Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of OneTaste

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

This week, Amanda and Chelsea dive into the cult of OneTaste, the controversial wellness company that built an empire around “orgasmic meditation.” To help break this one down, they’re joined by journalist Ellen Huet (@ehuet), whose reporting pulled back the curtain on the organization’s rise from buzzy Silicon Valley sex startup to full blown scandal that involved allegations of coercion, manipulation, and high control group dynamics. They unpack how OneTaste marketed intimacy as enlightenment and why so many got pulled into its orgasmic orbit. Is this a groundbreaking sexual wellness movement… or a textbook case of culty self help? Subscribe to Sounds Like A Cult on Youtube!Follow us on IG @soundslikeacultpod, @amanda_montell, @reesaronii, @chelseaxcharles, @imanharirikia.  Come see Sounds Like A Cult LIVE at The Bell House in New York on April 21st! Tickets at amandamontell.com/events Thank you to our sponsors! To Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain, Head to https://www.squarespace.com/CULT Head to https://acorns.com/CULT or download the Acorns app to get started. Head to https://factormeals.com/cult50off and use code cult50off to get 50% off and free breakfast for a year!  Learn more and join Function using my link. Visit www.functionhealth.com/CULT or use gift code CULT25 for a $25 credit toward your membership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is an all-in-wed website platform for entrepreneurs, artists, podcasters, to stand out and succeed online. I love Squarespace. I am not a web developer, and yet I am very proud of how this sounds like a cold website is looking. And I think it looks gorgeous, thanks to features like their design intelligence. Squarespace payments is also the easiest way to manage your payments in one place.

And Squarespace allows you to give you. your customers multiple ways to pay using popular methods, including ACH direct deposit, Apple pay, after pay, et cetera, et cetera. Check out Squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash cult to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable fact. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. One classic example is there. aversion practice. So let's say you were a female one-taste employee. And there was a customer who

wanted to take a course. You would be asked to own with a customer. And it could be someone that you really don't like. And if you said no, leadership would then come to you and say, well, you should do it anyway for your aversion practice. And so all of a sudden, aversion, which is usually a signal of your boundaries or your desires, becomes then a signal of, well, actually you should do the opposite. Like, you should go toward this thing. I cannot stop thinking about the fallout after Your psyche has now been rewired with how you view sex and experience sex. Even those of us who don't go to large group awareness trainings or orgasmic meditation gatherings, we still grow up hearing phrases like, no pain, no gain.

We think that pain and aversion and arduousness and whatever is a key to self-improvement, which is like the fundamental American value, I feel. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern, cults we all follow. I'm your host Amanda Montel and I'm an author. And I'm your co-host, Chelsea Charles, an unscripted TV producer and a lifelong student of pop culture sociology. Every week on this show, we discuss a different zeitgeisty group that puts the cults in culture, from theater kids to incels to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really?

And if so, which of our three cult categories does it fall into? a live your life, a watcher back, or I get the fuck out. After all, cultish influence falls along a spectrum these days. And look, this word cults can mean a lot of things. It is subjective and context dependent, sometimes sensational, other times really useful, other times just cheeky and fun. And this show, as those who've been listening for a while, is all about analyzing the ways that cultishness shows up in everyday life.

to examine how we're actually all susceptible to cultish influence, even if we think we're too smart for that. But also we're here to compare how not all culty groups these days are created equal. And we like to have a little bit of a laugh about it along the way. So today we're addressing a sub-movement built on a fantasy of perfectly optimized inner self. A group that thrives on high-gloss intimacy, curated vulnerability, and weaponized spirituality. These aren't just wellness seekers or tantra enthusiasts.

They're living avatars of a self-help fairy tale where orgasm is sold as enlightenment. You've probably seen their language floating around on Instagram, definitely in wellness retreats. The people preaching, orgasmic, awakening, selling intimacy as subscription model, standing barefoot in lofts lit, with salt lamps, they're ultra loyal to their practice and their purpose, but mostly to

one taste. Oh my God, Chelsea. Were you familiar with One Taste before we started researching this episode? No. No? I'm like not proud that I was, but I think my YouTube algorithm sent me down this rabbit hole like eight years ago or so. I mean, you cannot look away when you are prompted to watch a video called Wellness Orgasm, Col, coerces people into masturbating one another in a 15-minute-long ritual, blah, blah, blah. I was just like, oh, yeah, I'm going to click on that. And then it's just wild that that weird sort of shameful rubbernecking that I was doing a decade ago has now become newly relevant because this alleged cult is now the subject of a criminal trial ongoing right now.

So that's super fascinating and I'm so excited for listeners to hear our interview with an investigative journalist named Ellen Hewitt who wrote the investigative book about this cult one taste called Empire of Orgasm, which is brand new and you should check it out. So stick around for that interview. But first, we wanted to give a kind of background in case you are an innocent, sweet, untainted angel like Chelsea and have not gone down the spire. that I have. So, One Taste, alleged orgasm sex cult. It was founded by the charismatic, baggage-ridden girl boss, Nicole Daydone. Now, One Taste was presented as this, like, wellness startup that blended New Age mysticism with Silicon Valley swagger and grew from a single communal loft into a multi-million

intimacy empire with centers in all major cities. One taste burst onto the San Francisco wellness scene in the early 2000s with a seductive and spicy promise. Enlightenment, healing, and emotional transformation through a practice they called orgasmic meditation. Fucking content warning because this shit is like, it's freaky. A 15-minute clitoral stroking ritual marketed not as sex, but as a, quote, neuroscience-backed spiritual technology.

It's giving nexium. Inside, though, the world of one taste was, as you might imagine, complicated. Boundaries blurred under the language of this practice, emotional breakdowns were reframed as breakthroughs, and devotion to the company often meant relentless, upselling, long hours, unpaid labor, and pressure to participate in OM with partners that you didn't choose. Oh, no. Neuroscience jargon and spiritual poetry masked a hierarchy where surrendered equaled status.

