Cults often evolve from seemingly benign self-help movements into exploitative organizations by rebranding themselves as legitimate businesses, using psychological manipulation, financial exploitation, and false empowerment narratives to recruit and control members. OneTaste, an orgasm cult founded by Nicole Daedone in the Bay Area, exemplifies this pattern: it began as a 'sex-positive' meditation practice but transformed into a Silicon Valley-style startup selling courses, exploiting members through debt, sexual coercion, and psychological abuse while maintaining a public image of female empowerment. The cult's leaders were eventually convicted of sex trafficking and forced labor conspiracy, demonstrating how cults can operate for years before legal consequences materialize.
Part Three: The Orgasm CultAjouté :
[music] >> Coolzone Media >> Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you're listening to or like watching right now. I think like 10% of the audience watches, but it's impossible to tell because streaming numbers are famously opaque. But you know what's not opaque? Our guest for the podcast today, the great Jamie Loftus, here to help us finish the epic saga of One Taste, a Bay Area orgasm cult that went way too far. Jamie, welcome back to the show.
>> So good to be here. I am famously translucent. It is nice to not be opaque.
Yeah, I I do wonder who's watching. But usually I feel like if someone is watching, they'll let you know, and they'll let you know exactly what looks wrong about you. So I'll I'll get back to you with with the numbers.
>> Good to know.
Uh we also have on the podcast today our producer Sophie Lichterman, who is not showing up through video because you don't need to just need to justify that to you, you maniacs watching the show.
You don't need to know why Sophie's not going to be on video. She's not. Deal with it.
>> yeah, we don't need another subreddit about if I'm safe or not, guys.
>> Yeah, podcast listeners, you can just continue ignoring all of this.
>> I'm not Of course I'm unsafe. What are you talking about?
>> are are you excited to conclude this epic story? Cuz we we had a little bit of a break, a longer one than we usually do between the first two parts and the third. So, you know, I I I I expect things have been building up, edging, if you will, as we wait for, you know, the conclusion here.
>> I I liked I it did feel kind of like method podcasting that you sort of left me hanging on the edge of something thrilling for like 10 days. And now I >> Yeah.
>> [sighs and gasps] >> I'm I'm ready to What What is like Is enlightenment this feeling of knowledge coming? Like what is if knowledge is coming, what is that? That's enlightenment, Nirvana?
>> It's interesting that come to the longer one taste goes on the more Nicole did own who is again like the leader of all this gets everyone referring to orgasm as if it's like mana and like a like a like a role playing game or something like your orgasm is low or you've got a high level of orgasm your power your orgasm is powerful so like your they refer to orgasm not as like like a biological thing that that happens you know sometimes but as like this this mana pool that you build up over time both through like oohing through like receiving it if you have a vagina or through giving you know oohing you build up your orgasm level and it's almost like this mana pool that helps you gain powers that's kind of how she talks about it as time GOES ON >> SORT OF WHAT you were doing for us and for the okay I see I see the decision >> I wanted to raise your mana >> One of my favorite things about cult stories is just like the moving goal posts and how you're like oh you thought that was coming well actually there's a secret different kind of come that there is a huge financial barrier to to access >> It it's part of this like cults have to be all consuming they have to like fill every space in your life cults don't want you to have like hobbies or you know outside stuff going on so you know if you're if it's a cult like Scientology where it's supposed to be all consuming you've got this totally different way of looking at the world and psychology and the mind that's easier but if you come in with like this really narrow focus like Nicole did where it's just about you know cunnilingus basically you really have to like you have to get creative to to that all consuming cuz most people just it's not an option to to to have oral sex all day, every day, for that to be like your only behavior. So, you really have to work to make that everything.
>> Yeah, you should never you should never start a cult around something that is free to do. Right, yes. It's It's going to get difficult quickly if people figure out they can come for free at their house.
>> Although, you know, Jamie, people have always technically been able to come for free, and yet one of the most reliable ways to make money is assisting them in that. So, >> That's true. That's true. And I will say, you know, say what you will about Nicole, but she certainly has gotten creative with it so far.
>> She's creative. She's creative.
>> I have never heard quite of this.
>> Yeah.
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>> So, in mid-2006, OneTaste used Rob's money, remember our boy Rob who's, you know, she's she's turned into like the figure the male figurehead a lot of the time of the cult in this period. She uses his money to lease a warehouse, and Nicole Manday says everyone's got to live together.
Now, we're all living in this [ __ ] warehouse. This will be the first of two different warehouses that are like communal living spaces. And initially >> warehouses? Warehouse could mean so much.
>> you know, it's it's off of what you what's it called? It's off of Folsom Street. So, it's not like a it's a expensive area. Like it's fairly expensive real estate. From the videos, it's like a warehouse, but not a bad one.
>> Okay.
>> time in San Francisco warehouses that are living Oh, Oakland warehouses that were living spaces. This seems like one of the nicer ones, right?
>> Okay.
>> Um >> Okay.
>> So, around 50 people move in at first and they have to give up most of their earthly possessions to do so. Once they all live in the warehouse, clothes are basically most things are communal and borrowed or shared. People will like borrow and take each other's clothes. Uh if you complain that someone's like taken all of your clothes or taking your stuff and that you don't feel like it's equal, you'll be sort of uh critiqued or attacked for being too obsessed with attachments. Nicole starts having these She'll go through a couple of different names, but they're all there's these various different sort of uh group meeting structures that she'll do where everyone sits around in a circle and like critiques each other. This is all downhill from Synanon and the game that they played where everyone gets in a circle and insults each other. There's different versions of this, but it's a way for >> honesty approach where it's like I'm actually I'm being abusive towards you for your self-improvement.
>> Cuz cuz this is how this is how better than everyone else works.
Yep.
>> Um yeah.
>> [laughter] >> So, uh people who complain that like, "Hey, all my clothes have been taken by someone else." will be critiqued as being obsessed with attachments. You know, you don't want to be too obsessed with attachments, you know, we're we're doing this for for the betterment of humankind, you know, why why do you care that everyone's taking your shirts?
Uh everybody sleeps There's one giant central main room with like a dozen or more beds crammed together. Like it has to be like 20 beds, 20-something beds for 50 people crammed together. And like between two and three people for a bed, it kind of seems like. I think it's usually couples, but it does, at least from some interviews, it seems like some people are doing, you know, threples or foursomes, too.
Um >> Okay.
>> So again, at this point, you've got a few dozen, maybe around 50 full-time members who have like really devoted themselves completely to the cult. And then a few hundred people in the Bay Area who are kind of taking their courses. Some of these folks are casual, maybe once or twice a year they'll do a thing. Some of these folks are more regular, you know, they're coming in every month or even every week to do a variety, maybe they're doing a mix of yoga, some OM classes, whatever. And that's kind of how the cult is limping along at this point in time. So they're >> So we've 50 people like full-time in the warehouse, full-time.
>> together, completely committed. And then a few hundred people who are like paying money. And you wouldn't even call those folks cult members, right? Cuz the cult has a business side. So it'd be more accurate to say there's maybe 50 or so members and then a few hundred customers, right?
>> Well, I think that that makes sense for San Francisco.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> Right. Right. The cult is not at this point financially self-sufficient, but it is making enough money that Nicole only needs to like donations from rich people to kind of seal the gaps. So periodically, you know, probably a few times a month, she'll be like, "Okay, we need X thousand dollars, so we've got to find one, two, three wealthy donors who are willing to put in this much money."
And generally, what she's doing is kind of, "Hey, you remember you took this last class? We've got another one. It costs like five grand, but I know you're really attracted to this cult member.
She'll be in the class. Don't you want to get right?" That's kind of how this is and that's not quite prostitution, but that's like on the edge, right? You can see >> Yeah, she has too much she has all the power in that situation. And also I'm assuming that you know, at least some of the time she's lying about that.
>> Oh yeah, for sure. For sure.
>> So yeah, so in a way that is trafficking, isn't it?
>> Yeah, there's definitely trafficking or trafficking adjacent. It's going to get a lot more direct. At this point it's a little, you know, fuzzy. And she always frames this >> I'm still enjoying the idea of all of the like like the few hundred people who are just sort of like one toe into the cult. I think we both live in cities where that is the case for about half of the residents. So I'm like, yeah, I'd probably go to a cult a couple times.
>> [laughter] >> Yeah.
Yeah. Couple times a month I probably go to a place that I'm going to read an exposé about in a couple years. I don't know.
>> Easily. Like I said, I'm not 100% sure.
I haven't been to parties with like a bunch of one taste people. Um cuz I got high a lot in the Bay Area around this time. [laughter] >> I never I mean it's like we're never going to move into the warehouse, but you know, not out of the question that maybe you've been to the warehouse. You don't know.
>> to a few. Been to a couple of warehouses.
>> You're an open-minded guy.
>> Yeah. Yeah, I'm an open-minded guy. I love a warehouse, you know.
>> [laughter] >> Um >> I've maybe preferred What if I've done stand-up at a >> [laughter] >> Robert Evans told me I love a warehouse.
