author. Her name is Melissa Fibos. She had a talk on writing sex scenes, writing sex. And one of the things that Melissa Fibos said was that no one can tell you what sex is.

Only you can have that definition for yourself. And she meant it in terms of, like, when you're writing a sex scene, it doesn't mean that, like, his hard dick had to throb, da, da, da, da. Like, she's talking about using language and imagery that might not be sexy to someone else. But if it's describing sex, then it's sex. Seventy nuance, wordplay, metaphor, symbolism,

nonpenetrative sexual encounters. Yeah. Exactly. All these things. And what Melissa Fibos had said was kind of ringing throughout my head this whole time, because it's like, if I take my pants off and somebody stimulates my clit, that's, to me, that's sex.

And you can't tell me it's not. But it's also, like, if I got together with somebody and we completely had this, like, totally intimate, wonderful conversation, that could also be sex. Yeah, that's true. You know, it's up to you and what your boundaries are and what you're comfortable with and what that looks like. For sure.

And I think we think about that a lot with, like, maybe when people are first having sex or, like, first introduced to their sexuality. Yeah. But it kind of gets, like, chucked down to that. And it's like, once you know that, then you don't go back and you don't look at that again. So.

I mean, me personally, I think my life has been more joyful since I brought in my definition of what sex is and what sex can be and made it less about, as your girl, Daedon, was saying earlier, less about achieving some very prescriptive idea of orgasm. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Which, you know, she's tapping into something. Yeah, people have people.

Invincing it true. There's a lot of people in the world who look at sex and their sex life is not 100% exactly as they would like it to be. And so if you were to read someone who is well-spoken and seems to have the answers, why not give that a go? The other element that she brings to Oming is that if it's not about the orgasm

in terms of the coming, the peak, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Then it's about this connection, this sexual energy, and this sensitivity to somebody else. Holding space together. Yeah, and she goes so far that if you practice Oming enough, if you understand Oming enough, you can read somebody so well that you could potentially never hurt them.

Because you would know exactly how they feel. No, that doesn't work like that. But it's a very convincing statement that you would never hurt somebody. If you can offer people really prescriptive ways to... Okay, so you have your 15 minutes, set up your nest, bang or clit. You know each other perfectly, no more room for argument.

You've maximized your productivity. Exactly, yeah. You didn't have to do the time-consuming flirting or whatever. Yeah, and the other idea that this is a technology too, when the Me Too movement started happening, One Taste was out there saying that they could help teach connection

as preventative health for companies rather than treating the disease of sexual harassment. So it was like, bring in One Taste to your companies and we'll create that connection so that you don't have to worry about sexual assault and sexual harassment. You're just like, what? I don't know, that's, I don't know.

I feel like HR's gonna get a lot of mail about that. One Taste has also made very strong claims about getting women who had never climaxed before to be able to climax. Oming would cure sexual traumas and empower women while teaching men how to empower women, which would therefore make them more attractive to women. Okay.

Yeah. There is really no room for queer people in this at all, hey? That is the thing that I find so disturbing about this. It is so heteronormative. We'd buy into this, you're leaving, in San Francisco, you are leaving money on the table. Yes, yes. That bums me out.

Make it like in all bodies, accepting, blah, blah, blah. They would always like claim to be really inclusive and yet when it came down to it, it was like, oh, there's two women who are gonna own. Oh, but there's a guy over there. There's a guy, oh, you come over here. That's so bizarre, that's so bizarre. So one taste is couched in the tech industry in a big way.

It's also couched in the wellness industry. Right. And wellness being like that kind of peloton, soul cycle. Yoni eggs, goop. Funny you mentioned goop. Uh-oh, yep, yes the fuck, yep, yes the fuck. Yes the fuck, yes. I sniffed the air and I was like, wow,

this smells like Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina. Mm-hmm, exploding candles. Yeah. The smell like Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina. I smelled it in the air. Totally, no, it's very, very goopy. And if you don't know what goop is, it's Gwyneth Paltrow's. It's a lifestyle brand that's very female centered

and female positive, but there's been some legal cases about the line between self-care and medicine. It's very much in this wellness industry category. I like many, I'm sussy of the wellness kind of thing. Yeah. And I use, I know that the term wellness is really, really broad. So I-

Yeah, that's the other thing is that it's huge. It's hard to know. I'm just talking about like flimflammy wellness, Dr. Oz kind of wellness. Yeah, I agree. So one taste is in this like really interesting crux of tech industry and wellness industry. Yeah.