You can only imagine how fucked up things got. And again, our perfect guest, Ellen, will detail them later if you are emotionally prepared for such a listen. Basically, this is how we got to the lawsuits and trials of today. In the mid-2000s, former members began sounding alarms. Allegations of sexual coercion, manipulation, financial exploitation, all the cult-like control surfaced, leading to a 2018 BuzzFeed expose and an FBI investigation into labor and trafficking violations. Again, it's giving nexium. One Taste was marketed as a path to intimacy and empowerment,

but ultimately revealed how easily the wellness industry can turn vulnerability, desire, and trauma into a business model and how seductive a cult can look when it's wrapped in linen and the language of healing. Okay, so skipping ahead to present day, in June 2025, a federal jury convicted Nicole de Dadeone, the founder of One Taste, and Rachel Churitz, its former head of sales. of forced labor conspiracy. The verdict found they used deception, psychological, emotional coercion,

abusive practices, and manipulation of vulnerable people to obtain labor and sexual services from staff and employees. The charges reflect what prosecutors described as a coercive scheme, promises of sexual wellness and empowerment in a way to exert control

over people in a way that is equivalent to sex trafficking or labor operations. The conviction survived post-trial motions, a court-rejected defense arguments that evidence was insufficient. Whoa. It is so hard to hold cults accountable this way.

It's like kind of nuts. Oh, absolutely. And listen, the fallout from all of that is the story became so sensationalized that our beloved media powerhouse Netflix took advantage of it, which was quite triggering for the audience and the former followers,

so much so that they tried to sue and block the release of the doc. But unfortunately, once a story becomes a spectacle, it's almost impossible to put the genie back in a bottle. Thus became the story of One Taste, released on Netflix in 2022. It is so bananas to me that Nicole Dadeon, the founder, truly at the bottom of her heart, thought that she would be able to get away. And in some ways, this is fucked up and it kind of reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes, who was the ultimate example of girl bossing too close to the sun, the confidence to think that

your creepy orgasm startup would not draw negative attention. I agree. It's so San Francisco too. That entire umbrella, I'm like, this is like quintessentially San Francisco. Literally, it's like, people in San Francisco can't engage in any activity without making it a startup. Just the way that people in LA can't engage in any activity without making it a web series. Just wow. Industry towns. Anyway, this is all baseline background, but I think we need to get into our culty analysis to understand what really happened within one taste. And to help us dig a little deeper into it, we've got Ellen Hewitt joining us today. She's an investigative journalist known for her work in Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Business Week, where she covers topics including tech industry,

dynamics. She's the author of Empire of Orgasm, a new book about One Taste. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is an all-in-wed website platform for entrepreneurs, artists, podcasters, hi, to stand out and succeed online. So whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it super easy to set up a beautiful website that represents your brand, to connect with your audience, and to sell anything from products to content to even your valuable time. love Squarespace. I am not a web developer, and yet I am very proud of how this sounds like a cold website is looking. It is a Squarespace website. It has been since long before Squarespace was

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including ACH direct deposit, Apple Pay, after pay, et cetera, et cetera. Check out Squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash cold to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. If you have nothing nice to say, you can sit with us. I'm Suzanne Lambert, comedian, mean girl, and internet menace, and this is the Mean But True podcast. Every week, a special guest tonight will talk pop culture, current events, romance,

whatever we feel like. I don't know. Are you a cop? We'll be keeping it funny, playful, and petty, per usual. You cringe at the site of people posting QR codes to fund their own bachelette parties. You need to know how to respond to that coworker with the bad haircut, who's always making digs are just me to get something off your chest. Make sure to subscribe to Mean But True wherever you listen to podcasts,

unless, of course, you hate fun, in which case, don't. I'm Suzanne Lambert, and this is mean, but true. Ellen, thank you so much for joining this Sounds Like a Cult Podcast. Thank you so much for having me. So, Ellen, when you first encountered One Taste as a reporter, as a morbidly curious individual. In those early days, did it immediately feel cult-like to you? And if so, how?

Or at the very start, did it present more like that girl-bossy wellness startup with eccentric contours? I mean, it definitely seemed more the latter to me. Like, when I first heard about one taste in orgasmic meditation, I had read a couple pieces that explored, like, what is this thing? what is this practice? Who is the woman who started it? What is orgasmic meditation again? And you're saying it does what for my life? So I think as any naturally curious person would react, I thought,

whoa, this is interesting. It's certainly intriguing. It's provocative. You know, orgasmic meditation is just not an idea that you hear every day or even every year. And when you hear it, it's pretty hard to forget. So often when I tell people about the book, they're like, oh yeah, 15 minute clitoral stroking. Like, I have heard of that. And it really wasn't until I started digging a a little deeper into the stories of people who had been more closely involved in the group and had left that I started to hear some of the more shocking things that end up in that first story that I wrote as well as like in the book about one taste. These allegations that the group was actually really predatory, both financially and sexually and allegations that it was a cult.

I just like did not expect that because the original pitch is so fascinating already. Like there's so much to cover in the basic pitch, which is like this clitoral stroking practice is going to change your relationships and your life and give you better vitality and in some cases like an access to the divine within you. There's a lot to unpack in that already. So it doesn't immediately make you think like, I need to find out what the second layer is. It is so interesting that that was your first impression because when I went down my first one taste rabbit hole, I mean, this is just like my occupational hazard and lens, but I was just like, ooh, another cult to get interested in. Well, at the time that I learned about them, I wasn't like particularly oriented toward reporting on cults in any way. I was covering startups. I lived in the Bay Area my whole life. I was living in San Francisco at the time. I was actually living in a communal house at the time that this happened. This is like not so far from my regular life, which I think has actually allowed me to approach the topic with a lot of understanding and compassion. I'm not super woo, but I'm definitely more woo than like most people. And so I accept that and, you know, celebrate that about my.

myself. And the ideas in these workshops are very adjacent to some of the things that I just like understand and spend time around in my normal life. So that may have been part of it as I'm kind of a San Francisco person. That's amazing context. And that makes you like such a unique person to report on this, that empathy and familiarity. So Ellen, I want to start talking about our founder, Nicole Daydone's role and compare that to that of a traditional. cult leader. Do you think that she was a guru, a CEO, or was she both? I mean, I think what makes her special is that she really did try to do both. For those who read the book, they'll learn that Nicole was first inspired to learn this meditative clitoral stroking practice from these two other

groups that were based in the Bay Area in the decades before one taste came to prominence. And she observed how they were these other leaders doing something similar. And they were both men for what it's worth. And she decided that she was going to do her own thing and create her own version of this. Rebrand the practice from deliberate orgasm, which was its old name, call it orgasmic meditation, position herself as the leader as opposed to these men and really make it a business. That's what I think makes it unique as well, is that these other groups sold courses in part to keep the doors open, but they weren't trying to evangelize a message by making it a startup.