>> I love a good warehouse. I love a good warehouse. Yeah. So uh and this is kind of so you know, on the on one side you've got Nicole reaching out to these folks who are like regular wealthier customers. These are Bay Area tech bros generally who have a good amount of money. So she's got a list of these guys who she's like, okay, we need money. I can reach out to these dudes and maybe that'll bring in five or 10 grand that we need. And then on the other side, within the cult, she frames this often as like a game where like she'll go to a specific member and be like, "Hey, so we're doing a class and it's a high-dollar class. I'll give you a free ticket, but I'm going to have to partner you up with so-and-so cuz he really likes you. You know, do you want a free class, right?" And she would she would ask you to do her like a favor often for you, right? Or a favor for them. And so even outside of the classes, she's sometimes saying, "Hey, this guy needs, you know, I want to convince him to sign up. Would you do me a favor?" And favor is a hand job generally. Usually when she uses that term, that means like I want you to jerk this guy off for me outside of a class. And so now we're really Now we're Yeah. Come on.
Um >> No, this is in the The line has been crossed.
>> This is kind of and you're very from a very early point, 2005-6, there she's regularly It's not always, but she's pretty regularly crossing the line into into prostitution, right?
>> like exceeds like certain Epstein tactics to me. It's like it's not just you're recruiting someone to go to a second location, it's you're being trafficked to go give a hand job to get to a second location.
>> Right, to get them into the class where they'll then be going down on you for an hour or for 3 days or whatever, depending on the kind of class that they're doing, right?
>> Depending on how in the warehouse you are, yeah.
>> Yeah, yeah, how in the warehouse you are. And yeah, that that kind of over time this just becomes a major part of how OneTaste gets by. Certain moneyed men will pay for group workshops where many of the other seats are taken by other people paying for seats, including women. There are women in the Bay Area who pay for these seats and they get paired up with these guys, too. But a decent number of seats and holes, kind of if we we haven't sold Oh, there's 24 slots in this. We only found 15 people and most of them are men, so we need to make up the difference with a lot of young females from the cult, right? Um >> The ratio is off in the cult.
We got to get the ratio >> Right. So, by 2008, the constant struggle to keep the lights on in One Taste, cuz again, they're never quite in the black, has made Nicole had made Nicole desperate, right? She She likes the lifestyle, but it's also not quite working. And there's I think she's aware of the risk. I think she knows, "I've crossed the line already and we're still not profitable. Maybe I should either leave or try to like sell off my position in the cult to a mark, right?"
So, she starts wondering, "Has this thing run its course?" And just as she's wondering, like, "Do I need to cancel? A say or do I need to end things?" A savior appears. And that savior is the New York Times.
Um >> Oh.
>> So, one of their reporters calls and hears, "I've heard there's this Bay Area company that's, you know, an orgasm classes and they're teaching people how to do orgasmic meditation. Sounds like a great story." And Nicole is like, "Come on by. We would love to have you." Now, I've quoted a couple of times in previous the previous episodes from that New York Times article. And what I really want to emphasize to you is that this is a bad and irresponsible piece of journalism. The Times does not come in There's a couple of lines in there where they're like, "Some people say this is problematic." And there's a couple references to they may be blurring some lines, you know, in regards to >> to hear about the New York Times both sizing an issue in which there is a clear right side to be on. That's so interesting.
>> No, they treat this like it's a cool tech company. They treat this like it's between somewhere between that and like a an interesting new, you know, kind of alternative health care thing.
Like like cold plunges or something.
It's very much written like that or like when that dude was talking doing all those classes on like, I can be submerged in the cold. We did episodes on him for crazy periods. It's like that sort of thing where they're treating it like a [ __ ] Malcolm Gladwell book.
Like, oh, she made you know Yeah, she says science tells us this about orgasms, you know, they're just trying to be more scientific, right?
That's how it's framed. These are researchers.
>> how like, I mean, The New York Times is its whole own set of issues, but how like East Coast uh journalists often talk about like West Coast trends where they are just like, they're just kooky.
They're just weird over there. Check out these freaks. And you're like, no, those are sex criminals. We're doing other weird stuff you couldn't conceive of.
Yeah.
>> And so as a result, the the article winds up at working as an advertisement for OneTaste more than anything else.
And it even features, they take photos of OM sessions of like women being stroked in and other like otherwise masturbated in these in these different clinic classes that go on, but like really work-safe. So you'll just get like Sophie's going to put one on screen for those that you can see. And it's just like beautifully lit photo of just like the top half of a woman and she's she's like it's it's reversed so like her head is facing down and so you can just see her head and she's got this like expression of ecstasy. She's wearing like a black shirt or something.
It has her hands like kind of folded across her chest and she's lit so that like it almost looks like the her face just her face is glowing.
>> She kind of looks like a vampire coming back to life. Why would you consent to have this picture taken of you? Oh my god. I mean, it's beautiful, but >> in the article, the framing of it it's it the title of the photo is inner bliss. At a OneTaste Urban Retreat Center, a resident practices orgasmic meditation, partner not shown.
>> Partner not shown.
>> Yeah. So best of all, in in the article, The Times describes Nicole as a literal {quote} sex diva. And here's So, if you'll show you again, there's this photo and Nicole's right in the center.
This is her giving a class. She's like well-lit. Sex diva, Nicole Daedone, One Taste founder, says women will experience freedom when they own their sexuality.
>> God, how proud was the writer who came up with the phrase sex diva that they had to write it down?
>> God. God. [ __ ] >> It's an interesting photo to to choose because it almost looks like a like like a like a TED Talk.
>> Yeah. Well, great Sophie, put a pin in that. So, the article was a massive hit for One Taste. Suddenly, journalists, including a lot of like local TV news journalists in the Bay Area, are crowding in to get the story on One Taste and most of them are covering it in positive ways. They're kind of bemused. Look at this kooky thing. But it's like good. No, like these are not generally wondering is this all like a sex cult that she's just like trafficking her members to rich tech guys in order to keep the lights on, right? That's not really quite asked, you know?
>> And is she still like playing into the whole I mean, what has kind of been striking to me about a lot of the marketing we've looked at is that she's getting she's got the girl boss scam of like making it seem like this is good for women and women-centered.
>> Yeah. This is empowering. This is empowering.
>> Going with it.
>> Yeah. Cuz this is always framed as like did you know this very large percentage of women have never had an orgasm, never had an orgasm with another partner, you know?
Uh and then from there to like so that makes this a health issue, right? And that makes this uh and then there's all this like and here's what we've learned about the health benefits of orgasm. And so, there's always this like underpinning of actual statistics and actual stuff. And as a result, it gets covered as if it's just part of the broad sort of body hacking, body optimization stuff that's going crazy in the aughts. And so, in very short order, One Taste starts picking up some really like mainstream partners. Audible sponsors one of their podcasts. They have like an erotic poetry open mic night and like Audible sponsors turning that into a podcast.
>> They always Oh my god, every cult is trying to get stand-up comedians in the door. Some of the worst people to come in your door. They're Oh, the site never forget I I came very close. I was nearly persuaded in 2015 to go to a Scientology open mic.
Um >> Aw, that would have been amazing.
>> They have refreshments. They have refreshments. It was really tempting.
>> awesome.
Oh, man.
>> I My My career would be in a better place, I'm sure.
>> Yeah, that That sounds great. [laughter] >> Yeah.
>> So, uh cult members were very active on social media. And specifically, like a lot of like local social media, like in the Bay Area. So, there's a lot of like posts about like, "Was at this great house party. Here's some crazy pictures." And you'll see these like giant cuddle puddles of a bunch of young women and like 30% of the cuddle puddle will be like schlubby Bay Area engineer-looking dudes, right? These are all very much framed as being like, "Hey, are you like a nerdy guy with a lot of money who lives in the Bay Area and maybe is not good with like women?
This cult there's lots of young women who are good to go. All you got to do is pay to take a class, right? That's very much what the messaging is to these >> Sure.
>> guys. And a lot of new members are drawn in A lot of new male members in particular are drawn in by posts from residents of the warehouse talking about these wild sex parties and you know, these We're doing the We've got a party.
And they'll throw parties like on the beach. Here's a One Taste party on the beach. Come on, like show up. You know, people are being plied with drugs often at these events. They're being plied with sex to get them to pay for and come in and take classes and stuff.
>> Mhm.
>> I watched an interview with And I think this actually was from the Netflix documentary. I've watched a a couple of interviews, but I watched an interview from one of these members who joined during this period of time. And this is a like a middle-aged nerdy engineer dude who discovered OneTaste via these posts and at first assumed this is his quote was like, "Oh, this either has to be fake or if it's real, they're never they'll never have me, right?" But when he showed up, he found out that he in fact had what they wanted most, a credit card. Quote, "One night I was living on a boat by myself and the next I was living with like 40 people sleeping in a bed with my research partner. I was like this nerdy tech guy by day and at night I'd go home and be in the middle of this craziness." And that's the appeal. You can keep being cuz they want they don't want you to quit your job if you're like making a lot of money in the tech industry. You can keep being your nerdy tech guy by day, but you don't you get to actually be cooler than that. You got a secret life where you're researching orgasm magic with like beautiful young women and living in this like free love compound. And so your life is a lot more exciting than the other [ __ ] engineers at Google or whatever.
Um >> Oh, and and the fact that all of this is cuz it's like the wish fulfillment uh like thing is very clear. She couldn't have chosen a better location to find this particular kind of guy.
>> No, perfect.