Even with that, there were a lot of people who went to an initial meeting with those communication games. They played, they never came back, it was fine. Or they went and they paid the $150 and did the basics of oming. And they're like, all right, now I know how to do it. I'm gonna go and do it.

And they never came back. But there is a group of people who did keep coming back and who lived in the home houses and who got seriously in debt and who were victims of one taste. Let's do a little thought exercise here. Okay. If you accept that this is a technology

as she's described it, and it will do all of these things for you more or less, whatever, how do you ethically propagate that concept? How do you make sure that every single person who does this is coming from a place of pure intention and that none of your instructors, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's not scalable. Like you literally, what is the fucking lot? Like again, thinking of it in fucking shark tank turns, what's your fucking liability on this? When is that class action happening, you know? Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. And that's just with the oming practice because then it got to the point

where people were living in home houses and they were working for one taste, right? They were selling these classes, but also subject to the kind of rules and whims of one taste and Nicole de Don and the people who were running one taste. That's what delivers one taste to cult status is in no situations.

Yeah. And you know, cult is a pretty open term as well. You know, we're trying to define wellness. Defining a cult is actually quite hard as well. Of course. But to give you a sense, here's a typical day in the home house. Yes.

Wake up at six a.m. and have a few sessions of oming. Go to work selling classes and follow up with students to sell more classes, students who have already come. You need to learn this kind of complex system of color coding in order to determine who of the students you think are gonna spend more money.

So you really closely have to track like who do you think is susceptible to spending more money? Wouldn't be a good tech company without some analytics? You do a little bit more oming or you may be assigned to have sex with somebody. Should go ahead and do that. You lead a class or you help admin for a class. Part of that would be kind of taking notes

on students who are there to kind of note some important things of their lives that might be helpful to potentially sell them classes later. In the house, you have that assigned sexual partner. They're also called research partners. I'm sure they are. You're told in the house

that the more sex you have, the better. So just have a lot of sex. In fact, if you're arguing with someone in the house, which you might be because there's a lot of people in one house, you are told to go have sex. If you're like in the middle of an argument, it's like you too, go have sex. Not even om, but sex.

Yeah. Okay. Typically after dinner, there's a fight about who does the dishes. You just gotta bang it out. Gotta bang it out. That's, I hate that, wow. I know. Imagine if every time you were arguing

with your roommate, you had to fuck them. Oh my God. That's the, you see their moldy dishes and you're like, well. This is gonna suck. So before bed, there's more oming sessions or sex depending on what you're told to do. And then you're in bed, which you share

with three to five other people by midnight or maybe one or two AM, depending on how busy the day is, which means there's not a lot of sleep happening. There's like between four and six hours of sleep every night. If you did not feel like having sex and you were told to have sex, you know, for whatever reason,

you didn't want to be text right then. You were on period, you were feeling ill. You had to have sex anyway because orgasm was the connection. Orgasm was all important to human connection. No. But remember, orgasm does not mean the release of sexual energy

within the one taste frame. They have their own particular definition of orgasm that is larger and more encompassing. And it's about the sexual energy building up, which also means that it's like this house full of people who are never coming or like coming not very often. Yeah. That's the opposite of what you should be getting

out of a sex cult in my opinion. Right, I know. It feels like you're losing out on the one benefit of the sex cult, which is the sex. Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. It was generally seen if you felt discomfort at any of the rituals within the day or being told to have sex with somebody,

then your discomfort was a sign of growth and you needed to place your practice there. This is so manipulative. So if you didn't like having sex with people after being assigned a research partner, then that dislike was something that you needed to work on. So go ahead, more sex. One woman who was part of a lot of the reporting

that happened after, she was not very sexually experienced before she came to an home house. And so when her partners were more experienced in home, she thought any discomfort or pain that she was experiencing was her fault because she didn't know what was going on. They had been schooled and practiced in Oming, so she needed to default to them.

That's so frustrating in the context of something that was purporting itself to be so woman-centric. And if you did not voice this uncomfortableness in the moment, then you were at fault for not raising the issue earlier. So if you said like, hey, so-and-so, last week, when that happened, I didn't feel good about that.