And in San Francisco, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, if you had a message for the world, if you wanted to like share your vision with the rest of humanity, one of the best ways to spread that message was to make it a company. And Nicole really leaned into that. She really did a lot of CEO type things of the time, like gave a TEDx talk, spoke at South by Southwest. They hosted conferences.

She wrote a book. Like it's all these things that were not just what you might imagine. a cult leader from 30 or 40 years ago doing, she was really positioning herself as like a modern woman in power, like a thought leader and a CEO, a girl boss, you might even say, which I sort of hate that term. But like of the time, you know, girl boss, CEO, there was this energy in the air in the 2010s in which women in leadership, people were extra excited about that. It's such a product of its time, this particular organization, cult leader role, as cults always are a product of their time, you know, like you were mentioning cults of your

in the 70s on compounds, new agey sort of reinterpretations of Christianity. That was the cult that we now think of as like the stereotypical cult, but this was a cult of the girl boss era. And as cult leaders are opportunistic, they're going to react to what the culture is interested in at the time. And that very much feels like what this was as absolutely fucked up as it is. Ellen, so you touched on the language associated with one taste. And we all know, know that language is often where cultiness starts to creep in and OneTaste had an entire dictionary of its own. It had incredibly specific language like Om, which I think is very interesting. Stroker, resourcing, numbness, your edge. How did this vocabulary reshape members' understanding of

consent, agency, and discomfort? So on the surface, there's a lot about the language of One Taste that already serves to, as you both know, separate the in-group from the out-group, emphasize certain aspects of the group. For example, like, orgasmic meditation was abbreviated as OM, pronounced oom. Already we know that, first of all, calling it meditation, evokes a spiritual practice, labeling it ohm, which of course many people will recognize as like a mantra that you might hear in a yoga studio and has many other meanings. That's already suggesting a connection to like an ancient practice, giving it this sort of like religious authenticity. And then beyond that, there were so many terms that people used to emphasize like in-group out-group. So for example, you know, is very

millennial of them, but they used to refer to outsiders as muggles because they felt like if you were inside one taste, you were experiencing this like magic way of living. And if you were outside, you just, you were honestly like blind to it, kind of pitiable. They called the muggles. They used to call people who left the group and had defected. They used to call them dead. They would say they were asleep. Like they used to the terms of the matrix a lot. This sense of in and out was really heightened by the language. And on the sales team, they would use certain terms that you might recognize more from like porn sets or sex work or other types of sales. They would call their customers marks. They would talk about hooking them if they were like really bringing someone

in emotionally or use the term. This was one of my favorites that you'd talk about fluffing someone ahead of a sale. So if there was an interested customer, former sales workers told me that they were encouraged to fluff them by like flirting with them or doing these kind of suggestive interactions that would make them more interested in buying a course that would get them more access to this community. But, you know, specifically you were talking about agency, consent. This is, I think, the heart of what makes one face so complicated. So they have these philosophies within the group that played with the idea of where the edges of your consent were. And when you give something like that a name, and I'll talk about the names in the second,

it helps codify this idea in the minds of the people who are really devoted to the group and the community. And I think it gives them a lot of power. So one classic example is their aversion practice. So this was a practice that was taught widely within one taste. Many people have described it to me. And it basically says that you gain more spiritual and sexual power and enlightenment if you do acts that you feel a strong aversion to. And the stronger the aversion, the more liberation you stand to gain by doing that anyway. And sometimes this was non-sexual, but most of the time it was sexual. So an example that many people described to me as let's say you were a female one-taste employee. There was a customer who wanted to take a course and part of the course included learning the orgasmic meditation

practice. Well, it turns out they need a female partner in order to do that. And you would be asked to own with a customer and it could be someone that you really don't like or feel very aversive to in some way. And if you said no, many people describe that leadership would then come to you and say, well, you should do it anyway for your aversion practice. And so all of a sudden, Aversion, which is usually a signal of like your boundaries or your desires, becomes then a signal of, well, actually you should do the opposite. Like, you should go toward this thing. And other types of lingo was also used to reinforce this idea. So other people have described to me that people were kind of shamed for being too resistant. I think that shows up in a lot of groups.

You've probably heard that before. But being too resistant that if you had too many preferences, if you were too attached to your preferences about who you were having sex with, that was a problem. And for some women, they also described if they said, to a suggestion or an assignment of a sexual partner that they would be shamed for having a quote unquote golden pussy. And excuse my language, but within one taste they used the words pussy and cock specifically to revel in the charge of those words. And again, that's just another way that both it's emphasizing this certain attitude towards sexuality within the group, which was that intensity and extreme experiences are what are going to bring you personal growth. And it's

another way to separate you from the outside world. Like people don't casually throw those words around outside, but if you were someone who's really immersed in one taste, you might be walking around saying, like, my pussy told me to wake up and do this exercise today. Like, that is not so out of the question. And it's something that really separates you from other people. Bless you for that incredibly cogent analysis. And I think in sort of, if you want to crudely call them sex cults or these high control groups where like sex is the centerpiece, special language, euphemistic language, redefinitions of existence. words, sort of flipping the script and manipulations of terms that you would have once considered

negative or positive, like kind of turning them on their head. That all becomes extremely important, like especially important because sex is obviously such a charge and personal thing. More so than like money or just like consumerism. It's the most intimate thing we do. So changing your ideas about it is a way for the group to deepen its hold on you because it's like all of a sudden if you believe this different thing than what you came in with, if you've changed your belief as a result of joining a group like this, then you're more hooked. And like in fact, even within one taste, they redefined orgasm. They took the word orgasm, which many of us think means a moment of sexual climax. Like, we all know what that is.