>> But and also the Silicon Valley but the Silicon Valley detail of corporate sponsors for the sex cult uh is mwah.
>> Mhm. It's perfect stuff. And you know what else would be a corporate sponsor for a sex cult?
>> Oh, I have a feeling I know.
>> The products and services that support this podcast. Some of them may have been. We've had Audible ads before. Like this is what we we've shared at least one advertiser with this sex cult.
>> God, let's go for two. Probably more than one, let's be honest.
>> Mhm. More than one, almost certainly.
Anyway, >> God, what if it's what if it's what if it's an ad for dick pills? What if it's an ad for dick pills?
>> It might There's a good chance it will be and I hope it is.
>> I know.
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>> Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset [music] portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable [music] index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor [music] suppliers growing revenue over 20% year-over-year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands [music] of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the S&P 500. Then, you [music] can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on [music] your thesis, not someone else's.
Go to public.com/podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus [music] when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/podcast.
>> Paid for by Public Investing. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC registered advisor. Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com/disclosures.
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>> know, comedy. Ha ha ha.
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>> Love it.
>> So, Nicole spent the first few years of the cult's life sharing spaces with everyone else. She's living there initially at the warehouse. But after a few years, around 2010 or 11, I think, is kind of when this starts to happen. Um she decides there's too many demands on her attention. Now, coincidentally, this is shortly after she starts sometime around 2006 or 7 off and on seeing and then eventually dating seriously this Silicon Valley entrepreneur and multi-millionaire named Reese Jones, right?
>> Now, Reese, when they meet >> This guy's pushing 50. He's not in great shape, but he's just sold his company to Motorola for a shitload of money. So, this guy has spent the first chunk of his life building up and he finally cashed out and he's like kind of over the hill and looking to recapture his like youth now that he's got a shitload of money and he stumbles into One Taste for the same reason a fly winds up in a Venus flytrap, right? It's made as a trap for this guy.
>> Reese Jones, excellent name for an insecure multi-millionaire. Couldn't have written it better myself.
>> to be a Reese. Yeah.
>> Had to. And just Oh god, there Yeah, the idea of conceptually, I feel like we we encounter them all the time. A 50-year-old guy that's like, "You know, I think I'm ready to settle down. I think I'm ready to >> I'm ready to >> [laughter] >> You're I was like, "Wow, huge. Huge.
You've really just figured it out, haven't you?"
>> Yeah. I think I'm ready to settle down with a building full of trapped people.
Yeah.
>> [laughter] >> So, Reese, yeah, uh you know, OneTaste is losing money badly during most of this period, and Nicole needs a rich mark like Reese to prop everything up.
He gives them like a million dollars.
He's absolutely critical to their survival during this period of time. So, Nicole starts dating Reese, and this is going on from like 2006 or so to like 2011. And she's over this period of time spending more and more time with him, less and less time at the warehouse around her members. She's going on vacations with him. And she moves out of the warehouse and into a mansion with him because she decides that it's way better to live like a multi-millionaire than to live with her colleagues at the masturbation store.
>> Another Another classic cult moment where you're like, "And now the leader has decided that uh personal space does matter, only for them."
>> [laughter] >> For For the leader. Yeah.
So, from this point on, she no longer lives full-time in the communal spaces with her cult members, who are still technically researchers, but are starting to look a lot more like her workforce. 2011 was the big shift year for OneTaste, where it goes from being a weird self-help culty thing to a Silicon Valley body-hacking startup.
>> [gasps] >> Nicole publishes I mean, and this is There's a couple of big moments that kind of delineate this shift from the past, where OneTaste is very much like a descendant of these previous kind of orgasm woo cults that we'd talked about, right?
>> Okay.
>> And there's not much to differentiate her from that until she publishes a book called Slow Sex, The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm. And that happens like right as OneTaste is sort of maturing to be more of a service provider and more of like a body hacking thing than a we're researching, you know, the future we're researching orgasm magic to we're selling courses on on orgasmic meditation, right? As that shift happens, it's kind of signposted by she puts out this book that sells very well called Slow Sex. And it's framed as the a guide for both men and women and dedicated to quote the orgasm may each of us find ours now, right? She's kind of talking again of like orgasm like it's magic. One of the book jacket quotes for Slow Sex is by Ian Kerner, a sexuality counselor and New York Times best-selling author of She Comes First.
Ian said, "Slow Sex is >> No, dude.
>> No. Oh my god.
>> is the real deal on pleasuring a woman.
For any guy who wants his 15 minutes of sexual fame, Jiddu offers practical and inspired guide to the orgasmic big leagues." What?
>> No.
>> 15 minutes of sexual fame? What?
>> The male feminist has clocked in.
>> [laughter] >> This is why more than one of my female friends has given me a taser.
>> Yeah.
There's a lot that's like just the Yeah, it's >> Wow. She comes first. Wow.
>> She comes first. She tases second.
>> And you get you you can you really see a lot in terms of who the real customers are here cuz it's always framed as we're doing this for women. This is for and by women. But that quote is like, yeah, for any guy who wants his 15 minutes of sexual fame. Do you want to feel like a big shot? Do you want to feel like you're the best at like sex and pleasure, right? Like you're a [ __ ] sex god. Like that's what will make you into is that's really what OneTaste is selling.
>> This slow switch to an orgasm is not something that happens for women, but at them in this way that feels really >> [gasps] >> like that I don't know. It's it's gross. It almost like it feels reminiscent to me of like a Justin Baldoni playbook of like I'm me respecting women women is a business that I have.
>> Yeah.
>> And it is [laughter] marketed at men, but it's for women and I just happen to be financially benefiting from it.
>> Yeah.
Now, Sophie, I told you to put a pin in this, but the moment that most embody the evolution of OneTaste into Silicon Valley startup was Nicole's TED Talk.
Nicole Daedone, "Orgasm, the Cure for Hunger."
>> [laughter] >> That's the name of the speech. And Sophie's got to play you a long clip from this [ __ ] TED Talk that shows you how Nicole is pitching this to like a mass audience. This is her gearing her pitch to like the biggest possible group of people, right? So, here is like the mainstream focused look at this.
>> Okay, sex diva. I just want to give it for the for the non-Netflix watchers.
She's wearing what I can only describe as like peak >> peak like Express.
>> It looks like 2011 in there. That's pretty sheer.
>> Yeah. Blazer with like with like a with like a ooh, is this a tank underneath in purple?
>> Mhm.
>> Yeah, it's a a serious woman would never show her arms. So, she's wearing a tasteful blazer, but a little bit of cleavage is how Okay, sorry.
>> So, I figure we're TED people, we're fast, we're savvy, we're smart. So, I'm just going to break the ice for us, okay?
My topic is female orgasm.
Hold applause.
And so that said, I want to thank the people of TEDx for having me on the stage. This has been a dream of mine that I thought was absolutely impossible. That we could have a relevant, intelligent conversation about female orgasm was just a distant dream for me. I just fell in love with this practice. That's what happened for me. I gave nearly 10,000 hours to this practice. That's a lot of hours.
A lot.
But I learned some key things in that time that I am bringing to you. The first is that female orgasm is vital for every single woman on the planet.
The second is it's not so bad for the guys, either.
The third, and on a much more serious note, is that it roots our fundamental capacity for connection.
It's for this reason that I believe that at some day at some point you will hear yoga, meditation, and orgasm. And you won't hear it yoga, meditation, and orgasm. And you won't hear it yoga, meditation, and orgasm.
So in 2004, I founded One Taste Urban Retreat Centers with this in mind.
>> Yes, girl, give us nothing. Oh my god.
>> 2011 Silicon Valley hype train nonsense.
She's very much this she's doing a Steve Jobs, she's doing a [ __ ] Theranos, she's she's really trying to thread that needle and doing it very honestly very successfully. This this this pivot works great.
>> You know what she was giving? She was like, I don't shop at Ann Taylor. I shop at Ann Taylor Loft.
>> [laughter] >> I This is where I shop, Sophie, >> but >> I I really love this is I feel like a common feature of anytime I'm like watching a TEDx talk for whatever reason that mentioning at the top like I never thought I would make it here when I can guarantee you any garden variety narcissist can get a TEDx talk. It is not It is not difficult.
>> I never thought I would email a [ __ ] PR representative and show them, "Hey, look at how many followers I have on social media. Can I have a TEDx talk?"
>> [laughter] >> I never thought and uh God, yes, you >> an award and not what every hack and grifter in the aughts and [ __ ] early 2018s did a [ __ ] TED Talk. Like I think we can us olds remember when there seemed to be some prestige around TED Talks, but a lot of it was just a con, you know? A lot of it is how a lot of grifters grifted.
>> Particularly TEDx, which is like regional and >> yeah.
>> Yeah, Sophie was reminding me so much of like how we were encouraged to dress in high school and college where like I'll look at a picture of myself at 19 and be like, "Why am I dressed like I'm 50 years old? Why [laughter] am I wearing business casual to the frat?"
>> Why were we dressed in business casual?
>> [laughter] >> I I should've been dressing like a huge [ __ ] and it was just such a missed opportunity.
>> I have the exact same regret, Jamie, but you know what? There's always time.
>> We could do that now. We made up for it later.
>> I dressed as a huge [ __ ] for that period of time, which means I only wore Ed Hardy shirts. My pants, Ed Hardy shirts.