Then it was like, you didn't say something at the time, so there's nothing I could do to change it, so. Right, and these are the people who are purporting that they're gonna solve the Me Too movement by going into boardrooms and having employees finger each other's clowns. Beautiful. Well put, that was nice.

Sorry, that was a little crass. I feel like we've been there and we're here. We're in the vagina, let's just go. Yeah, we're in the box. Hey! So when Nicole had her TEDx and her South by Southwest talk, the selling got really predatory. There was a lot more emphasis on the people in the home house

to sell these classes. They were told to have people take out lines of credit. One woman reported that the salesperson got out the OneTaste computer, inputted all her information for a Discover card, and was like, here we go, here, now you can take another class. Proactive selling, you gotta love that.

That's, she should be, she's going places, but... The money will manifest if you want this badly enough. This is so American in the sense that... Oh yeah. Not exclusively American, things like this can and do happen here and all over the world, but it kind of ties into the prosperity gospel thing.

If you just want the money bad enough, it will magically appear for you. But you just have to set intentions and you have to put out positive vibes into the universe and so on. Well, and that was another thing that was interesting too, was the typical demographic of an home meeting would be pretty wealthy tech guys

who didn't really know how to connect very well with other people, especially women. Right. And then there was a lot of women who were either conventionally very beautiful, but who had been objectified constantly, or women who were not deemed conventionally beautiful, but who were interested

in a more sexual experience in their lives. But all those women too, typically didn't have a lot of money. So what sales people were told to do was, oh, Cynthia, you really need this class. This is gonna really open you up and you don't have enough money. Oh gosh, well, that guy that you owned with earlier,

why don't you go make your intention and your desire known to him and he can pay for your class? That's devilish, that's clever. Yeah, and it's all framed as opportunity. For her, it's an opportunity to have these classes. And for him, it's an opportunity to help empower this woman

slash perhaps later get inner pants. Well, I guess like literally right then get inner pants, but you know what I mean. There's a lot of this like ambiguity and one taste is just really exploiting it. When it came to the one taste employees, payment was never very clear. It was always shifting.

At first it was commission that never seemed to manifest. And then it was a group commission. And then it was like, no, we're gonna give you a monthly stipend. And then no, we're gonna give you a yearly stipend. And if you asked about payment, then you were seen as being disloyal to the cause. And many people who worked at one taste

were encouraged to show their devotion by offering up their income to the cause as well. So people are working something like 80 to 100 hour work weeks, getting paid pennies, still having to pay rent for the Ohm house and pay for their classes. They don't get the classes for free.

So people are going into massive debt, huge debt. You wouldn't think that a cult attack company in an MLM would go so well together, but. They really do. Just the perfect like blue. It's a very ambitious business plan. I give her that. By 2015, one taste was making $12 million

via their courses and their memberships. You could pay like $60,000 a year and have access to like all the classes. So that was a membership. That's crazy. They're doing very well for themselves. Pretty well. So there's some instances too with the selling,

especially when women are selling the classes, they're told to wear like a short skirt and make sure you have heels on and like lipstick and that kind of thing. And also as a woman, if you were selling, you were told often if you're selling to a man, oh, I only sleep with men who've gone through the ignited man program.

The ignited man program. A ignited man. Yeah. I flexed my packs when you said that. So it works. Oh. I was ignited. Oh, wow.

Okay. And all of this is kind of couched as like, you were an empowered woman. Yeah. This is what you can do. This is where your strength is. And a lot of people, a lot of women who were within one taste reported that.

They said, yeah, it felt really good. It feels really good to be wanted. And to like know that you have that power is just a little weird when somebody is telling you to enact that power, right? Yeah. Because then is it really your power? Yeah, or are you being coerced?

Yeah, exactly. So Nicole's whims influence everyone in the home houses for a while, she was having an open relationship. So that was the thing to do. Everybody have sex with anybody and everybody. And then she got into a relationship and then monogamy was the thing. There was a lot more people being married.

Okay. In one taste at that time. There were these like popular things to do that she would make popular. So it's like this week, everyone anal sex. Next week, everybody plastic surgery. That's a hell of a schedule. Yeah.