And they actually redefined it. They said, actually, orgasm to us doesn't mean climax. They used the word climax to distinguish that. And then they said orgasm and they would often use a capital O, is instead this more broad, higher level of arousal that doesn't involve a climax and is in facts, at times, within their group is elevated to orgasm now means like a full on erotic energy that guides your life and your intuition. And it is honestly much more comparable to like the force in Star Wars. They would talk about it like, my connection to my orgasm is really strong these days or like it's weak or what does your orgasm tell you to do? Like that is a straight-faced question that they would ask each other. And again, that's just a way that,

shifting the language, then just brings you in deeper. Oh my God. So much of it reminds me so much of Scientology. Scientology has like full dictionaries, full of coined neologisms, but also twisted definitions of words that we already know. And if you're just walking down the street in Los Angeles and encounter a high-ranking Scientologist, oftentimes you can't understand what they're saying. And that's reminding me of like what you're saying right now.

Because if you've been conditioned to think that orgasm, capital O, means this like spiritual thing that like it does not mean to anyone else. And well, great, now the only people you can talk to are other one-taste people. Totally. And more about that, conditioning Amanda, what you were saying earlier, Ellen, about the aversion therapy. I cannot stop thinking the entire time you were talking, I'm like about the fallout after. Your psyche has now been rewired with how you view sex and experience sex. And I just can't help but to think about how these people that have left the group are now navigating, I guess, re-exploring sex. It's just, I don't know, that's just so terrifying. I mean, Chelsea, you're getting at something very real,

which is that for people who left one taste, making sense of things like aversion practice were some of the most difficult and painful things that they had to do in order to process their time there. Because think about it, imagine you were really devoted to a group that told you that for your personal growth, for your enlightenment, sort of for your spiritual advancement, you should lean into doing things that you very clearly on some level feel that you don't want to do. So you do them. So then afterward, you leave and you're like, wait, how do I even make sense of this? If I under this premise chose to do this action that I didn't want to do, like what does that even mean that I consented to? Or did I consent? What is consent when it is given under pressure?

We don't have firm, widely agreed upon frameworks for that question. And that question is central to many people's psychological experience at one taste is that they were, on some level, taking action under an extremely unusual set of circumstances, whether that's a mix of social pressure or psychological pressure. People often described it as a pressure cooker. And there is not a clear way to make sense of where consent lies in there for different propositions. And I wish there was an easy answer, but as with a lot of complicated and difficult things in life, there is not. Wow. God. It's such a grave exit cost, which is obviously.

such a classic red flag of cults to leave and find that you have so much deconstruction and relearning and oftentimes trauma. Sometimes we cover really lighthearted cults in scare quotes on this show like Trader Joe's lovers or people who just go to IKEA a lot. And if you stop going to Trader Joe's, you're not going to have all this unpacking and like fucked up psychological coercion and conditioning to work through. This is an important reference point for this podcast, I think. Hi, I'm Eric Voss from New Rockstars. And if you want to know what's coming up next from the MCU, you should listen to The Sneak Peak, hosted by myself and Jessica Clemens. Sneak peek is your one-stop shop for keeping up with Kevin Feigy and his brain trust of nerd producers. It's a weekly roundup of

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I was wondering if you could talk about the power distribution within One Taste. Like, what did the power hierarchy look like? And was it all centered around, like, one charismatic leader? So within One Taste, there was an obvious visionary leader. It was Nicole Daydon. She is the creator of this world, this community, this idea. She's the visionary leader. She's this huge personality.

People speak of her in, frankly, like, semi-divine terms, depending on their point of view. And she had like a very effective set of lieutenants who did a lot of work for her. And she was really good at sort of being the leader and then bringing people along as she built the company. So she found an early co-founder, Rob Kandel, who for example did a lot of the business operations of One Taste in its early days and kind of like funded a lot of it and did a lot of that work. And then later on kind of her main right-hand woman was this person named Rachel Chirwitz, who not to skip too far ahead, but ends up actually being her co-defendant in the criminal trial against her in 2025. And Rachel functions as an enforcer. And this is a role that you will see in other groups like the Rajneesh Pram and other places where you have this leader who has this vision and is kind of almost like kept protected from the followers. They're kept in this like separate plane. And then there is the enforcer who derives their power from being very close to that person, but who also is free to them wield whatever. tools they choose to use to enforce compliance, to spread directives. And so Rachel, a lot of people

described to me, Rachel, as kind of Nicole's pit bull. If Nicole had an idea of what needed to happen, Rachel was the one who then went and like many people have described to me, her yelling at people screaming at them, bullying them to get in line or shaming them in some way. And then most importantly, she was the head of sales for many years at One Taste. And the way that One Taste made money as a business was by selling these increasingly expensive courses on how to do the orgasmic medication practice and live an orgasmic life. So some of those courses could cost 20 or even $30,000. And you needed to have someone who was running the sales team. And people sent me examples of the sales text threads that Rachel used to run. And she is like yelling at people in all

caps over and over again to do this or do that during the courses. Like guys, wake up. It looks like you're asleep back there. She means that metaphorically. Like you guys seem asleep. Like you need to get up and like go hunt and go find like customers and this and that. And it's really intense even to like read those just a decade later, she was really the person who kind of turned the screws and it allowed Nicole to remain above the fray. Okay. So some cults that we've covered on this show and that exists in the world hide under non-profit status for protections in the United States. This group successfully for a long time hid under Silicon Valley business status. Could you talk a little bit about how OneTase merged wellness culture with Silicon Valley business acumen and what that sort of blend of