My underwear, Ed Hardy shirts. My Ed Hardy shirts, actually not from Ed Hardy. Um >> Anyway, that's the [ __ ] thing a man could do at one time >> [laughter] >> and it >> [gasps] >> So >> Jamie and I are out here in our Ann Taylor loft.
>> That's right, just like Nicole.
>> than my mother. There truly are pictures of me as a teenager where I think I look older than I do now. It's so bizarre.
>> I got to I I will I will find a I will >> I will find a pant suit pic I mean a a like a little pant suit skirt picture that will ruin your day.
>> There was a period of time yeah where we just thought that like everyone was going to dress like Hillary Clinton, you know? Um >> Yeah.
>> If only if only that had taken over.
>> Hillary Clinton wishes she found this outfit that I definitely got from H&M on sale.
>> Yeah.
>> You know?
>> So while Nicole was absent from the two different warehouses that her cult members lived in over the years, she was always present in spirit. And by that I mean Nicole picked who slept in each bed. She had like a seating chart for beds in the commune spaces. And she would decide who was sleeping with who and paired with who as a research partner. And for all that Nicole over the years she would sometimes date women and she would portray herself and OneTaste is very queer positive because it's the aughts and the 2010s in the Bay and you have to. But despite all that, OneTaste's teaching and practice were very heteronormative and very much like anti-queer in a lot of ways.
>> Well, even what sha- how she was talking about um sex and orgasms felt just yeah like be- if because she's ultimately her customers are men.
>> Right. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So me I mean well not I mean there are like she she does have to get a certain number of like female like customers buying in and getting into the cult because she needs to use their bodies in order to further the business. So it is true that and we've talked about this, right? Like in the last episode I showed you this was kind of the pitch she's making it to a lot of these these women. Um but it is they like the the money part of the cult is entirely focused at selling to men, right? She has to sell OneTaste to women to get the workforce that she then basically traffics to get the money from the the guys, right? So, there is kind of a two-part aspect of it, I guess, which is important to see.
>> The The name never gets easier to hear, I have to say.
>> it's always upsetting. So, as I was saying, men and it's very heteronormative. Like, the actual cult's teaching and Nicole is like kind of really anti-queer past a certain point.
Men and women are always pretty much paired together as far as I can tell and Nicole would even break up existing queer relationships when people joined the group in order to pair them with opposite-sex partners.
Um because she doesn't think queer relationships are real. The bleakest example of this is probably the story of two OneTaste members, Jamie and Caitlin.
They are a lesbian couple >> Stop.
>> Hold on.
>> Look, I don't I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to tell you.
>> I didn't know I was in this.
>> I think >> Okay.
>> that the the I believe cuz I found this account from Ellen Hewitt's book Empire of Orgasm. I think she's using pseudonyms for these people, right?
>> she's a Bechdel Test fan.
>> Or she's a Bechdel Test fan. Or a Bechdel Test hater.
Or she wants to do this.
These are pretty sympathetic people. So, Jamie and Caitlin, this Jamie and Caitlin are a lesbian couple who get into OneTaste. They're like teenagers, they're young adult, very young adults and they're broke. And so, they're both obviously interested in female pleasure cuz they're lesbians, but they also don't have any money. And so, being able to live for free in the Bay in this warehouse seems kind of rad. As soon as they move in, and again, they move in as a as a partnership, as a unit, Nicole tells them, "Well, this whole This whole is about exploration. We're all trying to grow and you're not going to grow if you just stay with like the partner that you like and you're not going to grow as a as a queer woman, you can't grow by just having sex with the people you're attracted to. You can only grow by by having male partners. That's the only way to grow as a queer woman, right? And so, you should you need where you need to experiment with your sexuality by letting men O M you, right? And eventually by having sex with men. Now, in public, O M M is all that One Taste is about. And in public, O M M is described in almost asexual terms because they they really want to avoid the allegations that they're just trafficking in sex. But within the actual commune, people aren't just O M M two times a day in the morning and two times at night. They're being commanded by Nicole to have intercourse, right?
When she's pairing people up for beds, those aren't just your O M partners.
You're ordered to [ __ ] them. And so, Caitlyn and Jamie are paired with dudes in the cult, often with dudes, you know, maybe who have some money that are that that Nicole wants to make sure stay, right? But they're told they have to [ __ ] dudes to level up basically. In order to like gain XP in this cult system, in order to make your orgasm more powerful, you have to do these things that you're physically uncomfortable with cuz you're not into guys.
>> And at this point Well, at this point are Jamie and Caitlyn as an ally to both, are are Jamie and Caitlyn paying for this or are they {quote} being paid in free lodging? Like how >> They're being paid, I think, mostly in free lodging. Cuz some a lot of members do pay, but a lot of the ones who don't are the women, especially like the younger women. And these two are broke.
So, I don't think they Now, it may be cuz they are getting some money when they're working for the company, but it's it it's very uneven and the the One Taste will switch up what you're being paid at the last minute and often you're feeding that right back into the company. So, to the extent, maybe they're being given money that they then have to Yeah. I'm not sure how it works for every individual person. It's kind of different for everybody, depending on your position and how what Nicole is getting out of you, right? Um but to quote from the book Empire of Orgasm, Jamie said that in courses she heard a repeated message, "All women are hungry for [ __ ] If you're not feeling [ __ ] hungry, you're not connected to a part of yourself." Right? This is very anti-queer. Now, eventually, both women start having sex with male members of the group. And this is psychologically devastating to Jamie. She started to feel like her desire for her girlfriend, the woman who cuz they're broke they've been broken up forcibly by now, but the person who had been her girlfriend was wrong. She convinces herself to push on because Nicole keeps teaching her resistance is key to growth, and she really admires Nicole, and she also needs this place to live.
>> Right.
>> "Experiences," Nicole tells Jamie, "aren't good or bad for you. Experiences aren't good or bad at all. You choose the meaning." So, you are If you're deciding that this is an unpleasant sexual experience, that's cuz you made a choice. You could choose for it to be a good one. Why aren't you choosing for it to be a good one, right? See how [ __ ] abusive this logic is?
>> just like Yeah, and all under and and it still sort of falls under the like uh early 2010s definition of like being pro-woman is I mean, you could even extend this to like Sheryl Sandberg logic of like it is your fault that you're feeling oppressed and abused, and it is on you to to behave the right way to be accepted in this environment.
>> Yep. And there's bits of all there's bits of the secret in there, right? You just have to change your attitude and you can change reality. And you can see both how people don't necessarily pick this out as poisonous initially, but also how running with this logic, the obvious end state of this is that like there's no such thing as rape, ever. If experiences are not bad or good, there can't be such a thing as rape. You are choosing to be raped if you're raped, cuz you're choosing to interpret that as a bad experience. This is directly in those words what Nicole will eventually be teaching her followers, >> And that is so insane.
>> know that's really bad.
>> [laughter] >> Like >> That is Yeah, that's [ __ ] horrific.
It's so >> really horrific.
>> It's Oh god. And it's like that even in the way she's like the number of like pressure points she's attempting to attack is like she's sort of telling people to dissociate, but also telling them that like the failure to do so or the failure to feel pleasure where pleasure doesn't exist because it's abuse is a personal failure.
But it also sounds like she's like, "Well, if you don't like it, then just pretend you're a person who who likes it."
>> Yeah, pretend you're a person who likes it. Why don't Why can't you do that?
>> Yeah.
>> And it's you'll we'll we'll Yeah, I mean, yeah. We'll we'll keep talking.
So, um in time, Jamie becomes a coach, uh and she starts to see success in the organization. And the success, the fact that she's moving up the ladder, so to speak, validates is like the first She cuz again, this is a young queer woman who doesn't have a lot of life experience, who I think had a pretty rough background. And so, this is like the first validation she's gotten as an adult person. So, she becomes extremely loyal even though this is she's been horribly abused by this cult, which is a common cult story, right?
>> Sure.
>> So, then in 2012, Nicole calls Jamie and Caitlin in for a little one-on-one. And she informs them she's breaking up with Reese, the Silicon Valley millionaire who had kept the cult alive through its bad years, but she still owes him a lot of money from all the, you know, cuz he's calling in basically, you know, the loans he'd given them.
>> God, the amount of like discarded one-taste guys at this point could like unionize.
>> And it She hasn't I don't fully understand the financials here. She does not discard him. Some reports I've seen suggest that she repays him by 2012 that she's repaid him for like the million dollars that he loans the cult, but that's when this is all happening and that doesn't entirely line up with this because this suggests she's still getting some money from him in 2012. I don't fully know and I I don't claim to know at which point was Reese giving the cult money, which point was Reese receiving money, but whatever the case at this point in 2012 she still wants to keep Reese in the fold even though she's breaking up with him, right? Because she tells Nicole, "I'm not going to I I have to move to Los Angeles cuz I have important work to do there which is she's trying to find more rich guys, right? Um but Reese needs a handler and I've been his handler for the last, you know, several years and in my place I need you two to be Reese's handlers so that I can move on to Los Angeles." And here's how Ellen Hewitt describes what happens next. Jamie paused. Everything she learned up to this point had primed her to say yes to the position and to do so willingly, idolizing Nicole, becoming accustomed to having sex with men and to having sex with any kind of man, getting off on any stroke, being told that she should provide anything to help the company. Plus being asked to be Reese's handler felt like an honor. Jamie knew that only a few women in One Taste's history had held the same position. They were often Nicole's confidants and an admired group. She also knew the unspoken threat. The consequence of saying no is that you would be ostracized, ignored, and stripped of all your power in that world, Jamie said.