Yeah, I know. 2014, one taste is going hard. They've got all this money coming in. And Nicole gets to a point where she's like, now I can teach what I really want to teach. Which is? There's a new class that's being offered magic school, colon, a deep dive into magic, ritual and potent orgasm.

This summer, joined Nicole de Donne for a journey into the fourth dimension. For five days, let go of what you know of a third dimensional life. And at Merce in the magical world of orgasm alchemy. $8,000 per person. Yeah, that's some Harry Potter shit, okay. Actually, funny that you say Harry Potter

because one of the terms they use for people who are outside of one taste in the moment practice is muggles. Yeah. Fucking millennials, read any other book, read another book. There's so many books out there. So it doesn't have to be Harry Potter. It doesn't have to be.

There's good books. I'm sure Harry Potter, I'm not even trying to, like, anyway. So what happens at one of the magic schools that's reported on after all of this is they're told the story of sacred prostitution. So it's this idea of healing the world through orgasm and having sex. And there's a fable that's shared

or a moralized story that's shared about these women after the war. And it's some vaguely Eastern setting, you know? And after this hellish bloody war, these men who were so broken came back home and had sex with these beautiful, wonderful women who essentially just fucked the war out of them. That was the idea of magic school and orgasm, alchemy.

I subscribe to the idea that sex work can be healing, but I don't think it does you favors to pretend that it's a non-sexual act in the way that these people, you know what I mean? Exactly, yeah. Maybe sex work is also a good setting to understand what, like, a definition of sex. Like, if somebody sits on a cake,

that could be sex for somebody. No, that's true. If it's somebody, like, stroking their feet with a feather, that could be sex for somebody. Yep, Peggy'sfeet.com. Oh, yeah. Who, yeah. I've been there.

So at this magic school meeting, there were three women who were designated the roles of priestess, and they, like, wore these big masks, and they were topless, and they hugged everybody. They were, like, the- So Nicole was bored. Nicole was bored.

There were three men who were designated the priest's orgasm, and those were the men who could stroke the priestesses. One of the one-taste people there was like, it wasn't that different from one of the other one-taste courses. It wasn't that different from Eyes Wide Shot. I, yeah, yeah.

And I was just like, God, I guess when you're in deep, you're in deep. It's hard to- It's true. It's dark down there. Yes, there was a man wearing a plague doctor mask, and yes. Yeah.

There was a person with, like, a big gold-swinging thing full of incense walking around the room, muttering chants under his breath, but otherwise, it was very similar. It was really similar to, like, the communication games we played earlier. Yeah.

Like the tee cup. Yeah, past the invisible ball. God. Trust falls. Yeah. So obviously, you can tell that Nicole, yeah, she was bored, but she's also, like, pretty fucking dangerous.

Oh, yeah. She says, the places you hate are your practice. Like, that's something that you would pay $20,000 to hear her say. Like, the interactions, the, like, sensations, the places that you hate are where you need to spend your time. Your shitty roommate who didn't do the dishes now,

you need to have sex with him right away. Exactly. Yes. And there's also, through that, there's this really warped sense of responsibility. Like, there's this really crazy thing where Nicole says, and this is apparently a quote, there's no such thing as rape.

If a woman owned her sexuality, she couldn't be raped. If she owned her power, she couldn't. I'm not even gonna say it again. I want to put firmly on the record that I do not agree with that. Ms. Dodon's views represent only herself. They are not the views of Bitter Sweden for Me podcast. In no way shape or form.

Yes. Rape exists. It's a very real thing. Yeah, I'm anti-rape. Me too. Let's start from there. Holy shit, that's an incredibly irresponsible thing to say, what the fuck?

It is wild. She just has this idea that, like, things don't happen to you, things happen for you. So even if it's a really negative experience. That's so fucking toxic. Then it's a sight for your practice. That's fucked. That's so fucked up.

Yeah. Which also delivers her from any type of blame, right? If the harms that come to us are by our own doing, then Nicole cannot, or men, or powerful men, cannot hurt anybody. This went badly for you because you are deficient in some way. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. It's really. Someone do something about this horrible woman. She was done with, like, the very basic vanilla omen. Bang your clip for 15 minutes, yes. What she was interested in was bringing about the next Buddha. The problem is, when you set our goals too high, I think.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. Probably go with before something, I don't remember why. So this is a really upsetting story, reported by the podcast, The Orgasm Colt on BBC4, with Nestoran Tavakoli Far. I listened to the whole entire podcast.