business optimization and spiritual doctrine kind of led to. I mean, this is also one of the fascinating things about OneTaste is it was so in line with these really widespread and powerful business trends of the time. So think about, you know, One Taste was founded in 2004. It really started picking up steam in like 2009, 2010. Goop launched in 2008. Like, it's the beginning of this wellness industry boom that people are completely enamored by, this idea that you can spend money on courses and practices and access to teachers that are going to not just improve your health, but often the promise of wellness is total transformation. It is this sense that if you do a certain practice or change certain things about your lifestyle,

that you will essentially transcend. You know, they often make these really big promises. And so One Taste was really buoyed by that. All of a sudden, it's this theme. male-oriented pleasure practice that is going to not just give you better sex, better relationships, better intimacy, but it was going after that sense of like, you've got a glow, you've got a special vibrancy about you. There were even people who got really into one taste who would make claims like orgasmic meditation cured my Crohn's disease. Orgasmic meditation helped with my depression.

It saved my marriage. It helped me find God. All these things that are very common claims that you might find in wellness. And then at the same time, there's this energy that's coming from the Silicon Valley boom that, again, starts kind of in the late 2000s, it threw out the 2010s. This idea of like peak performance, body optimization. This is when we start getting the first, you know, quantified self-risk trackers that like track your body. There's this sense that people want to improve their bodies in a way that is going to, again, take them onto another plane.

This is a little bit more male coded. This is where, for example, One Taste got an endorsement pretty early on from Tim Ferriss, who was writing the four-hour body. He devoted an entire chapter to orgasmic meditation. was a huge deal. He was talking about Ome. He said, this should be required education for every man on the planet. And so think about all the men who are coming to San Francisco in the 2010s, because there's essentially a gold rush happening in San Francisco. And I know I was living there at the time. And here's this 15-minute hack that's going to, like, give you a better life. It's like a hack for

sex and wellness and like more energy and things like that. That was also happening. Then the last part is that meditation was also becoming something that helped you achieve more in the workplace. It was kind of getting mixed with capitalism this really interesting way in the 2010s. You started seeing conferences like the Wisdom 2.0 conference that talked about how mindfulness practices could honestly improve your company's bottom line or make you a better performer or a better CEO or give you more access to like visionary thinking. And, you know, it wasn't out of place for Google to have like workshops on how to use mindfulness in the workplace to like improve your stress relief. Like there was this sense that meditation, body optimization,

wellness. And then keep in mind, San Francisco also has this history of like, yeah, New Age Spiritualism, all these things coming together plus women's empowerment, women CEOs. Like it was all these trends that braided together to make one taste into this perfect example of what spiritual commercialism looked like in America. And I think that's a huge part of why it got traction is that it was offering something that people genuinely yearn for, which is like a promise to improve your ability to relate to other people, but at exactly the right time and the right place, which is a killer combination. Fucking America, dude.

It is truly no wonder that cults thrive here. Like, they're set up too. Absolutely. It's very much also, like, I definitely think that the idea within one taste, that personal growth was the be all end all. Like, people would often take actions that made them scared or uncomfortable because they thought on the other side there would be personal growth. Also, like, a pretty American idea, this idea that, like, it is up to you to be

constantly improving this abstract sense of yourself and to devote tons of money to it. One Tastes is not alone in charging tens of thousands of dollars for workshops that promise personal transformation. Those have also been around for several decades, but have really taken off in the last couple. Think about Landmark Forum, Tony Robbins, all these workshops where you go and you have these peak experiences of like insights and breakthroughs, often at quite an expensive cost, but there's this sense that those are like worth spending 30 or 40,000 or $40,000 on because they're going to transform your life. Oh my God, for sure.

I mean, even those of us who don't go to, like, large group awareness trainings or orgasmic meditation gatherings, like, we still grow up hearing phrases like, no pain, no gain. We think that pain and aversion and, like, arduousness and whatever is a key to self-improvement, which is, like, the fundamental American value, I feel. And, I mean, the thing is with ideas like aversion practice or another idea that was common at one taste that shows up in so many other places is this idea that you, you should take radical or like 100% responsibility for your experience. Both of those ideas have value.

That's what's complicated about it. Is that like aversion practice that's like, okay, well, yeah, getting out of your comfort zone, doing things that you're a little afraid of. Even I think that that's a great idea. Like, people should do that. But the problem is like the moderation was completely lost or that it was like applied with pressure to these situations that just ended up being

really harmful. And then same with this radical responsibility. Like, again, yes, it can be empowering to reframe narratives about your life in a way that puts you in the driver's seat. I wholeheartedly believe that. And at the same time, if you tell someone, as they did at one taste, that it is lowly or weak-minded or small-minded to think of yourself as a victim ever, or to only ever think that things in your life are the result of your responsibility and your actions, then that completely erases the possibility that someone could harm you. It means that if there are no victims, then there's no perpetrators.

And it means that you can then argue that, oh, you're feeling hurt. Guess it's your fault. Like your idea that you think that. And so it's tough because like, as with lots of things, it's not black and white. There is value to these ideas. That's part of why they work. That's part of why they're attractive. And then it is so hard to tell when it goes too far.