So, I want to be clear that last bit, the fact that if you if you displease Nicole, if you like wind up on the outskirts, you'll be kicked out, you'll lose everything that you've gotten from this world, that is something she directly tells people during lectures.
After everyone has experienced orgasmic meditation when folks are in, you know, this powerful cathartic afterglow, she will tell them, this is a direct quote from one of her sessions, "That's why this place is called One Taste. Once you've tasted being inside of yourself and knowing yourself, there is some part of your soul that will always crawl to get back. The truth is, if you get kicked out, your soul will never relax again."
She's very direct about this, right?
>> Yeah, I mean, and she's also like just describing chasing a dragon.
>> Mhm. [gasps] >> Chasing a high. And one of the things when this becomes a corky, people say, "No one was ever forced to have sex with anyone. No one was ever forced to stay."
And they weren't. They were just heavily coerced and basically told that life will be like a gray, colorless hell of an experience if you get forced out of this group cuz you won't [ __ ] this rich guy, right?
>> Right. And you're like, "Well, yeah, maybe then in that case, we should expand the definition a little bit."
>> So, by 2012, One Taste has totally come around to becoming like seen as a tech startup, to fashioning itself that way.
Her followers and public face and communications are talking less about all the crazy parties and a lot more about how Nicole is like a philosopher, but also like a Steve Jobs figure, right?
>> What is she selling, though? Like, what is the product, exactly?
>> Orgasm and power magic.
>> God, okay.
I guess we I guess it's At least we're not having children overseas manufacturing the orgasms.
>> Sure.
>> Jesus.
>> So, in the years after 2012, uh you know, One Taste finally gets in the black, right? It had been struggling, it had been utterly reliant upon these like infusions of cash from these rich dudes, and that's not really the case I mean, kind of after 2012.
It's It's profitable after 2012. The money is still coming from like rich guys who are paying for sex, right? But now it's >> Not one rich guy, and not her saying, "Hey, I need a loan." And it's her instead selling courses to these guys, right? So, it's no longer loans. Like it is a profitable business after this point. In fact, a quite profitable business. One taste not only repays Reese, but it it starts to succeed on its own raking in millions a year, and they do this. They make this switch in large part by copying something Nicole had seen from the yoga industry. So, during the first part of the 21st century, a lot of yoga studios began offering teacher training. Now, this qualifies somebody to teach a different kind of yoga. Most attendees who do teacher training don't become yoga teachers cuz there's not that many yoga teacher jobs. And so, it's often they're doing it for self-improvement. It's being pitched as like a well, you take the teacher class cuz it makes you that much better, right? And these are expensive and there's a and I'm not if you do if you like let's that's fine, right? Whatever. There are some cults within yoga, but also it's fine to pay money to get better at a thing that you like to do, right? I'm not I'm not [ __ ] on it. I'm just saying it's nice to receive a gentle touch from a beautiful woman. This is what I mean when it's like >> We all got our toes in the cult.
>> Right. A little bit. Piece of And so, she takes that idea and moves it over to One Taste. So, she starts selling teaching courses. And this is like this will certify you to teach OM and to do classes of your own, right? And there's often more advanced cuz there's there's endless layers and endless every teacher always wants to be you have to be up on the latest thing. So, every year there's a new class about the stuff that you have to get to stay certified. It's another 5 to 10,000 dollars, right?
These are multi-day courses. Again, a lot of these are hugely expensive.
>> And I'm assuming that the teacher is the teacher training also includes abuse?
>> Well, yeah. I mean, yes. Like that that like sure. Yes. Now, Nicole had offered a coaching program since 2012. Um and this is takes off. It's successful. They make money of it. So, increasingly One Taste pours all of its efforts into either hosting coaching classes or selling them, right? They recruit a huge crop of students in 2012 and eventually they are going to license or whatever more than 1,300 people as One Taste each of whom have paid probably well in excess of 10 grand to get to that point, right?
In some cases much more. The company starts turning a profit in 2013 and before long they are making a surprising amount of money. Nicole Bergin is bringing in celebrity guests to provide a sheen of legitimacy. They start doing cult events. They have these like One Taste Mastery for which are like these big, you know, they're these like conferences and stuff for the One Taste family, for all the people who are coaches cuz now there's One Taste houses in different states they're starting to fill up and people are doing classes outside of the Bay Area. So they're doing these courses and they're she's hiring celebrities to like talk to everybody at the start of these like three-day and five-day events. For one event in 2013 she hires Dr. Jocelyn Elders, the former Attorney General, who tells students you are part of a new sexual revolution. Great. Thank you, Jocelyn.
I don't I'm sure she just cashed the check.
>> [laughter] >> It is always wild hearing these celebrities that you that that cults manage to bag for things like this.
>> [laughter] >> It's It's It's a good It's a good reminder that people are desperate for attention and refuse to do even a basic level of research.
>> Of course not. That's offensive. So I want to show you guys an an example of an ad for One Taste Mastery program, which is one of their like really advanced, you know, certification. So Sophie is going to play that for us now.
>> Looks like the Master Class logo.
>> I was going to say yeah, this is a very tech logo.
>> Master Class, Master something else.
>> I'm going to let it slide. This is a course [music] in how to open your sex life. It's a way for you to research what [music] your actual boundaries are.
>> I was about to fall asleep.
>> I like to make sure that my whole mouth, my whole tongue my >> Sex without boundaries on the screen is the wording there. That's upsetting.
[music] >> And it really does take sex to a whole new paradigm. I learned how to slow down and actually feel everything that's happening versus constantly being in my head.
>> [music] >> Oh my god.
>> Great. Looks great.
>> I love >> I love that one of their quotes is >> Sex without boundaries.
>> Now >> There's at least three phrases present in the advertising that could plausibly describe assault.
energetic >> energetic sex >> Also feels kind of like a line. Also with all of these I mean I guess something that like feels like a big other than like the tech-ification of this sex cult. It's like been decades since this has been accessible to anyone who doesn't have an insane [clears throat] amount of disposable income.
>> Because like the original is going to be trafficked, right? Yeah.
>> Right. Where it's like the the the earlier sex cults were like at least You could be you could be trafficked as someone who doesn't have a lot of money laying around. Yeah.
>> Right.
>> Yeah. The the cuts to rooms full of white people with bad haircuts really does kind of pull it all into focus of like >> Yeah.
>> what's going on here. God, that's so bleak.
The footage >> Yeah.
Yeah, isn't that remarkable? It's so MLM-y. It's so Yeah, I I it it it's it's really upsetting to me. It's upsetting like again coming out of like the sex positive, you know, community the kink community. Like the idea that anyone could hear the phrase sex without boundaries and not IMMEDIATELY BE LIKE, "WHOA! Wait a second. What are you talking about? What do you mean by that?" Because that's a that's a dangerous phrase.
>> Right. And it feels so That's why it like going back to the New York Times article, like it's so clearly praying on people who don't have basic a basic understanding and it's just how they imagine like non-vanilla sex to work.
>> Right.
>> Non-vanilla sex to work.
>> That video really, really, really reminded me of NXIVM.
>> Yeah, it it very similar. And I I didn't catch this until right now, but honestly, that's part of what's most upsetting to me about all of this is that she's almost set this up to be like a fly's web in between people who like are know that they want more out of like sex than they're getting, know that like maybe what they weren't educated they didn't get a good enough education like what sex could be. They want more out of like their relationships than they feel like they're getting. And there is like a sex-positive and kink community where people like aren't trying to like just take your money and abuse you where you can like learn stuff like that if if you're into that. And she's created like this spider's web in front of it to ensnare people, but in a way that is very much different because like if you were to like every kink community every kink event that I have ever been to starts and a lot of like education that starts with boundaries and boundary setting. And the importance is not sex without boundaries, the important is knowing what your boundaries are and having ways to make sure everyone else knows them and that you're communicating them and that you can like that's what's important. Like the the it's so [ __ ] up to create this thing that is meant to almost like stand in between that and people who are curious in order to ensnare and hurt them. That's very much what's happening.
>> Hey Jamie, is Barbie naked behind you?
>> Is Barbie naked behind me? No, she's wearing a painted-on bodysuit.
>> Yeah.
>> Oh, okay. Great. I was just making sure.
>> I used to use her on stage, but she does have a bodysuit painted on the doll.
>> Great.
>> Great.
>> [laughter] >> Thanks for checking in.
>> Robert, now that I've checked in on Barbie, it is time for an ad.
>> Yeah, we should do an ad break.
>> Okay.
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>> All right, and we're back.
>> Um >> So, uh >> I I just just sort of closing the loop on talking about kink where like I feel like truly kink communities are our best communicators. Like it it and it makes me really sad, like you're saying, to see people who are seeking something out and then very likely getting scarred to the point where sex at all is going to be indefinitely traumatizing.
>> Yep.
>> Um but at least they were parted with $10,000 in the process.