The Orgasm Colt was really, really good. A lot of the information comes from that. Awesome. Nestoran interviewed people who had lived with Cassidy in a gnome house. She came to the San Francisco One Taste from the East Coast with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend was really, really rich.

He was this really loaded guy. They were, One Taste was really interested in getting Cassidy involved because it was a link to that money. She also leaves everything behind. Like, she's from the East Coast, she comes to the West Coast, no family, no friends.

Yeah, perfect prey. She comes to sessions with visible bruises on her body. It's very clear that this boyfriend is physically abusing her. But everybody is instructed. All the admin who are running the classes, everyone's instructed not to say anything. And they're in fact told to never call the police.

Because, you know, what One Taste is doing is just so far outside of the small, narrow mindsets of the world that they will never understand. That's a red flag. This young woman, she's called Cassidy. That's not her name. It turns out she was molested as a child.

So she has a lot of sexual trauma that's deep in her. And she's told that Oming would heal her childhood trauma and that in order to do that, she needed to have sex with other people. So One Taste is very invested in having Cassidy be open to sex with other men besides her boyfriend because this level of the organization, a woman who has unemotional sex is a full

and empowered and enlightened woman. She's made to have sex with a lot of people. The other, like One Taste people who are living with her, they're told that if Cassidy is crying or shaking, not to worry, because that is just the orgasm coming out of her eyes or her body. You know, the tears coming out of her eyes. Oh, fuck.

And this is the way to clear her system. Cassidy explicitly verbalized how painful the Oming and the sex was for her and she was told that she had to do it in order to be free. A term that they used was blowing your lines clean. I know, it's really disturbing. At a certain point, a tender account was set up for her and managed by somebody else

and strangers were ushered in into the Ome house to have sex with her to crack her open. She, as you can imagine, was not doing well. She was having a horrific nightmare. She couldn't sleep. She wasn't eating. She lost weight. She was vomiting a lot.

Yeah. And within the Ome house, when someone is in real pain, what they said was that it was the virus, not the real person. So it'd be like, that's not you speaking. That's the virus speaking. Fuck off. This is such a culty cult.

This is pretty culty cult stuff. Cassidy is pretty down in the fucking dumps. Of course. She could probably imagine. Cause she's also told that like, this is your beautiful life too. You know, like all these practices like part of your beautiful life.

She gets out. She has a godmother who lives nearby. She leaves and she is now healthy and healing. And I'm hoping that she's getting whatever the fuck she wants. I hope it's a lot of money from one taste or whatever it is. I hope you're out there having a beautiful life

where people treat you the way that you deserve to be treated. Yeah. Oof. Can I ask how the story that you just mentioned, how is that known again? A reporter was talking to other people who lived in the same Ome house with Cassidy.

I see. So she didn't tell this story on her own. It becomes pretty clear when 2018 rolls around and a Bloomsburg reporter named Ellen Hewitt publishes a piece that clearly lays out all these allegations of sexual servitude and just issues across the board. The FBI starts an investigation

after that article comes out. They investigate one taste for prostitution, sex trafficking and violations of labor law. Okay. In 2015, so this was even before, this was like three years earlier, a former employee did receive a six figure settlement out of court for a sexual assault and harassment case

that they brought up against one taste. Okay. So there is precedent to do so. When the article comes out, of course one taste is like all of that is lies. No way. Don't believe it guys. No way.

Total lies. One taste lawyer's response to any allegations of sexual assaults are, and I quote, any allegations of abuse of practice are completely false. 300,000 people around the world practice Oming and many have experienced healing. Okay.

Whatever. Fuck you. Nicole, Daedon, our bud. How's your magic school going? I couldn't tell you, because in 2018 they did stop having classes. They shut down, they went into a moment of self reflection,

which means then Nicole fucking bounced. Like no one within the organization has really seen her. Even before this actually in 2017, she sold her stake in the company. She was trying to move a little bit away, but it's all the same executive team and she knows the executive team, you know? So she's still very much connected.

I think one sign that she's still very connected is that she always said that she was very interested in buying land for one taste. Of course, to give them a physical location. Yeah, a little compound. And there is a space in Northern California in which the executive team of one taste, many of them are owners of this space.