But they do. And then really harmful things happen. It totally absolves them from the responsibility. It's very convenient. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. So Ellen, in many of these high control or.

destructive groups, there is a familiar pattern where leaders often start with like a lofty promise, enlightenment, healing, transformation, and gradually decide that any method, no matter how coercive or harmful, is justified in that vision. This ends justify the means mindset is often what turns those woo-woo wellness movements into a system of control. Do you use? Do you, Do you believe that one taste was intentionally predatory or did it collapse under the weight of its own ideology? I have struggled to answer this question and it usually relates to like, what do I think is Nicole's motivation, right? What do I think is driving her? Because she is really at the center of this. And I'm a reporter. I'm not her. I'll never know really what's inside her head. But I keep seeing

glimpses of both. You know, throughout my reporting through this book, I would see moments as described to me by people who were close to her or who witnessed this, where she really seemed to be toying with other people, controlling them out of a personal sense of like twisted pleasure for it or remorselessness or like it really appeared that way. Like it was hard for me to hear these stories and read them in any other way. And people who were close to her would describe her doing that. And even at the same time, some of those same people would say there were also moments where she seemed to show this genuine belief that her practice and her methods, which were often, again, quite extreme. And we can talk about like why those were, but she had lived in extreme life and she felt that she

had reached enlightenment. And she wanted to show other people her path. This is like a pretty generous, but I think also like kind of fair interpretation of her motives. There are also moments where I really feel like she thought she was waking people up in the way that worked for her and really truly believing, sometimes in a way that bulldozed other people's ideas about what was good for them. She really believed that she was showing them something that was going to lead to, again, personal growth, enlightenment, kind of like breakthroughs. And then there were also times when, yeah, it seemed like she was just doing things to mess with people.

And there's a quote in the book from her ex-husband who was married to her briefly, like, kind of before she got famous. And he says, you know, like essentially that her secret thrill was figuring out what she could get other people to do. And that's not a great way to treat other people. I'm going to go ahead and say that. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, Anne, at the same time, she would show like radical openness and compassion for people who had been through really dark things. We don't have to get too into it, but like Nicole's father was a convicted child sex abuser, and this is something that shaped her really significantly when she was a kid. Part of the book tries to answer the question also was she directly abused by her father. And there are people, because she has never spoken about that publicly in much clarity. And there are people I found who knew her when she was younger who said, actually like, yeah, she did tell me that her father had sexually abused her.

That's obviously like a huge, really traumatic thing to experience as a child that is likely going to have repercussions for the rest of your life on how you think about your relationships in your family. your relationship to sexuality, all of that. And that part of her did many things to her life trajectory, but that part of her also allowed her to relate very compassionally to people who had been through extremely difficult sexual histories. And so for a lot of people who had something like that in their past, coming to one taste was deeply alluring. Like they wanted to experience the kind of sexual healing that Nicole projected. Whether she had actually experienced it or not is kind of up for

debate. Depends on your point of view. But that was the promise. And it was a promise with a lot of gravitas where like this is a place where you can talk about really dark, serious stuff. And for a lot of people who were drawn to one taste, it was because you could talk about sex in this really straightforward, candid, open way that is honestly pretty hard to find elsewhere. That's so fair. And I want to be clear, like, I know you're not defending Nicole. But what you're saying is really illuminating with regard to like why people wanted to join and why people wanted to stay. And that's so valid. And yeah, like she wasn't just 100% evil or else like smart people wouldn't have wanted to be around her. And that quote about her getting off on seeing what she could get other people to do, I mean, look, we're interviewers. That's our job.

I love seeing what I can get people to tell me. But I think there is obviously a line where that crosses into unethical. You mentioned some of the like extreme behaviors that Nicole did and that might have like pushed her into. cult leader territory, could you talk about some of those extreme behaviors and how OneTaste continued operating after those extreme behaviors were brought to light? Yeah. I mean, in her formative years, Nicole experimented with a lot of drugs. Like, there are people who told me she used meth. She has spoken about using copious amounts of LSD. She had a period of time in which she was a sex worker. She has described it as being an escort, as well as a stripper. And she has talked about those formative experiences later when she was like coaching and leading and lecturing

to her one-taste students. And so there was this idea that her life was often something to be mimicked as a way to, again, get to the kind of transformation that she had access to. And then she would also make more explicit prescriptions and stuff for her students. So for example, some of the, what I would call an extreme behavior in the sense that it's, that's not meant to be a judgment, but it's just more intense than kind of what the average person does. So within the one-taste community, Nicole would sometimes give assignments, Nicole and other leaders, in which they were kind of handed out casually, but a lot of people really wanted to do them in part because it was a chance to impress Nicole with your dedication or how much you were like a big player in this game that they were all playing. So an example assignment would be like, oh, your orgasm seems really blocked up these days. You should go and have sex with 30 different men in the next 30 days. And there were some women who described receiving an assignment like that within one taste and doing it. And maybe finding some value in it, but also really confronting afterward being like that was really intense. I'm not sure how I felt about that. Other women described like starting it, being like really

overwhelmed, stopping. So again, it's like no one was like capital F forcing the completion of these assignments. But those women would describe to me how ashamed they felt that they couldn't finish it. So you can sense that social pressure of like you were so approved of and celebrated if you did this thing and you were kind of seen as like, well, she tried but she couldn't really hang if she like couldn't do it. You know, people described, yeah, other assignments were like in classes that they would be, you know, assigned like, okay, you two need to go off and like have sex in the corner while these other two people go do this other sexual act together, just as a way of loosening people up. So there was this sense that these kind of like behaviors would lead to, again, sexual and spiritual growth.

But they were often quite confronting. And in more serious arrangements, there was, you know, something that later came up in the criminal trial is that in order to support the business, Nicole in the late 2000s made an arrangement with a venture capitalist who she met named Reese Jones, who was her boyfriend for a period of time. He was also interested in One Taste. They supported the company financially by lending them money, paying for business expenses. And in exchange, this is according to court testimony and what people have told me, there was an arrangement set up where he was repaid in sexual favors from One Taste employees. So that looked like either these elaborate immersive theater BDSM experiences that were put on for his

birthday. Imagine like a whole cast of actors recreating like a sexual scene for an audience of one. And then those were sometimes themed after the Wizard of Oz or the Seven Deadly Sins. And then there was another system which was essentially that a series of female one-taste employees were asked to serve as sexual handlers for Mr. Jones, which meant that they would do something like live at his house, do some housework, maybe take care of his dog, and then also sexually service him every day. That often looked like a handjob or it could be like some sort of other sex act. And keep in mind that for the women who did that role, at the time that they accepted, they also thought of it as an honor within the community, this idea that it meant that you

were helping the business thrive and you were close to Nicole because all of a sudden you had this relationship with her romantic partner. And it's a very confusing setup within one taste, but you can see how it ties back to again, Nicole had been a sex worker. There was a lot of discussion within the group that like this kind of exchange of sex for money wasn't bad. And I mean, that's also up for debate kind of like more broadly, but this idea that within one taste they tried to teach you, you could have sex with anyone and that it was better to, again, let go of your preferences and like lean into your aversions and be open and not resistant. All these things like help fuel this system that then led to financial support for the company.