>> Yeah. Yeah, at least that happened, [laughter] right?
>> Yeah.
>> So, um as the most expensive courses went from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, and the big money started rolling in. Much of what the early members had loved about life in the cult changed. The clitoral massages were still a part of life there, but members now were not called researchers. In fact, there's like a big announcement that like, "You're no longer researchers. You're now employees. And now, in fact, most of you are salesmen.
Most of you are like doing calling, right? Like your job is to call people and try to get them to take classes, right? Like that's the new business is selling and teaching classes. You're no longer We did the research. We figured it out, right?
The experiment's over. So, they move to a new warehouse which has semi-private rooms.
And yeah, everybody's sales people now.
In order to justify this change, Nicole tells her followers, "The universe is made of love. Sales is love. Therefore, the universe is made of sales."
>> [laughter] >> Okay. [gasps] Honestly, based on the level of cruelty and evil she's capable of, she's half-assing it with this one.
>> She's half-assing [clears throat] it.
That's lazy. That's lazy? I'm sorry.
>> [laughter and gasps] >> If If sales is love and love >> Really, Nicole? That's what we're going with, huh?
>> God.
>> It's a measure of her charisma that no one leaves on the spot after hearing that.
>> Sure.
>> So, one of Nicole's most valuable members and employees during this period is a young man named Said, who first gets drawn into the group because he was in love with somebody. He goes to like a class and he falls in love with someone who lives at the warehouse named Maya.
And he basically tells Maya, "Hey, I've got a crush on you." And she's like, "Well, if you're into me, the best way for us to hang out is for you to take more classes here." And eventually he winds up moving in. Now, Said is a really conventionally attractive guy, right? And he starts being used by as a lure by Nicole and Rachel, who's like her head of sales, this woman Rachel, and like the other people running the cult. It sees Said both as like maybe a way to get off themselves, but also here's a really hot guy, we can use him to bring in both hot women that we want to work and join the cult, but also maybe older women who have money to spend on expensive classes. And they want to be paired with this hot dude, right? So, a separate part of Internal One Taste Culture, as I've said before, these like circular meetings where people will, you know, one way or the other the purpose is for you to get insulted and mocked and derided and have like a cathartic experience, right? So people will sit around and ask Nicole questions and she'll answer them and like coach them and say this is what that question tells me about you, right?
During one of these sessions she focuses on Saeid and she asks him, "Why do you think so many of the women here like being paired with you, Saeid?" And here's how Ellen Hewitt describes what happens next.
"Because I'm willing to violate them."
he started to say.
>> A murmur of surprise >> shot through the room as Saeid remembers it and then the students started cheering. He was cut off but he had wanted to say, "I know how to violate them in ways they want, to take them to their edge but I also don't make them feel taken advantage of or left empty or not held afterwards." All he got to though was violate. After that everyone started calling him the violator.
Another One Taste executives decided she would call him the [ __ ] That says a lot. Both that >> This >> they they love that term cuz they love the aggression. That's a bigger and bigger part of it is that like aggression is good. Some violence is good, right?
>> Sex without boundaries.
>> Yeah.
>> That is I that is not how I thought that anecdote was going to go.
>> Nope.
>> That is really I I thought I genuinely thought it was going to be people who were get becoming uncomfortable interjecting and being like, "Yeah, that is what it feels like." But no, it's doubling down and saying like so so we're just deep enough in at this point where it is sexually violent and we're and I'm I'm shocked at how willing they are to say it.
>> They they're willing to say it and the craziest thing to me is at least if this is being reported accurately by Hewitt and I have no reason to believe it's not >> Sure.
>> the violator is the one being violated here, right? Because after Nicole hears this, she loves this as a branding thing and she uses Saeid as she starts calling him their hook, literally their hook because he will pull women into the company's classes and gatherings and there's a lot of women who like are you know maybe want to explore that kind of thing and maybe want to explore some more aggressive stuff. Saïd doesn't want that though. He doesn't actually like being the violator. He doesn't like being called in to do all of these like violent and aggressive sex acts in order for Nicole to make more money but she keeps telling him to go do go be the violator again go do that this other that we've got this other woman who it is willing to pay if you like spend some time with her, right? And Nicole keeps asking him to go further and further.
She assigns him to have sex with a OneTaste executive named Emma who thought the violator sounded hot and she starts using him to rev her up is her words before speaking events. She'll she'll make make him come in and masturbate her and then she'll go out to like give a speech.
On another instance one of Nicole's top lieutenants Rachel who's also ordering Saïd to have sex with her periodically orders him to have sex with another female cult member. He refuses and Rachel calls him an ungrateful petulant brat and shouts at him and gets everyone else in the compound shouting at him until he agrees to go upstairs and do it. Again Saïd's not forced to have sex exactly. He's just berated and mocked and ostracized when he doesn't, right?
>> He is forced to have sex.
>> He is being I would say he is being but like but in terms of the people who defend this will be like well he could have left. He was big guy. Why didn't like no one was stopping him, right? Cuz there's not a Yeah.
>> It is wild how I mean how Nicole is you know doing classic like she's she's going full Darvo and and then like I mean like all cults like that they're it seems like a lot of why this is working is not only is she praying on you know probably his masculinity but also that berating is a part of the culture. So no one would flinch at someone being berated. That is a part of it.
>> And they they celebrated.
She talks a lot about people needing to have sharp scalpels and that she celebrates that we we all have sharp scalpels, which means we're good at cutting each other. It's good to cut each other. We need to do that. It makes us stronger. These are This is Nicole's literal language, right?
>> want like someone in the room to have a moment of lucidity and be like, "So, what is the goal here? What were What Why did we start doing this?"
>> Yeah.
>> God, that is That's really I mean >> It's pretty bleak.
>> Yes.
>> Yep.
Uh so, like a lot of OneTaste cult members, Sayid is also queer. He's bisexual. And at one point, he admits interest to a man to Rachel and she allegedly calls him the F-word and forces him out of her bed. So, again, this is a very like queer-phobic anti-queer environment, too, for the people living in it.
By the late 2010s, OneTaste was more profitable than ever and had transitioned entirely to depicting itself as a Silicon Valley startup.
People had once been researchers exploring the frontiers of desire and sexual power are now operating a call center spending days at a time awake struggling to hit aggressive sales targets. Nicole successfully convinced many of them that selling and buying courses was the infinite game. She talks a lot about games, right? This is very much coming out of these other cults, right?
>> Yeah, well, and infinite growth cuz we're in Silicon Valley. So >> Cuz it's Silicon Valley, right? And anything was justifiable as long as you had to keep the game going, right? Per an article in Bloomberg, quote, "OneTaste taught members that money is just an emotional obstacle. It encouraged students to take out multiple credit cards to pay for courses and some turned to such sites as GoFundMe and Prosper Funding for help. The first time I didn't cover my credit card bill, it broke something in my mind," says Ru Mipalaga, who went to his first OneTaste event in 2012 at age 24, worked for the company for about 2 years, and left owing $30,000 on his credit cards. "I was no longer afraid of debt," he says.
"Once you break that barrier, 3,000 is the same as 30,000." At one point, Mipalaga complained that he and his co-workers hadn't been paid in 2 months.
He says he was publicly shamed for having a scarcity mindset.
>> Oh, another hot button phrase that's constantly misused. Nice.
>> Love it.
>> 3,000 is very different than 30,000.
>> Very much so.
>> My guy, it's 10 times.
3,000, actually.
>> I don't know. It's >> But it's not a scarcity mindset, Sophie.
>> And none of it's real money, and you're being like in an LLM. You're always being told, "What? What's the big deal?
You're going to pay 10 grand. This will make you so much better. It will open you up. You'll You'll You'll make that much so much more money than that." Like once you really get melt fully. Right.
Right. It's an investment, you know?
Now, the art that Bloomberg article was published by Hewitt, the author of the book Empire of Orgasm, in June of 2018.
She was not the first reporter to write critically about OneTaste, but she was the first to write critically about OneTaste and have it matter. The vast majority of mainstream reporting on the company, as it was generally described, was bemused but open-minded. In fact, if you want a really good study in journalism versus PR, you should read that first 2008 New York Times article, The Pleasure Principle, and then Hewitt's article. Now, I think the best example of this is how The Times wrote about Vic Baranco, the Morehouse founder. That's like one of the earlier orgasm cults. This is the guy you like to crush women's vaginas with his hands when he was in a bad mood. Here's how The Times described Vic.
Morehouse's founder, Vic Baranco, was a former appliance salesman who called his philosophy responsible hedonism. By some accounts, Mr. Baranco, who died in 2002, used coercive techniques of mind control. "It was a huge ego-crushing machine, as any valid monastic tradition is," said a man who lived at Morehouse for more than 20 years and did not want to be identified. And like, that's all you guys had about Morehouse. Really, that's all you had? The New York Times.
That's all you needed to say about them, you thought?
>> I I mean the New York Times is stand out for this, but it's God, I mean it's it's a lesson that no one ever seems to learn.
And And even I mean it that's amazing that um that the article that came out eventually did cuz that had to probably be hard to get through.
Uh like you just have to have an editor that actually cares about stuff in order to get that done. I don't know. I think I'm sure we all have like I have like three Los Angeles cult adjacent things that you're just like >> Mhm.
>> well, I guess we'll just see if a journalist manages to get it through at some point, but it's that's >> Thankfully, one did, right? Hewitt did, you know? And not only for this article, she got dozens of brutal accounts inside life of life inside OneTaste. Accounts that the Times could have got some of them at least the Times could have gotten. Um but not only did that she forces OneTaste in this article to address the worst allegations of abuse.
Vlan Vlec, who was the CEO of OneTaste in 2018, admitted to her, "We took money from people that we shouldn't have."
Right? So, she even gets just within the article before the backlash to it, she gets them to like, "Oh yeah, you know what? This lady has our number enough that we have to cop to some shit."
So, by the late 2010s, OneTaste had spread to a number of other countries.
This started with Nicole ordering specific offices opened first in New York and then in Austin, LA, London. But also, there's a bunch of independent OneTaste houses that are being established all over the country. Per the book Empire of Orgasm, almost 500 OneTaste students would live in 33 different OM houses. This informal network mimicked the way many Silicon Valley tech startups were metastasizing rapidly from city to city. Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and other on-demand companies prided themselves on blitz scaling and operating with little overhead or liability. To avoid getting dragged down by employment costs, the startups hired drivers as independent contractors and required them to provide their own cars and equipment. Similarly, many of OneTaste sales workers were independent contractors paid on commission.
It's all the Silicon Valley grift, right?
>> Yeah, it's it's a classic grift and it's kind of a creative grift in that there is actually no real product. Like the overhead couldn't be lower because what you're selling is a salt.
Yeah.
>> Speaking of that, when Nicole had established the second warehouse commune, you know, they they move out of the first on on Folsom into another one.
This is the one that has like semi-private rooms, which seems like a positive move, but when they move into this place, Nicole makes it be the rule that none of the bedrooms should have locking doors. And after this point, all of these OM House franchises around the country abide by this rule to disastrous effect. Now, periodically throughout this long journey, Nicole and her top lieutenants would experiment with broadening the curriculum. On several occasions, they attempted to create male versions of the clitoral stimulation workshops, right? To where you're trying to teach people how to give a hand job really well, I guess.
>> [laughter] >> And this never works out as a business.
Nobody For some reason, nobody wants to take HAND JOB CLASSES.
>> [laughter] >> I IT'S JUST SO HOT. Come on.
>> It's really funny. No one interested at all in the dick version of this. If you tried to tell people that like no, the the the penile orgasm is actually a sacred and magical, get the [ __ ] out of here. Get the [ __ ] out of here. No, it's not.
>> god.
>> [laughter] >> You can't sell that. I'm sorry. Nobody's [gasps] buying it.
>> No, that's too free. That's too free.
You cannot No.
>> dudes are so screwed up. You know the way make money in that for ways is to sell make people stop coming. Like you can convince people there's magic in never coming, right? But you can't convince people that like a dick is magic. It's just not.
>> If it If it was, we would know by now.
We [laughter] would certainly know.
Uh God, okay. [snorts] >> It's very funny to me. Um And the reason Hewitt gives for why like these classes never take off is that One Taste's ability to recruit young women both to pay for classes and to provide the sexual labor crucial to the the organization's focusing doesn't work.
They're less interested if there's also hand job classes. That makes this seem like something else. If it's all focused on just just people with vaginas being massaged, right? And if that's the only thing that's happening, you can convince yourself this is like really women-led and like women-positive. If like there's also jerk-off classes, that doesn't work. That's just not a good sell.
>> And And so so the jerk-off classes being completely unprofitable uh is incidental.
>> Super funny.
>> That's so good.
>> So, um a lot of like a lot of these people are comfortable being massaged, taking an OM, because they're being told the men are not getting any sexual gratification out of this, right? So, if you add any kind of male sexual gratification classes in there, even though a lot of men are getting gratified, that's kind of how the money is being made. You have to hide that stuff.
>> Right.
>> So, earlier in the episodes, we talked about a guy named Ken Blackman. He was a former member of the Welcomed Consensus Orgasm Cult, who once punched a lady because he had been taught that violence was a kind of honest communication.
Nicole eventually recruits this guy as a teacher, cuz she knew him at the Welcomed Consensus, and because she's reintroducing a lot of these Welcomed Consensus curriculum about like violence into the One Taste curriculum. And she she changes the way they frame it and and her her her her words, the way she describes this, the term she likes to use is skillful violation. And skillful violation means that you know it's better for someone to push through their boundaries, even if they say no, so you don't listen to the no. You violate them even though they say no cuz you're skillful enough to know that they actually need to have their boundaries violated, right?
>> what your opinions are on this like is why is it escalating towards such absurd violence at this point? Like >> It's because there's nowhere else for it to go.
>> Right. It's just escalating it to like how can I retain control and eventually it just becomes fear tactics.
>> That's right. If you're honestly trying to help people be more sex positive or like teach them kink stuff, there is a point at which and it's a pretty quick point at which people are just kind of good to go on their own. You know, they might want to go to like parties or events or like take specific technical classes on how to use whatever whip or a [ __ ] St. Andrew's cross or whatever, but you don't they don't need to keep paying money to a group, they don't need to keep listening to a guru. You kind of give people a basic and they're good to go. If you're not going to do that, in order to keep them following you have to constantly have more new curriculum and eventually that's going to wind up in some really dangerous directions, right? And for One Taste it it ends in skillful vio- And she Nicole justifies skillful violation being a thing by teaching that only 25% of human communication is verbal, right? Trained OM experts learn how to read the nonverbal 75% of communication that's going on. And >> you don't even realize what you're thinking or what you want. Sure, sure, sure.
>> So a skillful violator is someone who's been trained enough to be able to read someone's real desires and then be able to force them to experience those, right? At their annual conference OMX one year, OneTaste staff wore shirts with penetrate written on the front.
>> No. God. [laughter] >> Great stuff.
>> No.
>> In 2013, a member of an OM house in Austin posted on OM Hub, the cult's internal social network, and claimed that a man had repeatedly entered her room and sexually harassed her cuz again, the doors don't lock. This blows up internally. This is like a causes problems. People are saying, "Shouldn't we be able to lock doors? Who was this guy? Should he even have been there?
This seems like a problem." And initially, Rob comments internally and apologizes and says like, "We'll get right on it." But after that, a bunch of Nicole's lieutenants come in, and I think this is actually Rachel who comes in and is they're do damage control. And one of her lieutenants posts, "As a woman, the easier thing for me to do is say I was violated. That way I don't have to look at my part in it."
>> Oh, okay. Okay.
>> part? She was in her room that won't lock. What was her part? Like >> It is insane how regressive it gets.
>> Yeah.
>> It gets. Okay.
>> Now, by this point, uh Nicole has added a section to her uh coaching program lecture where she claims to have seen a 2013 study from somewhere which researchers studied in which researchers studied rape victims to see how they'd healed afterwards. And Nicole claimed the women who recovered were the women who took responsibility for the action.
>> Right.
>> Right.
>> Okay.
>> So, this is part of what she's teaching.
Now, this becomes an increasingly important message for the cult because in 2014, a sales meeting was called and one of Nicole's representatives told the company, "It's really important that we not break any prostitution laws while selling courses." And attendees say like, "Oh, that was a moment where I realized they're kind of telling me to prostitute myself, but just not to talk about it that way. Otherwise, they wouldn't have brought that up at all."
>> Right.
>> Now, Nicole increasingly lectures about how sexual trauma is the result of not wanting sex enough. And as she taught, if you change your mental state to ones that accept one that accepts sex is always a positive thing, you literally can't be raped. And while she gave these courses, she would talk about how she was sexually abused as a child and explain, "The only way I healed is that I accepted I had actually caused that situation by coming on to him and also that it was a good thing." Right? That it made me more powerful. Likewise, if someone expressed a fear or a phobia related to sexual trauma, the solution was to embrace that trauma and find a way to enjoy it. People are encouraged/forced to participate in rape and bondage play because they'd been raped or subjected to intimate partner violence. As Nicole said, "The places you hate are your practice. They're actually your biggest gift. They're the places where you get free."
Now this line of [ __ ] is >> deeply [ __ ] depressing cuz it's like not only practicing dissociation through being actively abused, but again going back into like all of these she's capitalizing on these popular narratives about kink.
Um and by like suggesting that you would only be interested in this if you've experienced extreme trauma and enjoy dissociate. Like it's just so it's such [ __ ] This is so dangerous.
>> It's really bad. Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> Um 2016, the company made $9.4 million.
Gwyneth Paltrow praised them openly.
They do some like Goop stuff.
>> Okay.
>> Uh Khloe Kardashian talks about them.
>> it took me that long.
>> Tim Ferriss does like a podcast thing about them, you know? Um At the most advanced stage of the grift, One Taste was breaking into the mainstream or at least the mainstream part of the woo self-help world. While the public-facing part of the company was very much in line with the body modification self-dop- optimization Bay Area culture of the era, That's not what's actually going on internally. And inside, there are ongoing experiments that are like verging on a cult nonsense. At one point, Nicole starts initiating priests of OM and selling like $15,000 classes where rich guys can participate in these like drug-drenched sex magic rituals and get like certified as priests. And I think Nicole's idea, cuz this is this never fully turns into anything. I think the idea at one point was that if this is successful enough, if enough guys are interested, if this proves to have legs, maybe we can apply for tax-free status and call ourselves a religion, right? I think Nicole was like exploring and just doesn't quite get the chance to live this grift out.
>> she is committing enough sex crimes, I think, to qualify as a tax-exempt religion.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. You might as well at that point.
She's She's committed enough crimes to be a religion.
>> Yep.
So, she is getting much more reckless with everything as the years go on. I found at least one account from a former member who claims Nicole plied these rich tech guys with drugs at these high-dollar classes. And, you know, these are not only are they basically paying to get into an orgy, but like at one point this one member says Nicole specifically doses a dude with a bunch of LSD to try to convince him to donate another $250,000 to the company, right? So, that's part of what she's doing.
>> I'm honestly shocked at how because of how modern this story is that there is no It doesn't seem like any member of the cult who has that there's been no significant whistleblowing incident >> Not yet. Not yet. Pieces have come out, but yeah, that's not going to happen until 2018 when Hewitt puts that article out.
>> Yeah.
>> But because the men with money are so core to everything happening here, Nicole's teachings trended towards explaining how it was good for men to be angry and controlling to women. She called this letting out your beast and praised it.
Everyone was increasingly encouraged to be brutal towards each other, to cut each other up with their skillful scalpels. Nicole also praised intimate partner violence, most of which seems to have been man on woman. Women were who were beat by their partners were told that they had caused the situation by goading his beast or not understanding his beast enough. If they sought to escape abusive situations, they were insulted from fleeing it from his beast rather than meeting it with love.
So, these OM priest classes and orgy sessions could net as much as a million dollars for One Taste. For a five-day class, these are the real top dollar things. And the guys in these they are just paying to get into an orgy with a bunch of young women, right?
>> Right. But they have But But it has to seem like school as well.
>> got to It Right. Right.
And this, you know, this works for years without them getting in trouble, but it couldn't last forever.
By 2017, there's a couple of pending lawsuits and there's some like rumblings that bad press might be coming, right?
And Nicole decides to separate herself legally from the group in the hope of gaining some sort of plausible deniability. So, she sells the company for 12 million dollars to like her wealthiest followers. And this is framed as the company maturing, right? Nicole's still going to be the spiritual and intellectual leader, but One Taste is going to be run like a normal company with like a CEO and a normal business chain chain of command, right? Now, initially it seems like maybe this will work. In 2018, 35,000 people had attended One Taste events in cities around the world and hundreds of members lived in OM houses in multiple countries, OMing twice in the morning and twice in the evening and often quitting their careers to sell courses.
>> Mhm.
>> But that same year, Bloomberg published Hewitt's first bombshell article about the cult, which described it as looking like a prostitution ring. That article quoted former employees saying stuff like orgasm was God and Nicole was like Jesus. And I'm going to quote from an article in the Times about the fallout from this article. OneTaste went quiet.
It shut down all centers and courses. A group of about 30 senior practitioners, including Nicole, retreated to the land, which is like a chunk of land that they're starting a compound on, right?
Then came a BBC podcast, The Orgasm Cult, a Netflix documentary, Orgasm Inc, a Vice documentary, and a Playboy investigation. On June In June of 2023, the FBI stormed the land. Dedone and Sherwitz, that's Rachel, were arrested.
The company has spent about $15 million on legal fees since 2018, suing the BBC, suing Netflix, suing a former member, being sued by another member for alleged sex trafficking, and fighting the criminal trial.
And yeah, that's that uh and it's one of those things where they were committing these crimes the whole time. It's as soon as that article comes out, the FBI's like, "Oh, I guess we got to look into this." And there's just immediately tons of [ __ ] to make charges on. Rachel uh is like she accused of targeting vulnerable people by advertising that the company's like classes could fix sexual trauma, telling people to take on debt to pay for classes, withholding wages from employees, isolating people by demanding absolute commitment. Um she's accused of participating in abusive employment practices, subjecting members to economic, sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse, surveillance, indoctrination, and intimidation. Um and Dedone is accused of, you know, participating in or of sexually trafficking people of a whole bunch of bad stuff, right? And there's a lot we don't need to get into everything that happens in the court case, you know, just a few weeks ago, earlier this year, Dedone was sentenced to 9 years in federal prison. She is convicted, so is Rachel, um and they are sentenced both to prison sentences. Nicole, again, gets like 9 years.
>> Yeah, which as as always seems low.
Um >> Seems low. Seems low.
>> Uh, Judge Gujarati says that Nicole caused long-lasting, if not irreparable harm to former OneTaste employees. What she was doing wasn't about enlightenment or operating in a different dimension.
It was criminal. Um, Dedoen has not accepted any wrongdoing, neither has OneTaste. Uh, the people currently leading things still stand by her and basically say she's the [ __ ] best.
Uh, they're apparently, like, at least the way they're framing it is we're waiting for her. You know, as soon as she gets out, you know, we'll we'll we'll be able to get back to the important work.
>> Yeah, I mean, Jesus Jesus famously returns.
Um, that is What did What did she end up getting convicted on? I'm curious.
>> Oh, gosh. Uh, let's get the exact list up here cuz I mean, obviously sex trafficking is part of it.
>> Yeah. It's so cuz every time I hear about a case like this and then you hear the actual conviction, it does sound like she was able to probably get out of a lot of consequences by being able to argue, "Well, technically there was a degree of choice even though people were so psychologically [ __ ] that I would argue that's not true."
>> I mean, we'll see how much that help, but she does get like it's a forced labor conspiracy. Like it's conspiracy to commit forced labor that she like gets in trouble with um and gets convicted of like forced labor conspiracy. Like is like the actual crime she's convicted on is forced labor conspiracy alongside a little under 900 grand in restitution and 2 years supervised uh release. And it's just so far large, seven victims confirmed, right? That's based on this.
Uh, the only accomplice who goes down with her is Rachel. Obviously a lot of other people were complicit and still are. Uh, but yeah, I don't think OneTaste is going to have the juice to survive until she's done, but we'll see.
>> Lord have mercy. I know, truly. Let's uh I I I hope not. I hope not. But usually with something like this, unfortunately, they're just going to be another grifter that uh that innovates in the field of uh you know taking advantage of people.
So.
>> Yep. Yep. Yep.
>> Holy [ __ ] >> Well.
>> Well, holy [ __ ] Robert.
>> Has this influenced any of your thinking on how to create your own cult, Jamie?
>> Um look, Nicole uh this was a truly horrific one. I I feel like she really uh did find a way to incorporate almost every grift of the last 20 years.
>> is an impressive pyramid, yeah.
>> There's an element of false feminism.
There is an element of capitalizing on male loneliness. There's a class element to it. There's indentured labor. There's forced labor. There's a tech element. I mean, it really does kind of run the gamut. And and she almost became a religion. I think that really would have been the bingo, right? Is to rebrand it a religion. Um >> And that's what I will do eventually.
When I finally best this with a cult that's about the opposite of orgasming.
I'm going to teach people how to poop right. You know, I think that's the next grift.
>> Well, and I think that's also I mean, don't >> You're doing it wrong.
>> Poop right is a good name. I >> If you get better at it, there's magic.
It'll make you immortal.
>> Look, media literacy is at an all-time low. I think you should call it poop right. Get to the point.
>> Poop right. Call it poop right.
>> I had to think too hard.
>> And like by 3 years on, I'll be teaching people that like if you're if you're not eating an all grape diet, like God is going to kill your children or something like that. It'll go crazy after a while, but up to that point, we'll have a lot of fun, you know?
>> Yeah. And I'll also try to sell so many supplements.
>> So many supplements. It's always basically all supplements.
>> Oh my gosh, she wasn't selling supplements. That's a big That was a mistake.
>> She wasn't actually, you're right. That was an error.
>> That was there should have been a useless product. Yeah, there were so many things she could have sold under the One Taste name.
>> [ __ ] it. Mm.
>> God. I I guess when I'm when I'm signing over my $20,000 check I I hope I'll remember to withhold it when you're like, "Actually, the best way to poop is to punch your spouse before dinner."
That's the only way >> [laughter] >> to really release is to assault someone immediately before taking the healthiest [ __ ] of your life.
>> Jamie, I would never do that. But, the key to pooping is to live on a boat for several years like robbing merchant vessels for me in order that I can like sell the the the proceeds. That's that's how you do it.
>> That's kind of brilliant to sell a poop only you could you could take.
>> [laughter] >> Okay, well, this is a good blues guy meeting, I think. Yeah, this is good.
I feel good [laughter] about this. Great stuff.
Yeah, I think we're we're on our way here. Jamie, you got any pluggables here?
>> Oh man, the usuals. I I I have a book coming out next year that there's no link for. So, I'll I'll let you know when there's a link for it. But, for now, listen to the Bechtol Cast every week. Listen to We The Unhoused every other week both on Thursdays and Tuesdays respectively. And and yeah, take a take a healthy [ __ ] for free at your house tonight. Do that do that for me.
>> Yep. All right, everybody.
>> I'm trying to undercut your business.
>> Yeah.
>> Wow.
>> Yeah.
>> Thank you.
>> [laughter] >> All right, everyone. We're done. Go away. Bye.
>> Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media. For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/atbehindthebastards.
We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.
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