And it is called the land. And you can go to land- or the-land.com and see a variety of their offerings, including meditation practices, massage, long walks in the woods, beautiful expensive baths, blah, blah, blah. It's no doubt that Nicole is connected to the land.

Of course. And one taste in general. So when most people left one taste, of course they were in very severe debt. And as you can also probably imagine, a lot of them had trouble in their sex lives. They didn't want to be touched after having to have been touched so much during one taste.

They didn't trust intimate relationships. They were promised to have a deeper connection to humanity. And this just pushed them much further away from that goal than they had ever been before. How sad. There are varying responses to it all. A lot of people that spoke out after everything felt actually pretty positive towards oming.

Okay. Yeah, what they weren't so excited about was just one taste, the company. Bad corporate culture. Like the community they loved, the people they loved, they hated everything else. Yeah, they just hated that corporate culture. Oh my God, that's hilarious.

I mean, that's sad, but. One woman said that she thought oming was powerful and an interesting practice, but she said that it should always be done. Not always, cause she, I don't think she's working in absolutes ever again. She highly recommends that you do it with somebody you trust.

And that it not be a complete stranger. So, so much of one taste was about this radical responsibility that we talked about. You know, like if you don't put it out there in the universe that it's your fault doesn't come to you. And yet one taste never took any responsibility. Their lawyers have always said, no, no, no, no, never, never, never.

Even the higher ups haven't said anything. And for company and movement that was so about like women speaking up and women being empowered, none of them have said shit. They have their PR machine hard at work. The PR company is Harold's PR. Do you want to guess who Harold's PR also represents? Weinstein.

Bing, bing, bing, bing. Yeah. They represent a horny fucking one spoon. Laying in bed with dogs. The one taste website, all of that is defunct. You can't find it unless you go to the Wayback Machine. Oming, which is trademarked by the way, but Oming is now taught through an organization

called the Institute of Ome. Cool, cool. So it's still fucking out there. That website is live and, and going. Okay. So the last that we've heard from Nicole de Donne. Yes. February, 2020.

Okay. So that's not that long ago. Right before everything went a little screwy and we took our eyes off Nicole for a bit. Guess who gave Nicole de Donne a platform with an FBI investigation ongoing. Dr. Oz. Warm up your jade vaginal legs.

Light up that vulva scented candle. Gwyneth and the Goop podcast had Nicole de Donne on. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. She goes on. She's her enigmatic self. Gwyneth is like, oh wow. To be fair, Gwyneth, well not to be fair. Cause I think this just makes it even worse.

Gwyneth doesn't even interview her. It's an editor from Goop who interviews Nicole de Donne. Oh, that's a shame. The editor, they've absolutely done no research because she's like, oh okay. This is an interesting practice. So, and, but she's obviously mistakes it for masturbation, for self stimulation.

And then Nicole is like, oh no, no, no. You need somebody to stroke you. You can't let yourself go. You can't let yourself get out of control. So it's like, okay. Obviously Goop is dumb as shit. I'm sorry. I'm sorry if you like Goop.

No, I am not. Good sunscreen. And it's all this, like the very beginning of one taste stuff where it's like all about female empowerment. And if I can train my partner to really understand me then what does that say about the relationships between- And this is in February 2020 she pulled this shit? Yeah.

Jesus. The podcast does not mention one taste at all. What they do mention though, they're like, if you wanna learn more about Nicole and her practices, visit the land. Ah, the land. The land. The land, which by the way is a two hour drive north

of Lafayette Morehouse. Yeah. Which is the remnants of one of the way back sex schools led by Vic Boronco. She's really just doing an elaboration on this guy's script. Yeah, but putting it into the new context. And right now, hearing that from a woman, hearing the power of clitoral stimulation,

blah, blah, blah, blah, that's a lot more powerful now from a woman. And it has that modern touch of your pussy is an app. So. Exactly. It's so good. Yeah, thank you. I also wanna say we are in a very susceptible time.

Yes. For cults. Absolutely. Moments of great change or upheaval, create instances where people feel that they need to find direction, find a community, whatever it is. The pandemic is an excellent example.