So to bring us ahead to current day or close to it, the company was active from 2004 to, you know, into the late 2010s. And in 2017, that's when I first heard about the company. They had actually pitched me to write a story about them because I was covering startups at the time. And they were like, oh, we're like a sexual wellness startup run by women. Like, are you interested? And so I met with their leadership and I learned a little bit about the company. And that's when I also started poking around on my own and finding people who said, like, actually I'd had a terrible experience with this company. There's this whole side to it that has never been made public. Like, I want to tell you more. So of course, I spent several months like really digging into it. I ended up writing this big

investigation in 2018 about these allegations that one taste was a cult and about these allegedly predatory financial and sexual practices that we haven't really touched on the finance stuff, but people say that they were pressured to take on debt in order to buy expensive one-taste courses. That's essentially it. And after that first story came out, a few things happened. I started to hear from sources that the FBI had started investigating, that FBI agents were showing up at the houses of former one-taste members and asking them about what had happened at One-Taste. And they were essentially trying to figure out like how to crime happened here.

And at the same time, One-Taste went into hibernation for a couple of years. They were trying to, like, figure out how to respond. to this kind of like new era of coverage for them. That went on for several years. Like the FBI actually investigated for about five years. During that period of time, I was also working on what would eventually become this book. And all these things were happening in tandem. And then eventually in 2023, federal prosecutors charged Nicole and Rachel Churwitz, her second in command as former head of sales with a federal crime, forced labor conspiracy. And that essentially means like two or more people conspired to try to obtain labor from people in an unlawful

way. So in this specific case, it was through serious harm or threats of serious harm, that kind of thing. And serious harm can be physical, but also psychological, financial, reputational, et cetera. And, you know, I was really shocked that charges were filed against these people because I knew it was a possibility, but it just, I wasn't sure if it was going to happen. And then that kicked off all these legal proceedings that eventually led to a criminal trial in Brooklyn this past summer, where for five or six weeks, a jury heard all these presentations about one taste, and they, at the end of the trial, found Nicole and Rachel guilty of this crime. And so the two women were actually taken into custody the next day. And they're currently in a federal jail in Brooklyn awaiting sentencing, which could come

in early 2026. We just don't know exactly when. Well, we are seated. Wow. Thank you so much for so generously and clearly explaining all of that. It is a big story. And I know it is not easy to, like, succinctly summarize. So, like, you're the goat. We're going to finish this interview by playing a little game because this podcast is all about ricocheting violently between serious cult analysis and laughing uncomfortably. Chelsea? So we're going to play a game of what's cultier? Okay?

So we're just going to compare cult-like things that we've discussed on the podcast to One Taste. So first one, One Taste. or Elizabeth Holmes. Oh. Silicon Valley hometown heroes. I'm going to say one taste, but there are so many colorful details about Elizabeth Holmes that I will never get out of my head. Like her outfit, her voice, like within Silicon Valley, that story has become,

first of all, it was like captivating. And then, of course, then the third and fourth order ripple effects have been hard. Like, they've been hard on female founders who work in. Bio-tech. You know, it's so unfair to them to, like, constantly be dealing with Elizabeth Holmes comparisons. But it is a stunning story. Like, it's really one of those stories that, as a journalist, covering this general industry, like, the story of Theranos is wild. Like, the amount of money that came in and the reputations of the people involved. It was like, like, former secretaries of state are, like, investing in this company and the promises and the use of the founder.

You can understand why it's such a compelling story. But I think on, maybe on the culty scale, one tastes probably a little bit far. Wow. That's a fascinating answer. I'm so obsessed. with Elizabeth Holmes. I was her for Halloween. I love doing her voice. Like, that is a stranger than fiction tale. Totally. What's Caltier? One Taste or the MLM industry? Ooh, I mean, the MLM industry is huge. And I think that OneTaste managed to get endorsed by like, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim Ferriss, Chloe Kardashian. Like, those are the big names. Like, certainly they had success in getting at the edges of the mainstream. But I think if you look at the scale of the MLM industry. It is like stunning how big it is and how profitable. So I'm probably going to say

MLMs because it just says it's like a bigger beast to grapple. Ellen, you're so iconic because like as a part of this game, you so do not have to come up with like the most eloquent justification. You are literally allowed just to say your answer, but like I'm obsessed with everything you're saying. I like to explain my thinking, you know, if I have it. Show your work. Show your work. A plus plus. Okay, so what's cult here? One Taste or Anti-Vaxers? Ooh, I'm going to say anti-vaxxers. It involves children. You know, One-Taste, you can say a lot of things about One-Taste and the way that they harmed people and helped people in like this weird, confusing mix of the two. Children were not involved. And I think when children get involved, that gets, that's a whole other ballgame. Like, when you talk about people who were not just in a cult, but were born into it, every time I read those stories, I think, like, that's a totally higher level of complexity and impact. on someone's life. Okay, so that makes me want to change the next one that I'm going to ask,

because that's such a good point. One Taste or Waldorf schools? Oh, I don't know that much about Waldorf schools, but someone was telling me the other day that their friend who grew up in a total like Waldorf education has some sort of special skill about like their sort of bodily awareness of other people. So like I guess it made me realize that there might be more philosophical overlap than I expected between One Taste and the Waldorf School because like One Taste also promises that you would learn how to read nonverbal cues of other people. That is part of the pitch of if you are a regular own practitioner that you will be able to sense in your partner, like read their body better essentially.

And I had not thought of the Walder School as maybe teaching that to its children. And that is the extent of what I know. So I'm going to say One Taste, but I'm curious. Now I'm going to read more about Walder School. Amazing. Oh my God. Fucking Waldorf schools. Okay. One Taste or Kundalini Yoga? Oh. I mean, I think One Taste uses a lot of references to Kundalini yoga. And so that's one of the funny things about One Taste and Nicole is she's kind of like a magpie. She'll like go around and like pick the best part. You know, she was picking bits a lot from Buddhism, obviously, but then like Kabbalah and Theosophy and

Kundalini, this and that. And I got to say, it's a total question mark for me. Like I just don't know. I have heard many people in my life and in my reporting talk about like, Kundalini Energy. If you asked me to identify it or define it in any way, I wouldn't know the answer. So I'm going to pass on that one. Okay, great. Pass. Who, okay, but who do you think had cooler celebrity followers? Because you just named a few celebrity followers of one taste, Gwenath Haltrow, Chloe Kardashian.

But Kundalini had Adrian Brody, Demi, Dime Moore, Russell Brand. I think that one might undo. That's like one of those graphics you see on Instagram where it's like, like where would you like to sit on the airplane? It's like in between Russell Brand and Demi Moore or in between Guineath Paltrow and Chloe Kardashian? I think I'm choosing that. I would probably pick sitting between Demi Moore and Russell Brand and then I would

rather talk to Demi Moore. I don't think I want to sit next to Gwenith Paltrow. I'm afraid of her. Oh, that's super fair. I guess you could just like spike Russell Brand's plain wine with a zanee and just be like, put him to sleep. He was like turn my body away. from him, having to look out the window and I'll talk to the other person.

Okay. Last one. One Taste or the Twin Flames universe? Great comparison because one of the things about One Taste that people, I hope that they walk away with an understanding of this. And again, your listeners are like, I'm sure, very well versed in this. But basically, yeah, that like cults are constantly changing. One of their concentrates is that they are changing to adapt with the times. And it was fascinating for me to see how One Taste starts this example of groups that are like more business oriented, more, you know, they started to be like online a lot more like they had conferences and like a big present. They were making their own like podcasts for a long time 15 years ago. And obviously that there's

a woman at the top. I think that goes against some of the perceptions that people have about like what cults look like. They, you know, they might still have this outdated idea. And the really compelling examples of these like alleged cults that are that really gain their followers online, that really have these like female leaders. I think there's like kind of two leaders of that group. But to me, Twin Flames is like another example of like what people need to be aware that, you know, I'll say alleged, but that like an alleged cult can look like that can look like a YouTuber, an Instagram influencer. It can even, this is getting into my like day job as a tech reporter at Bloomberg, but it can even look like chat chachibati. Like I just wrote this big story about people who go into

these delusional spirals and in some cases psychotic episodes in their relationship with chatubit. And people described it to me as a cult of two. It's you and this entity that you imbue all of this knowledge and like authority to. And this thing is like programmed to tell you exactly what you want to hear, to flatter you, to make you feel like you've come across some special divine discovery, like, oh, you've awoken in the chatbot or you can use me to speak to spirit guides and starvings and stuff like that. And then it isolates you from other sources of information and other relationships. You're literally like saying in three sentences what we spent two hours talking about yesterday. I'm just like, what? I mean, it's, it's fascinating.

And I think people really need to be aware that like a cult leader doesn't even need to be human anymore. It can look like AI. It can look like a chat bot that you have created that knows you really well and can therefore then tap into those emotional wells that are what draw people to cults, this feeling of wanting to be seen and special and feeling like you belong or have a mission in a purpose. We all have those. And it's just the format of how that gets pulled is changing. And so anyway, Twin Flames, I would say, I don't know which one's cultier. They would say tie, maybe. Oh, tie. But what I like about that comparison is that it highlights to me this way that people yeah, need to have their eyes open about. Like, a cult just might not look like what you think

it does anymore. I could not have said it better myself. Ellen, you are perfect. You are everything. I would follow you onto a dangerous compound in the woods, whatever you want. But if people want to follow you in more of like the professional, if parasocial way, where can they do that? I'm on Instagram. It's at E. Hewitt, and I have a substack, ellenhuitt.subsec.com. Sleigh. All right, Chelsea. Out of these three cult categories, live your life, watch your back, and get the fuck out.

What I wonder, do you think the cult of one taste falls into? A resounding get the fuck out. This, I mean, surface level, because I watch, obviously, you know, after doing research, but then watching a documentary, you learn, like, surface level things, but after our conversation that we just had with the brilliant Ellen Hewitt, it couldn't go any other way. I am just flabbergasted by one taste. And like we discussed earlier, I just can't help but to think about how this has affected the people who were, you know, able to leave the group and they're just understanding around sex.

And I don't know, it's sad and scary. It's so sad. I mean, it's a product of the general culty vulnerability in the United States that we're just like fucked up about sex. And there's a lot of purity, culture and misogyny and sexual trauma in this country. and a group to help rehabilitate that could be great, but like one taste was never it, and that's a shame. It's a get the fuck out.

Wild that we're recording this episode right before the trial decision is made. But juicy little ep for Sounds Like a Cult, that is our show. Thanks so much for listening. Stick around for a new cult next week. But in the meantime, stay culty. But not too, culting. Sounds like a cult was created by a cult. Amanda Montel and edited by Jordan Moore of the Podcaven. This episode was hosted by Amanda

Montel and Chelsea Charles. This episode was produced by Chelsea Charles. Our managing producer is Katie Epperson. Our theme music is by Casey Cole. If you enjoyed the show, we'd really appreciate it. If you could leave it five stars on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It really helps the show a lot. And if you like this podcast, feel free to check out my book, Cultish, the Language of Fanaticism, which inspired the show. You might also enjoy my other books, The Age of Magical Oversthinking, Notes on Modern Irrationality, and Wordslet, a Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. Thanks as well to our network studio 71. And be sure to follow the Sounds Like a Cult cult on Instagram for all the discourse at Sounds like a cult pod,

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