Yeah. Taylor and I started a podcast and maybe you've joined a cult. Who knows? Yes. So. Yeah. Here are some things to look out for

if you suspect that you may have joined or might be joining a cult. So PSA time. Do it. First, question how the leader is acting. Could you sense a lack of empathy or perhaps narcissism but might be easier to detect as if the leader embodies the complete ideals of the group.

So if Nicole is just everything and anything. Everyone's just trying to be exactly like Nicole. Yes. Look out for that from the leader. Secondly, look at the followers too. Are they just doe-eyed participants or their good amount of healthy skepticism happening? Do your own research.

The organization, the group, the company, whatever it is is gonna provide you a lot of their own information, which is fine. Good. Good to know. Do some of your own as well. And fourth, talk to a skeptical friend. Yeah.

Talk to that bitch who's always telling you no, no, no. Oh my God, it's a horrible day. Talk to your your friend. My tail fell off. That's what sucks, Cole. Don't join that. Oh, bother. And lastly, it is always important to remember

that the most susceptible person to a cult is the person who thinks they are too smart or too grounded or too whatever, whatever to get sucked in. Yeah. So if you, if that's your thought, like nah, I'll never happen to me. No. Take a moment with yourself, figure some shit out.

I'm not too smart to land in a cult. Oh no, not at all. I have the humility of knowing that when I hear these stories or I watch these documentaries, you watch Holy Hell or you watch Wild Wild Country or whatever and you think, could I be in this specific cult? You know what I mean?

This one, no, because I'm gay. Like this one, they don't want me there, which- Right, no, you're completely blocked out. Yeah. Nicole's path to world utopia doesn't really account for anybody who's not a heterosexual man or woman. Exactly. So Taylor, if you were to get sucked into a cult,

what would the cult be? Or conversely, if you prefer this question, what would your cult be about? I don't have it in me to be a cult leader. I really, really don't. I don't think I could do it. I thought the same thing of you, to be fair. Oh, thank you.

I hope that's a compliment. I don't think you could ever be a cult leader, Dee. I think you could be an okay cult leader. Is that a not a compliment? No, no, no. I don't think you would do it. It doesn't strike me as particularly in your character to do it.

But you have a real ease around people. I've literally never known anybody who dislikes you. You're charismatic, I guess is what you would say. But you're also very unassuming. And I think that people could find some semblance of the Messiah in you. And then if you saw money in that, like maybe you had to pay the rent,

Batman needs his heart medicine, you know whatever it is. And there's your cult. It does, I need to read up on that. Yeah, that's true. So if you were to get sucked into a cult. Anything that professes to be primarily about kindness, empathy, and forgiveness. Okay.

Even if it doesn't turn out to be that, which of course it never, it turns out to be that. It usually turns into like armed insurrection or... Clutoral stimulation, yeah. Whatever it is, yeah. But I think anything that was like that real hippie-dippy one love shit I think could get me. Yeah.

How about you? Yeah, definitely that for me as well. Like something that's about like being bigger than us, which I guess is a lot of like religion and belief system. But I think this one at a time in my life, I think it could have, I mean, I had the alternate timeline, right? I don't know though.

I really appreciate you introducing me to this new character of sex cult Josie. Your alter ego. How am I gonna send this episode to Brian Steele? Oh no, I'm sorry. Brian, I didn't know for one, I should have done something about jazz. I'm sorry.

I'll give him the explanation. I'll just be like, listen man, it just happened to be this episode. She didn't know. She didn't know. Yeah, no, none of us knew. Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy,

go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find podcasts. We usually release new episodes every other Sunday. You can also follow us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy. If you liked the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review or just telling a friend. Stay sweet.

The sources that I used for this story were first and foremost, the podcast, The Orgasm Cult, produced by BBC Four and written by Nasturon Tavakulifar. It is a very deep dive into one taste and if you want to find out more information about it, that's definitely where I recommend it go.

I also read the article, Sergeant Bilko Meets the New Culture by Robin Green, published in Rolling Stone Magazine in 1971. I read the Bloomberg Exposé, The Dark Side of One Taste, The Orgasmic Meditation Company, published in Bloomberg and written by Ellen Hewitt. I looked at onetaste.com through The Way Back Machine,

which can let you see anything that someone has taken off the internet. And lastly, I watched the TEDx video by Nicole Dadeon, which she titled Orgasm, the cure for hunger in the Western woman, which she gave on June 11th, 2011. The song that you are now listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele.