Orgasm Inc.: The Story of OneTaste (2022) - full transcript
The only thing that ever heals,
the only thing that ever awakens
is connection.
I do think we have a pleasure deficit
disorder in this country.
It's getting faster and faster, our world
is getting really hyper-connected,
but human connection
is beginning to dissolve.
I do think, though, that there is a cure,
and that cure is
female orgasm.
Hi. My name is Nicole Daedone,
and I'm the founder
of OneTaste Urban Retreat Center.
She really was a celebrity to me.
Like, I'd seen her TED Talk 30 times.
I have this vision
that someday you'll see
yoga and meditation and orgasm
all on the same bill.
Welcome to the Orgasm Is pop-up shop.
Is. Orgasm Is.
Yeah.
Hi!
People began
to flood into our doors,
person after person after person.
That's one reason
why I love living in Silicon Valley.
Every single option
you could imagine available in this city.
It was all about exploring orgasm,
exploring pleasure.
To feel that open and that safe
with another human being,
every single woman
should know she can feel that.
I'm a lot more conscious
just of my own power in my sex.
The next thing we knew, we were
invited into all of these tech circles.
She wants
to have this elite group
of turned-on, hip men and women.
I was a lonely, nerdy guy.
OneTaste opened up a world
I didn't even dream was possible.
That feeling that had driven me
my whole life,
seeking or trying to connect
in relationship or sex
or any of those things, it was like...
"This is it."
It went from, like, utopia to a hellhole.
She would just become fascinated
with what she could get people to do.
That was kind of, like, her secret thrill.
People were getting hurt.
People were getting hurt badly.
She thought she was
saving the world by taking people's money
and messing up people's emotions.
Welcome to hell.
When you look at orgasm,
what I found is it has the same
fundamental goal as the internet,
and that's human-to-human connection.
OneTaste was
a fast-growing startup
in the health and wellness,
and sexuality space.
It was started by Nicole Daedone.
Having spent a lot of time
thinking about Nicole,
I think of her
as a very skilled craftsman.
She seems to know
what people will gravitate toward.
People wanted to hear from a woman.
People wanted to see a woman like her
at the top of a company like this.
This was really women-led,
and I think that was important
based on what OneTaste were teaching.
Orgasmic meditation is a way to connect
to yourself, connect to your partner,
to feel more in your body.
I'm a lot more physically close to people
and less afraid of more affection,
and it's teaching me
to really ask for what I want
and say the vulnerable thing
that might be scary to say.
At the fundamental level,
we all want the same things.
We want to love, be loved, see, be seen,
know our purpose and feel connection.
Nicole is very compelling.
She's someone who put others at ease
when she was around them...
We love you all. Happy birthday!
...and whose special gift was setting
a vision that people were excited about
and were willing to do a lot of things
in order to help advance.
Go ahead and take a moment
to really feel where you are
and the people that came here tonight,
maybe noticing,
"Oh, I want to talk to that person later."
Making contact.
Maybe you're avoiding contact.
Noticing
the patterns.
Women and relationships
were always a mystery to me.
And I didn't understand
how to, like, find a girlfriend.
But I wanted to get laid,
and that was, like...
this, like, fly in the ointment, you know?
I'd heard about OneTaste,
and then finally,
a friend of mine at the time was like,
"Oh, we're gonna go
to an in-group at OneTaste."
"Do you wanna come with us?"
The building was at 1074 Folsom.
We walk in,
and it's like this big, open space.
Everybody's hanging around, talking, like,
kind of like a cocktail party, almost.
It's just, like, a warm, friendly vibe,
which, to me at the time,
is, like, odd, almost suspect.
I was used to all the cocktail parties
in the whole tech scene,
where, you know, everybody's aloof.
But this was totally different.
Warm, open, friendly,
and the person I'm sitting next to,
there's this kind of presence
that you feel,
and then I look at her and I go, "Oh."
'Cause on the website was the picture
of the woman that founded OneTaste,
Nicole Daedone,
and I'm like, "Oh, you're Nicole."
And then we just
immediately started talking
about the idea of integrating
sexuality and spirituality.
I don't think that there's anything...
of a higher order
than having my body feel so good
that I emanate a good feeling...
...and that that good feeling
can catch on to you,
and that we can begin
to pass it on to each other.
And when we feel good,
strangely enough, we act well.
So, there's this way that, it seems to me,
all there really is to do is to be happy,
so happy that it overflows
and I have enough for you,
and I want to share it
in any way I possibly can with you.
What happens in the face
of really intense sensations
is that the mind wants to go
either toward really good or really bad.
And that's what we tend to do
with sexuality.
It's either beautiful and beloved,
or it's this nasty, evil thing.
But we don't know how to move
in the dynamic reality
that occurs in between those poles.
Hi.
We are redefining what orgasm is.
Everything you see on the wall
is written by somebody who just came in
to write what orgasm is for them.
OneTaste would have
really low-key events,
and the people who were working
radiated this happiness or attractiveness.
They invite you to do yoga with them,
they invite you
to help them run another event,
and you get sort of swept up in it.
Orgasm is awesome, orgasm is amazing,
orgasm changed my life.
Not only were all these happy,
friendly people I was hanging out with
part of this organization,
they all lived together.
Whoo! OneTaste rocks!
Welcome to OneTaste San Francisco.
I'm gonna take you all on a little tour
inside the building. Come on in.
This is Alicia,
and she does orgasmic haircuts.
Hi, guys. Hi.
My, how she uses her hands.
There's some yoga going on.
Maybe we could take
a quick little peek inside.
- You can't film that.
- This is the front of our warehouse.
A little messy right now.
Who left their laundry here?
And this is our center during the day.
I started reading online.
There was, like, an online forum
where people would post
their comings and goings,
like threesomes, foursomes, n-somes.
So-and-so having a make-out
with so-and-so,
and so-and-so watching someone making out.
I was like, "What is going on?
Like, this can't be real."
"This has gotta be all made up.
I'm sure this isn't actually happening,
and if it's happening,
there's no way they're gonna let me in."
But then, sure enough,
no, it was the real deal.
One night I was
living on a boat by myself,
and the next night I was living
in a warehouse with, like, 40 people
and sharing a bed
with my "research partner."
I was, like, this nerdy
techie guy by day, you know,
fixing people's computer problems,
and then I'd go home at night
and, you know,
be in the middle of this craziness.
Welcome to OneTaste.
Tell us, how do you do it, Alicia?
How do you stay so sexy?
I use my Amorepacific
Treatment Cleansing Foam.
Is that your secret?
I thought it was orgasmic meditation.
I OM...
I OM every day and I use Amorepacific.
I OM and I don't eat any sugar.
And I always tell the truth.
What does it mean to say that
I'm a practitioner of orgasmic meditation?
For purposes of simplicity, I'm going
to describe it as a man and a woman,
just so that I can say "he" and "she,"
but it can be
all different, crazy configurations.
Nicole is certainly a genius.
Brilliant idea to name it
an OMing session.
An orgasmic meditation.
Because there's so many seekers,
so many spiritual seekers in the Bay Area
and around the world.
You've turned this sex practice
into a spiritual practice.
She will lie down.
There'll be a pillow underneath her head,
a pillow underneath each leg.
She'll butterfly open her legs.
And then he will get his finger onto her
upper left-hand quadrant of her clitoris.
The upper left-hand quadrant is a location
that they have found, scientifically,
to have a bundle of nerve endings.
Some say 8,000,
some say 800,000, I don't know.
But they cannot find any reason
for this bundle of nerve endings
other than pleasure.
The thing that will prevent you
from knowing you hit the spot
is hoping you're hitting the spot,
not sure you hit the spot.
"What's the spot? I'm never gonna
find the spot. It's impossible."
That will be the thing that will stop you
from the natural human intuition
of feeling this little, slightly electric...
You'll also know because she'll go...
...and she will not, in any way, at all,
move her hips.
She won't be doing weird moans.
She'll just be what we call "nailed."
So, then you will just stroke up, down,
up, down, up, down, up, down,
up, down, up, down.
- What am I gonna say next?
- "Up, down."
There you go. For 15 minutes.
It's so simple.
The man, if he's a good doer,
he'll start to say,
"The lips of your pussy
are starting to fill with fluid,
and the shades of pink
and coral and ruby."
"And starting to build tumescence,"
is a word that they used a lot,
which was to build the turn-on,
to build the energy.
Lighter, faster strokes
will bring somebody up,
and then slower, firmer strokes
will bring somebody down.
So, you bring them up,
and then you plateau them,
then you bring 'em up,
and then plateau 'em.
This is how you hit
the other dimension
that you sense, in your body,
is possible when you're having sex,
and maybe that you glimpse,
or that moment that you glimpse
in orgasm, where there's just nothing...
This is how you get to exist
in that place sustainably.
The stroking practice was phenomenal.
And for me as a human being, you know,
putting that much attention on just
that one tiny spot on your index finger,
touching the woman's clitoris,
just stroking...
And from that one point,
it opens up all these channels as a man
that I just never even knew
were accessible to me.
The idea that her toe would wiggle
and I could feel
a little tingle in my finger,
that was, like, connected.
And it was like, "What?
Like, how is that even possible?"
So, these are things
that unfolded in the practice.
Of course, when I started,
I had no idea what I was doing,
and I was lucky
if I could even get on the clitoris.
The guys here said,
"All I want is to have more sex."
"Please, please."
They didn't realize they're immersed
on an island of women who want sex.
And so they were having,
like, 20 OMs a day.
Their little fingers were in braces,
and they were, like,
locking themselves behind the door.
"Nicole, get me out of here.
Please, no more sex!"
I was like a lot of guys I knew
in the tech world in San Francisco,
starved for just basic physical affection.
And OneTaste opened up this world
of intimacy and connection and sex.
What she was selling was an
innovation in relating to your sexuality.
The Bay Area is a place where
people are gonna be attracted to
and open to that kind of idea,
and where they, frankly, might have
a little extra money to buy courses.
He said to me, "I'm gonna describe your
pussy now. Is that all right with you?"
I remember thinking
I've never had somebody do that before.
It felt like somebody touched
the deepest part
that existed inside of me.
I felt so exposed and so vulnerable,
and I remember thinking, "Oh my God,
I don't think I've ever been that intimate
with another human being before
in my life."
I've talked to many people who said
orgasmic meditation changed their life,
that it helped them
experience sexual pleasure
that they thought
was unreachable for them.
And especially women who said,
"I've never had an orgasm before,
and this helped me redefine
what sexual pleasure could mean for me."
"You know, I had felt like
there was something wrong with me,
and now there was this alternative
that was presented to me
that allowed me to embrace my body
rather than feel ashamed."
My first introduction
to orgasmic meditation
was when I saw a demo of OM.
And I remember that night, it was like...
It was like...
Like, the finger found the spot.
And I was just like, "Oh, I feel like
my whole body, just, like, opened up."
That's beautiful.
- Thank you.
- Yeah.
Describe your sex to me.
Timid and shy,
which is frustrating at times,
but I feel like I'm in the right place.
Over the course of my four years
living and working at OneTaste,
I became more relaxed and social in a way,
and I think people could see it.
I became okay
with men giving me attention at work,
I became friendlier towards them,
and my career took off.
I guess I owe that to learning a lot
about men at OneTaste, you know.
They were really, like,
encouraging us to see
the soft, sensitive,
emotional sides of men.
So this is the building that was
what we called the center, 1074.
That's where we would hang out
most of the time during the day,
and then upstairs was the yoga studio,
but also the main classroom space
where we would hold practice
every morning.
And then this is 1060.
This was the warehouse.
I always loved that there was
that behind-the-red-door quality.
Yeah, so now it's a BDSM dungeon
and a play space.
I remember the first bed I had
was on this side, in the corner there,
and then later on I had one here.
I was sleeping
in one right here at one point.
I was up in the loft.
Ten, 12, 13, 15...
I mean, at least 15 beds.
And I remember the first night I moved in,
and it was nuts.
Like, there was so much energy in my body.
All the... Yeah, that buzzy,
lively energy of... Of people...
...you know, exploring sex.
You know, my mom died
when I was 13 years old,
and there's nothing that a 13-year-old kid
can possibly be prepared for in any way
to have that experience
or lose someone that close to them.
So, I think on some level,
I was learning how to connect with women
so that I could be able
to let people come and go in my life
and not feel the grippy attachment.
I was
a software engineer in Silicon Valley.
I was pretty successful,
except in my personal life.
I was just kind of a walking encyclopedia
of all the ways
you can be bad with the opposite sex.
I had a few different nicknames
at OneTaste.
One of them was Yoda, and I think
it's partly because of my stature.
I'm 5'0".
I'm five feet tall.
And so, in a way that was good because
I was a counterexample to all of the men
who thought they had to be a certain thing
in order to actually have
good relationships with women.
We're in this place now
where women are actually self-sufficient.
They don't need men
to protect them anymore,
or to care for them anymore,
or to, like, provide for them anymore.
So, what can men do, right?
What women want is someone who's actually
there meeting them as an equal
and ready to play.
I think OneTaste was a place where
really what we were doing was
increasing human connection,
and researching human connection.
Like, what happens
when you are vulnerable with someone?
What happens when you are more truthful
than you've ever been with someone?
And what happens when
you expose your clitoris to someone?
All of this stuff that people avoid
because it's so scary
is precisely where people need to go
in order to have true,
nourishing human connection.
The best thing you have to lose
is that sense of hopelessness
that you will ever...
be reached deep inside.
I probably re-watched
that TED Talk, like, 20 or 30 times.
I really felt like something
she was saying in that talk touched me.
Like, something about
it was more than sexuality,
it's about real connection and realness.
You get to have
this most profound and deep experience
with another human being.
There's a certain magic that comes
from putting attention on other people,
instead of always focusing on your needs
and your wants and your goals, which...
In OneTaste, through OMing,
we learned how to really put our attention
on other people's feelings,
which is basically what empathy is.
But not just, like,
"I can feel when you're happy or sad."
But like, I can feel the moment
that you think I'm lying,
or I can feel the moment
that, like, you pull back.
Precision with empathy.
It felt so good to feel like
you're helping them help people.
Whoo!
It's like our lives
are such a good TV show.
Just to watch it, like,
in real, like, real time.
Hmm.
And I'm so grateful that,
like, life is just so interesting.
Mm-hm.
In high school, my anxiety was,
like, almost debilitating.
In my early twenties,
I learned how to put a mask over it.
I still had anxiety
and I still felt terrible
most of the time.
So, to be, you know, in a space
where I could really be real,
it was like incredible medicine for me.
We're gonna do this exercise three times.
My first class, the first half
of the day was Nicole speaking to people,
giving impromptu coaching.
Giving them "strokes" was the term.
That was life-changing,
because she could cold-read people
with such accuracy
that, if you're open to it,
it could maybe change your life,
give you a new perspective.
She'd say, like, "What are you here for?"
For some people she'd just say
"Thank you'" and move on.
And when it got to me, I was starting
to say something mundane like,
"Oh, sex is interesting,
so I signed up for this class,"
and I could see she was
already turning away from me,
like that wasn't a good answer.
So she was gonna shift,
and then I just blurted out,
"I want to connect with people for real."
And she turns back to me,
and it felt, you know...
It felt really good to get her attention.
Ultimately, what we're aiming for
is to create a permanent meeting space.
So, no matter how whackadoodle she gets
when she's stuck up here in her ego,
she knows that I can get in there.
And she read me and she said, "I know
why you don't connect with people."
"It's like you're trying to stay
in this tonal range."
"It's a nice range, but you're denying
people the whole spectrum."
"You trying to act
like a super cute frat boy,
who says everything's cool all the time,
when really you're a dark, dangerous man."
And no one had ever
spoken to me like that before.
I don't know if she was
reading something in me for real
or reading something
that I wanted to be true,
but it felt like the most resonant thing
anyone had said to me.
I did feel like
I put up a facade with people to be liked,
but inside I was angry, I was frustrated,
you know, I felt dark inside.
It was life-changing,
just that beginning before I ever OMed.
I got over a fear of being seen,
a fear of vulnerability
that I had my entire life.
Hey, would you like to have an OM?
Sure.
Okay. I've only done it
once or twice though.
That's okay.
- When's a good time?
- Uh, now if you're not busy.
All right, let's go.
OneTaste, the idea was to get
this thing out into the world, right?
Well, it became evident
pretty quickly that I could, like,
shoot video and tell a little story,
and, like, boom,
we've got, you know, some media.
So this is what you need to know to truly
learn how to handle a woman's pussy.
That's right. We just said,
"Learn to handle a woman's pussy."
Nicole, she wanted to
leverage that, you know, right away.
And so that sort of became
my raison d'être...
and eventually became
my real raison d'etre.
Like, I quit my job so that
I could be the video guy for OneTaste.
"Your sex is not a problem."
"We've been living
in a paradigm of wrong for too long."
And what if you could learn
how to become a master of the vagina?
Today, we're going to discuss
why everyone is going to be happier
when you learn how to give a woman
a 15-minute orgasm.
If you all don't know,
Nicole's first book was released
on May 25th, Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm.
And it's come out to some
really great reviews and publicity.
Just this weekend, Nicole was at TEDxSF
giving a lecture to 750 people...
This was a practice that intrigued
reporters whenever they heard about it.
It was like,
"Orgasmic meditation? Like, what is that?"
Fifteen minutes?
Fifteen minutes.
That's a lot of orgasm.
That's a lot of orgasm. Yeah.
The OneTaste Urban Retreat,
not your average yoga studio.
The pants come off the women, and soon,
the studio erupts in female ecstasy.
Nicole knew
that it couldn't be so kooky,
you know, and it had to become
more about wellness,
more about women feeling empowered.
A visual testimony
on how orgasmic meditation is practiced.
They started having offices
in Los Angeles, New York, London.
They started expanding internationally...
The statistics are terrible.
Thirty percent of women self-report that
they don't reach orgasm when they want to.
In 2013 and 2014,
they held these conferences,
weekend-long conferences
with thousands of attendees.
Thank you for coming to OMX!
They just started collecting
more and more money from sales of courses.
At one point, OneTaste started selling
a thing called membership
that was, like, $50,000-plus,
which allowed whoever the customer was
to take any class for the whole year.
By the time 2017 came around,
the company had about
$12 million in revenue.
That was the year that they were on a list
of fast-growing startups by Inc. magazine.
And it was a reflection of Nicole's desire
to make OneTaste mainstream.
I'm Gwyneth Paltrow,
and you're listening to the Goop Podcast.
Today's guest is the very magnetic
Nicole Daedone. She's a...
OneTaste caught the eye
of really influential people,
in particular, Gwyneth Paltrow,
who was not only someone
who's very influential in Hollywood,
but also someone
who's this, like, wellness god.
Nicole is also
the author of Slow Sex,
which is a book I often recommend to women
who are looking for more desire
in their relationships.
I really wonder if she was
trying to do an L. Ron Hubbard.
"Let's get some famous people in."
That was one of the many brilliant things
the founder of Scientology came up with,
was the power of celebrity.
"If we can get movie stars, music stars,
and people like that
in our ranks as our public face,
boy, that makes us really attractive
to your average Joe or Jill out there."
And he was absolutely right.
And so, I could see her
kind of following that lead as well.
In late 2017,
I was contacted by a woman
who works in communications,
and she said,
"Hey, can we talk on the phone?"
"I have a story I think
might be interesting to you."
"It's about a fast-growing company
run by women in the wellness space,
and it's called OneTaste."
And this was in 2017, and the #MeToo
movement was just getting going.
And I remember the way she pitched it was,
"You know, this is a company
that's gonna help people
connect with each other in a way
that is gonna help mitigate
some pain we've seen
come up with the #MeToo movement,
because it helps people be
more sensitive to each other's needs."
And I mentioned to a friend of mine that
I was considering writing about OneTaste.
And my friend told me,
"I know somebody you should talk to."
"They used to be
a customer of this company
and they had a pretty bad experience."
So, I ended up having a long conversation
with this person for several hours,
hearing their story.
And at the end of that,
I thought to myself,
"Wow, this is really different
from any of the reporting that's out there
about OneTaste currently,
and this might be a big story."
When you are looking at Nicole,
you're looking at Nicole
and she's looking back,
and she locks into your eyes,
it is like you are being completely seen,
like, down to your soul,
including everything,
yuck and all, especially yuck.
And while you're being,
like, embraced in this gaze,
also being, you know, picked apart
like you're under a microscope.
And so she starts playing this game
with me, which is pulling desires.
And so she says, "What do you want?"
So, you know, she's fish...
She's pulling them out, so I say,
"I want to have more sex,
I to have want more orgasm."
"I want to have more fun,
I want more community."
So, she's going, "Come on, what else?"
This is how this goes.
And so, finally, I get down in my belly,
in my womb, to like,
"Wow." And I had never
spoken it out loud, and I said,
"I want to have a baby."
And I was like...
And she's like, "Not so fast. What else?"
I was like, "That's it."
"What else?"
And so finally I say,
"Okay, I wanna have a demo."
A demo is a demonstration
of a woman in orgasm for an hour.
And Nicole goes... And she looks around.
"Did you hear that? We hit bottom."
"That was it. That's the bottom desire."
And so, here I have said,
in front of all these people,
that I wanna have a demo,
knowing full well that
that was not at the bottom.
That was Nicole's desire.
So, I was just
fully giving over to Nicole.
The type of personal reflection
that they encouraged us to do
was all about finding your deeper desire.
Yet, they would do
this complicated psychological thing
of inserting their desire into you
and telling you that it's yours.
What's
your real big desire?
What's your real big, deep desire?
What turns on your pussy?
- I want to coach and teach for OneTaste.
- Fuck, that's awesome.
"This is how
Nicole manipulated people."
"She agreed that something was true
if it matched what she wanted to hear."
"If you said something she didn't like,
she called it a lie,
or, 'That's not the end of your desire.'"
"If you had any doubt,
she knew how to increase that doubt
until what she told you was true
became what you believed."
So, Bill and I pay Nicole $15,000,
which, according to Nicole,
at the time was a very good deal,
and my course begins.
A lot of people described to me
going to some event
where they were first exposed to OneTaste,
and maybe there was an explicit pitch
for the company or taking a class.
I'm gonna have one of our sales associates
Lindsay come up and talk to you
about a special offer
for all of you for attending tonight,
and also for being on the web.
And then the pitch
just gets bigger and bigger.
"Why don't you take
this week-long, intensive class?"
"Come and learn from Nicole,
or come help us teach a class."
"Why don't you come help us with sales?"
We need an initiation ceremony
or something edgier.
We need something that they are locked in,
they are in for the full weekend,
for the full ride.
Rachel would be pitching
the $15,000 coaching program.
And at the time, I was just barely
making ends meet as a freelance writer,
but somehow, it felt so good
to meet with her for a sales call anyway.
I told her in the beginning, "I don't
have money, I can't buy anything,"
and she just made it feel good to come
hang out with her and talk about my life.
And similar to my experience with Nicole,
I felt so good and so seen afterwards.
So when she asked, "Do you want
to take the coaching program?"
"We can put you on our payment plan,"
I found myself giving her my credit card
before I even realized.
So I gave her, you know, this card.
It was $1,000 a month,
which put me into debt immediately.
But then afterwards, I had to justify
my purchase, and that put me in deeper.
I've had people describe to me
this sales tactic of,
we play some sort of communication game
like hot seat.
Someone's sitting in the middle,
being asked a bunch of questions.
And in the back,
OneTaste staff are taking notes.
They're writing down, you know,
"This person's recently divorced."
"This man feels unsure
how to approach women."
And then they strategize
about who's the best OneTaste staffer
to be sent over to that customer
to try to win them over.
Imagine you come to me and you say, like,
"Well, yeah, I'm interested in OneTaste
because, you know, I've had trouble
keeping a long-term relationship,"
and I'd ask you something like,
"Can you imagine if that were true
for the rest of your life?"
You make the pain bigger,
so that what you offer as a solution
sounds more appealing.
Nicole's very brilliant
at seeing wounding.
And so that's what she hooks into,
and then becomes
the salve of that wounding.
So then, you're not feeling the wound
when you're in her presence,
but you're reliant upon her to guide you.
And then, on top of that, there was
this very strong connection between
how well you were doing spiritually
in the OneTaste teachings
and your ability to sell courses.
They really saw that as connected,
they thought that
a more turned-on woman
would sell courses better
because they would be projecting
their turn-on to the customers,
where it was almost like
channeling this divine force
that would help you in
such an earthly pursuit as closing a sale.
"I'm a turned-on pussy,
feeling and savoring
every stroke going through me,
sent back out
with power and love to shine."
Yeah!
We were supposed to talk about cock,
like, talk about, like, crass,
nitty-gritty sexual stuff,
'cause that's hot, that's what
we're trying to do at OneTaste.
You know, it turns people on
when they get
that flutter in their stomach
when you just said,
like, "cock" or "pussy,"
which actually probably,
like, embarrasses people.
I don't know if that's turn-on
or discomfort.
At one point Nicole is, like,
"We're gonna teach this thing
called 'orgasmic rebalancing.'"
And she did a demo
of what orgasmic rebalancing was.
You know,
you can kind of see from the footage,
the closest thing would be like reiki,
where you're moving energy in the body.
I'm sure the footage...
I haven't looked at it in a while,
but I'm sure it looks crazy.
I was
immediately taken by Nicole.
I thought she was just very charismatic,
but at the same time,
I could see that she was a hustler.
Tell me a bit about that.
Is Nicole Daedone a con artist?
Yeah.
You got to dissect that word though.
It means "confidence."
It's like, yeah, she can say things
in such an enthusiastic way
and have so much knowledge around it
that she is a fantastic salesman.
I am interested
in letting my body be used
in the transmission of the experiences
that have been given to me.
There is an experience of beauty
that one feels
when something is in harmony.
This was that kind of beauty.
Today, I am immersed in it.
I feel here that there is something
inside of me connected to everything.
There's an intimacy that I feel
with my partner, the bed, the plants.
The world becomes
one giant network of neurons,
and this entity that I call Nicole
is part of this.
If you're looking at
that footage from the Stinson demo,
what you're seeing is...
batshit nuts. Come on.
Someone's up there, completely naked,
getting her pussy stroked,
there's someone with snakes there and...
Right? Like, all this stuff...
Like, what is going on?
And to me...
...all that stuff was just there
to create a certain kind of aura
for the people in the room,
like investors.
I wonder if the New York Times
reporter was there.
The Stinson Beach demo,
it's very intense. It seems like...
Sometimes she's laughing,
sometimes she's crying.
There's a lot of moaning.
You hear people in the audience
expressing their sensations.
You know, "It's like a warmth in my belly,
or like a tingling in my face."
Rachel Cherwitz shepherds
some of the audience members up
to, like, touch Nicole's thigh
while the demo is going on.
They describe it like
it's meant to be like
you can feel the energy
of this experience.
You realize, "Holy shit,
I'm actually experiencing things
in tandem with this woman
who's getting stroked in front of me."
"Like, I'm actually
feeling stuff in my body too."
And even though I think most people
would watch that and think, like, this is
bananas... Um...
it looks like the people in the room
feel like something really is happening.
I hope you really got a sense tonight
of what it's like to have a woman,
a fully-trained woman, get off.
And see the places that she can go.
It's just unmatched.
I mean, there's nobody else that...
who I stroke,
that can do what she does,
and I want all of you
to be able to do what she does.
I'm in agreement.
- Please.
- Me too.
When I took the course,
by that point,
we had both female and male OMing,
and my partner was very skittish
about doing a male.
So, Nicole stepped in personally,
and I had a meltdown.
I started shivering, crying.
Tears were rolling down my cheeks.
Then she sort of moved me to her breasts
and started stroking my head.
And the part of me
that wasn't having a meltdown,
the rational little control center there,
was thinking, "Oh yes, Nicole,
I know what you're up to."
"You're making yourself my mommy."
"You're holding me
gently, tenderly in your lap
next to your breasts, and stroking my head
and looking lovingly at me."
"You're trying to imprint me as mom."
It didn't work.
I guess if I didn't have that
little skeptical bit in my consciousness,
maybe I would've really bonded with her.
Maybe I would've gone all in for OneTaste
and been one of her really fervent
members and defenders.
But I didn't.
You're all welcome to come get stroked,
and we have darshan from 11:00 to 1:00,
Monday through Friday.
and it would be my honor
to stroke anybody in this room
and have you have...
If you look at Zen Buddhism
or any of these things,
there's levels of being ready
for the next piece of truth.
Whenever it became public that
there was also a male stroking practice,
all the men were like,
"I want that, I need that."
Like, "I empathize with what these women
experience about starving."
"I'm starving too,
I wanna get stroked as well."
And it would become a quagmire.
So, we kept it private.
As soon as that was on the table,
it changed everything.
So we just had it not be,
"It is not on the table."
"It is not on the table
that there is a male stroking practice."
Someone joked around,
"Oh, it's like a spiritual hand job."
And right, so that's the problem, is,
it can devolve into a hand job,
and we wanted it to be
something very different than that.
Like, a woman stroking a man's penis
brings up a whole bunch of cultural things
that the reverse simply does not.
What it means for a woman
to be a sexual service provider
and for a man to be
in the position of being
on the receiving end
of sexual service providing.
So, like, you couldn't just have them
reverse and say, "Now this is OM."
It ends up not being an OM.
We have a female identity
in our culture, right?
The female is the victim.
And if I, in any way, don't buy into that,
then there's only two options with victim.
There's villain.
Your practice session
where women are being OMed,
orgasmic meditation,
by men who are not present,
don't know who they are,
aren't clear in their sense of purpose.
A woman cannot
open her legs to a man at that level,
and I think it's really important for you
or someone who's highly trained
to be here in these practice sessions.
When the man impresses his shape
into her, her whole body feels that,
her whole consciousness is ignited,
but I think that you need to
tighten up the practice sessions.
What you say, for me,
feels like, uh, protection of women
in such a way that it continues
an idea that we need to be protected.
And that idea keeps me
not taking responsibility for my sex.
So, I have a story, and I am no victim.
The problem with the victim story,
it takes away your power.
If you wanna know
the real way to deflect rape,
it's to turn on 100%.
Because then there's nothing to rape.
Nicole had some very barbaric messages
when she talks about
the darkness that she has
or the darkness that she came from.
Trauma is just stuff that's
stuck in the body that needs discharge.
I think what you do...
I mean, this is gonna be my suggestion
every time, is you OM a lot.
As you OM,
whatever is in there begins to come out.
It just progressively
and gently opens you and releases,
and then you can just
face and be rid of, face and be rid of.
And then pretty soon what you just notice
is your capacity to sit in pain decreases,
and you just gotta get that shit out fast,
and then you're clear again.
You know, my dad was a child molester,
and he had experiences with young girls
and used me as bait.
And so that exact behavior...
Whoa, of me colluding
with somebody who would cause harm.
And I got that seed out.
I got free.
I could forgive everybody
in the whole experience
'cause I got free of that.
I think I told the story in here
when I was a stripper
and they put a knife up to my throat.
Nicole's biography is
kind of a matter of mystery.
You're never really sure
what's actually true.
I think her biography
went through a lot of revisions
as the company became
more and more prominent.
But she did talk about
having worked as a stripper.
Well, I have great cred.
I come from darkness.
She was a very highly paid call girl.
She would tell stories about, you know,
getting $700 for a trick,
I think is the term.
Then she had a thing where she would
play around socially with people,
like, mess with their heads.
Guys, especially.
Friend of mine was like,
"Oh, she's a monster."
"She's a monster."
Like, "Stay away from her," and stuff.
And that was very intriguing.
We had done some LSD earlier one day,
and she proposed to me.
Having your wife be
a sex cult leader was like...
It was pretty interesting for me.
It's like, I was totally ready
to go buy a Harley and ride up the coast
and be in a sex cult, are you kidding?
And take LSD.
I totally wanted to do all that stuff.
Our mission plan,
our business plan was this:
800,000 people trying to practice
orgasmic meditation,
10,000 people at the level of mastery,
or teachers,
and a center in the major cities,
all the major cities of the world.
Rob Kandell was
Nicole's first business partner.
He was a guy who used to work
kind of in a tech-finance job,
and met Nicole, and they decided
to start OneTaste together.
When I first met Rob,
he was married to Carol.
They were part of Nicole's
little cadre of followers.
Nicole wanted Rob
for his unending devotion,
and also his bank account.
You know, he was kind of like
a nebbish-y guy, looking for approval,
and Nicole had
a really good sense of style,
and so she would groom him,
so he became hot.
I was stroking a hot young thing
on a warm Tuesday morning.
She would
borrow things from Scientology
or, like, these different cults,
even going back
to stuff like Lifespring and est.
The shamans say that a medicine man begins
by falling into the power of demons.
Now, in Kabbalah,
it's called chesed and gevurah.
In the darshan...
There's a thing called Satguru...
The desire sutras...
It's sacred...
In the more esoteric practices.
I want to go see Amma.
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.
Kalimah said... Wilke said...
Think about the Buddha.
Malcolm Gladwell.
Rumi. BKS Iyengar. Krishnamurthy.
The Tibetan Buddhist...
Sort of like Mother Teresa.
A universal sanctuary light-bearer.
Shabbat. The love of Jesus.
That is religion, and the dukh has it.
All of this fucking crazy shit
about sacred and spiritual and woman.
Usually, if you touch the absolute,
you have this realization.
The realization is, "I am God."
One taste, which is a Buddhist concept.
The Buddha said, "Just as the ocean
has one taste, the taste of sal
the only thing that ever awakens
is connection.
I do think we have a pleasure deficit
disorder in this country.
It's getting faster and faster, our world
is getting really hyper-connected,
but human connection
is beginning to dissolve.
I do think, though, that there is a cure,
and that cure is
female orgasm.
Hi. My name is Nicole Daedone,
and I'm the founder
of OneTaste Urban Retreat Center.
She really was a celebrity to me.
Like, I'd seen her TED Talk 30 times.
I have this vision
that someday you'll see
yoga and meditation and orgasm
all on the same bill.
Welcome to the Orgasm Is pop-up shop.
Is. Orgasm Is.
Yeah.
Hi!
People began
to flood into our doors,
person after person after person.
That's one reason
why I love living in Silicon Valley.
Every single option
you could imagine available in this city.
It was all about exploring orgasm,
exploring pleasure.
To feel that open and that safe
with another human being,
every single woman
should know she can feel that.
I'm a lot more conscious
just of my own power in my sex.
The next thing we knew, we were
invited into all of these tech circles.
She wants
to have this elite group
of turned-on, hip men and women.
I was a lonely, nerdy guy.
OneTaste opened up a world
I didn't even dream was possible.
That feeling that had driven me
my whole life,
seeking or trying to connect
in relationship or sex
or any of those things, it was like...
"This is it."
It went from, like, utopia to a hellhole.
She would just become fascinated
with what she could get people to do.
That was kind of, like, her secret thrill.
People were getting hurt.
People were getting hurt badly.
She thought she was
saving the world by taking people's money
and messing up people's emotions.
Welcome to hell.
When you look at orgasm,
what I found is it has the same
fundamental goal as the internet,
and that's human-to-human connection.
OneTaste was
a fast-growing startup
in the health and wellness,
and sexuality space.
It was started by Nicole Daedone.
Having spent a lot of time
thinking about Nicole,
I think of her
as a very skilled craftsman.
She seems to know
what people will gravitate toward.
People wanted to hear from a woman.
People wanted to see a woman like her
at the top of a company like this.
This was really women-led,
and I think that was important
based on what OneTaste were teaching.
Orgasmic meditation is a way to connect
to yourself, connect to your partner,
to feel more in your body.
I'm a lot more physically close to people
and less afraid of more affection,
and it's teaching me
to really ask for what I want
and say the vulnerable thing
that might be scary to say.
At the fundamental level,
we all want the same things.
We want to love, be loved, see, be seen,
know our purpose and feel connection.
Nicole is very compelling.
She's someone who put others at ease
when she was around them...
We love you all. Happy birthday!
...and whose special gift was setting
a vision that people were excited about
and were willing to do a lot of things
in order to help advance.
Go ahead and take a moment
to really feel where you are
and the people that came here tonight,
maybe noticing,
"Oh, I want to talk to that person later."
Making contact.
Maybe you're avoiding contact.
Noticing
the patterns.
Women and relationships
were always a mystery to me.
And I didn't understand
how to, like, find a girlfriend.
But I wanted to get laid,
and that was, like...
this, like, fly in the ointment, you know?
I'd heard about OneTaste,
and then finally,
a friend of mine at the time was like,
"Oh, we're gonna go
to an in-group at OneTaste."
"Do you wanna come with us?"
The building was at 1074 Folsom.
We walk in,
and it's like this big, open space.
Everybody's hanging around, talking, like,
kind of like a cocktail party, almost.
It's just, like, a warm, friendly vibe,
which, to me at the time,
is, like, odd, almost suspect.
I was used to all the cocktail parties
in the whole tech scene,
where, you know, everybody's aloof.
But this was totally different.
Warm, open, friendly,
and the person I'm sitting next to,
there's this kind of presence
that you feel,
and then I look at her and I go, "Oh."
'Cause on the website was the picture
of the woman that founded OneTaste,
Nicole Daedone,
and I'm like, "Oh, you're Nicole."
And then we just
immediately started talking
about the idea of integrating
sexuality and spirituality.
I don't think that there's anything...
of a higher order
than having my body feel so good
that I emanate a good feeling...
...and that that good feeling
can catch on to you,
and that we can begin
to pass it on to each other.
And when we feel good,
strangely enough, we act well.
So, there's this way that, it seems to me,
all there really is to do is to be happy,
so happy that it overflows
and I have enough for you,
and I want to share it
in any way I possibly can with you.
What happens in the face
of really intense sensations
is that the mind wants to go
either toward really good or really bad.
And that's what we tend to do
with sexuality.
It's either beautiful and beloved,
or it's this nasty, evil thing.
But we don't know how to move
in the dynamic reality
that occurs in between those poles.
Hi.
We are redefining what orgasm is.
Everything you see on the wall
is written by somebody who just came in
to write what orgasm is for them.
OneTaste would have
really low-key events,
and the people who were working
radiated this happiness or attractiveness.
They invite you to do yoga with them,
they invite you
to help them run another event,
and you get sort of swept up in it.
Orgasm is awesome, orgasm is amazing,
orgasm changed my life.
Not only were all these happy,
friendly people I was hanging out with
part of this organization,
they all lived together.
Whoo! OneTaste rocks!
Welcome to OneTaste San Francisco.
I'm gonna take you all on a little tour
inside the building. Come on in.
This is Alicia,
and she does orgasmic haircuts.
Hi, guys. Hi.
My, how she uses her hands.
There's some yoga going on.
Maybe we could take
a quick little peek inside.
- You can't film that.
- This is the front of our warehouse.
A little messy right now.
Who left their laundry here?
And this is our center during the day.
I started reading online.
There was, like, an online forum
where people would post
their comings and goings,
like threesomes, foursomes, n-somes.
So-and-so having a make-out
with so-and-so,
and so-and-so watching someone making out.
I was like, "What is going on?
Like, this can't be real."
"This has gotta be all made up.
I'm sure this isn't actually happening,
and if it's happening,
there's no way they're gonna let me in."
But then, sure enough,
no, it was the real deal.
One night I was
living on a boat by myself,
and the next night I was living
in a warehouse with, like, 40 people
and sharing a bed
with my "research partner."
I was, like, this nerdy
techie guy by day, you know,
fixing people's computer problems,
and then I'd go home at night
and, you know,
be in the middle of this craziness.
Welcome to OneTaste.
Tell us, how do you do it, Alicia?
How do you stay so sexy?
I use my Amorepacific
Treatment Cleansing Foam.
Is that your secret?
I thought it was orgasmic meditation.
I OM...
I OM every day and I use Amorepacific.
I OM and I don't eat any sugar.
And I always tell the truth.
What does it mean to say that
I'm a practitioner of orgasmic meditation?
For purposes of simplicity, I'm going
to describe it as a man and a woman,
just so that I can say "he" and "she,"
but it can be
all different, crazy configurations.
Nicole is certainly a genius.
Brilliant idea to name it
an OMing session.
An orgasmic meditation.
Because there's so many seekers,
so many spiritual seekers in the Bay Area
and around the world.
You've turned this sex practice
into a spiritual practice.
She will lie down.
There'll be a pillow underneath her head,
a pillow underneath each leg.
She'll butterfly open her legs.
And then he will get his finger onto her
upper left-hand quadrant of her clitoris.
The upper left-hand quadrant is a location
that they have found, scientifically,
to have a bundle of nerve endings.
Some say 8,000,
some say 800,000, I don't know.
But they cannot find any reason
for this bundle of nerve endings
other than pleasure.
The thing that will prevent you
from knowing you hit the spot
is hoping you're hitting the spot,
not sure you hit the spot.
"What's the spot? I'm never gonna
find the spot. It's impossible."
That will be the thing that will stop you
from the natural human intuition
of feeling this little, slightly electric...
You'll also know because she'll go...
...and she will not, in any way, at all,
move her hips.
She won't be doing weird moans.
She'll just be what we call "nailed."
So, then you will just stroke up, down,
up, down, up, down, up, down,
up, down, up, down.
- What am I gonna say next?
- "Up, down."
There you go. For 15 minutes.
It's so simple.
The man, if he's a good doer,
he'll start to say,
"The lips of your pussy
are starting to fill with fluid,
and the shades of pink
and coral and ruby."
"And starting to build tumescence,"
is a word that they used a lot,
which was to build the turn-on,
to build the energy.
Lighter, faster strokes
will bring somebody up,
and then slower, firmer strokes
will bring somebody down.
So, you bring them up,
and then you plateau them,
then you bring 'em up,
and then plateau 'em.
This is how you hit
the other dimension
that you sense, in your body,
is possible when you're having sex,
and maybe that you glimpse,
or that moment that you glimpse
in orgasm, where there's just nothing...
This is how you get to exist
in that place sustainably.
The stroking practice was phenomenal.
And for me as a human being, you know,
putting that much attention on just
that one tiny spot on your index finger,
touching the woman's clitoris,
just stroking...
And from that one point,
it opens up all these channels as a man
that I just never even knew
were accessible to me.
The idea that her toe would wiggle
and I could feel
a little tingle in my finger,
that was, like, connected.
And it was like, "What?
Like, how is that even possible?"
So, these are things
that unfolded in the practice.
Of course, when I started,
I had no idea what I was doing,
and I was lucky
if I could even get on the clitoris.
The guys here said,
"All I want is to have more sex."
"Please, please."
They didn't realize they're immersed
on an island of women who want sex.
And so they were having,
like, 20 OMs a day.
Their little fingers were in braces,
and they were, like,
locking themselves behind the door.
"Nicole, get me out of here.
Please, no more sex!"
I was like a lot of guys I knew
in the tech world in San Francisco,
starved for just basic physical affection.
And OneTaste opened up this world
of intimacy and connection and sex.
What she was selling was an
innovation in relating to your sexuality.
The Bay Area is a place where
people are gonna be attracted to
and open to that kind of idea,
and where they, frankly, might have
a little extra money to buy courses.
He said to me, "I'm gonna describe your
pussy now. Is that all right with you?"
I remember thinking
I've never had somebody do that before.
It felt like somebody touched
the deepest part
that existed inside of me.
I felt so exposed and so vulnerable,
and I remember thinking, "Oh my God,
I don't think I've ever been that intimate
with another human being before
in my life."
I've talked to many people who said
orgasmic meditation changed their life,
that it helped them
experience sexual pleasure
that they thought
was unreachable for them.
And especially women who said,
"I've never had an orgasm before,
and this helped me redefine
what sexual pleasure could mean for me."
"You know, I had felt like
there was something wrong with me,
and now there was this alternative
that was presented to me
that allowed me to embrace my body
rather than feel ashamed."
My first introduction
to orgasmic meditation
was when I saw a demo of OM.
And I remember that night, it was like...
It was like...
Like, the finger found the spot.
And I was just like, "Oh, I feel like
my whole body, just, like, opened up."
That's beautiful.
- Thank you.
- Yeah.
Describe your sex to me.
Timid and shy,
which is frustrating at times,
but I feel like I'm in the right place.
Over the course of my four years
living and working at OneTaste,
I became more relaxed and social in a way,
and I think people could see it.
I became okay
with men giving me attention at work,
I became friendlier towards them,
and my career took off.
I guess I owe that to learning a lot
about men at OneTaste, you know.
They were really, like,
encouraging us to see
the soft, sensitive,
emotional sides of men.
So this is the building that was
what we called the center, 1074.
That's where we would hang out
most of the time during the day,
and then upstairs was the yoga studio,
but also the main classroom space
where we would hold practice
every morning.
And then this is 1060.
This was the warehouse.
I always loved that there was
that behind-the-red-door quality.
Yeah, so now it's a BDSM dungeon
and a play space.
I remember the first bed I had
was on this side, in the corner there,
and then later on I had one here.
I was sleeping
in one right here at one point.
I was up in the loft.
Ten, 12, 13, 15...
I mean, at least 15 beds.
And I remember the first night I moved in,
and it was nuts.
Like, there was so much energy in my body.
All the... Yeah, that buzzy,
lively energy of... Of people...
...you know, exploring sex.
You know, my mom died
when I was 13 years old,
and there's nothing that a 13-year-old kid
can possibly be prepared for in any way
to have that experience
or lose someone that close to them.
So, I think on some level,
I was learning how to connect with women
so that I could be able
to let people come and go in my life
and not feel the grippy attachment.
I was
a software engineer in Silicon Valley.
I was pretty successful,
except in my personal life.
I was just kind of a walking encyclopedia
of all the ways
you can be bad with the opposite sex.
I had a few different nicknames
at OneTaste.
One of them was Yoda, and I think
it's partly because of my stature.
I'm 5'0".
I'm five feet tall.
And so, in a way that was good because
I was a counterexample to all of the men
who thought they had to be a certain thing
in order to actually have
good relationships with women.
We're in this place now
where women are actually self-sufficient.
They don't need men
to protect them anymore,
or to care for them anymore,
or to, like, provide for them anymore.
So, what can men do, right?
What women want is someone who's actually
there meeting them as an equal
and ready to play.
I think OneTaste was a place where
really what we were doing was
increasing human connection,
and researching human connection.
Like, what happens
when you are vulnerable with someone?
What happens when you are more truthful
than you've ever been with someone?
And what happens when
you expose your clitoris to someone?
All of this stuff that people avoid
because it's so scary
is precisely where people need to go
in order to have true,
nourishing human connection.
The best thing you have to lose
is that sense of hopelessness
that you will ever...
be reached deep inside.
I probably re-watched
that TED Talk, like, 20 or 30 times.
I really felt like something
she was saying in that talk touched me.
Like, something about
it was more than sexuality,
it's about real connection and realness.
You get to have
this most profound and deep experience
with another human being.
There's a certain magic that comes
from putting attention on other people,
instead of always focusing on your needs
and your wants and your goals, which...
In OneTaste, through OMing,
we learned how to really put our attention
on other people's feelings,
which is basically what empathy is.
But not just, like,
"I can feel when you're happy or sad."
But like, I can feel the moment
that you think I'm lying,
or I can feel the moment
that, like, you pull back.
Precision with empathy.
It felt so good to feel like
you're helping them help people.
Whoo!
It's like our lives
are such a good TV show.
Just to watch it, like,
in real, like, real time.
Hmm.
And I'm so grateful that,
like, life is just so interesting.
Mm-hm.
In high school, my anxiety was,
like, almost debilitating.
In my early twenties,
I learned how to put a mask over it.
I still had anxiety
and I still felt terrible
most of the time.
So, to be, you know, in a space
where I could really be real,
it was like incredible medicine for me.
We're gonna do this exercise three times.
My first class, the first half
of the day was Nicole speaking to people,
giving impromptu coaching.
Giving them "strokes" was the term.
That was life-changing,
because she could cold-read people
with such accuracy
that, if you're open to it,
it could maybe change your life,
give you a new perspective.
She'd say, like, "What are you here for?"
For some people she'd just say
"Thank you'" and move on.
And when it got to me, I was starting
to say something mundane like,
"Oh, sex is interesting,
so I signed up for this class,"
and I could see she was
already turning away from me,
like that wasn't a good answer.
So she was gonna shift,
and then I just blurted out,
"I want to connect with people for real."
And she turns back to me,
and it felt, you know...
It felt really good to get her attention.
Ultimately, what we're aiming for
is to create a permanent meeting space.
So, no matter how whackadoodle she gets
when she's stuck up here in her ego,
she knows that I can get in there.
And she read me and she said, "I know
why you don't connect with people."
"It's like you're trying to stay
in this tonal range."
"It's a nice range, but you're denying
people the whole spectrum."
"You trying to act
like a super cute frat boy,
who says everything's cool all the time,
when really you're a dark, dangerous man."
And no one had ever
spoken to me like that before.
I don't know if she was
reading something in me for real
or reading something
that I wanted to be true,
but it felt like the most resonant thing
anyone had said to me.
I did feel like
I put up a facade with people to be liked,
but inside I was angry, I was frustrated,
you know, I felt dark inside.
It was life-changing,
just that beginning before I ever OMed.
I got over a fear of being seen,
a fear of vulnerability
that I had my entire life.
Hey, would you like to have an OM?
Sure.
Okay. I've only done it
once or twice though.
That's okay.
- When's a good time?
- Uh, now if you're not busy.
All right, let's go.
OneTaste, the idea was to get
this thing out into the world, right?
Well, it became evident
pretty quickly that I could, like,
shoot video and tell a little story,
and, like, boom,
we've got, you know, some media.
So this is what you need to know to truly
learn how to handle a woman's pussy.
That's right. We just said,
"Learn to handle a woman's pussy."
Nicole, she wanted to
leverage that, you know, right away.
And so that sort of became
my raison d'être...
and eventually became
my real raison d'etre.
Like, I quit my job so that
I could be the video guy for OneTaste.
"Your sex is not a problem."
"We've been living
in a paradigm of wrong for too long."
And what if you could learn
how to become a master of the vagina?
Today, we're going to discuss
why everyone is going to be happier
when you learn how to give a woman
a 15-minute orgasm.
If you all don't know,
Nicole's first book was released
on May 25th, Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm.
And it's come out to some
really great reviews and publicity.
Just this weekend, Nicole was at TEDxSF
giving a lecture to 750 people...
This was a practice that intrigued
reporters whenever they heard about it.
It was like,
"Orgasmic meditation? Like, what is that?"
Fifteen minutes?
Fifteen minutes.
That's a lot of orgasm.
That's a lot of orgasm. Yeah.
The OneTaste Urban Retreat,
not your average yoga studio.
The pants come off the women, and soon,
the studio erupts in female ecstasy.
Nicole knew
that it couldn't be so kooky,
you know, and it had to become
more about wellness,
more about women feeling empowered.
A visual testimony
on how orgasmic meditation is practiced.
They started having offices
in Los Angeles, New York, London.
They started expanding internationally...
The statistics are terrible.
Thirty percent of women self-report that
they don't reach orgasm when they want to.
In 2013 and 2014,
they held these conferences,
weekend-long conferences
with thousands of attendees.
Thank you for coming to OMX!
They just started collecting
more and more money from sales of courses.
At one point, OneTaste started selling
a thing called membership
that was, like, $50,000-plus,
which allowed whoever the customer was
to take any class for the whole year.
By the time 2017 came around,
the company had about
$12 million in revenue.
That was the year that they were on a list
of fast-growing startups by Inc. magazine.
And it was a reflection of Nicole's desire
to make OneTaste mainstream.
I'm Gwyneth Paltrow,
and you're listening to the Goop Podcast.
Today's guest is the very magnetic
Nicole Daedone. She's a...
OneTaste caught the eye
of really influential people,
in particular, Gwyneth Paltrow,
who was not only someone
who's very influential in Hollywood,
but also someone
who's this, like, wellness god.
Nicole is also
the author of Slow Sex,
which is a book I often recommend to women
who are looking for more desire
in their relationships.
I really wonder if she was
trying to do an L. Ron Hubbard.
"Let's get some famous people in."
That was one of the many brilliant things
the founder of Scientology came up with,
was the power of celebrity.
"If we can get movie stars, music stars,
and people like that
in our ranks as our public face,
boy, that makes us really attractive
to your average Joe or Jill out there."
And he was absolutely right.
And so, I could see her
kind of following that lead as well.
In late 2017,
I was contacted by a woman
who works in communications,
and she said,
"Hey, can we talk on the phone?"
"I have a story I think
might be interesting to you."
"It's about a fast-growing company
run by women in the wellness space,
and it's called OneTaste."
And this was in 2017, and the #MeToo
movement was just getting going.
And I remember the way she pitched it was,
"You know, this is a company
that's gonna help people
connect with each other in a way
that is gonna help mitigate
some pain we've seen
come up with the #MeToo movement,
because it helps people be
more sensitive to each other's needs."
And I mentioned to a friend of mine that
I was considering writing about OneTaste.
And my friend told me,
"I know somebody you should talk to."
"They used to be
a customer of this company
and they had a pretty bad experience."
So, I ended up having a long conversation
with this person for several hours,
hearing their story.
And at the end of that,
I thought to myself,
"Wow, this is really different
from any of the reporting that's out there
about OneTaste currently,
and this might be a big story."
When you are looking at Nicole,
you're looking at Nicole
and she's looking back,
and she locks into your eyes,
it is like you are being completely seen,
like, down to your soul,
including everything,
yuck and all, especially yuck.
And while you're being,
like, embraced in this gaze,
also being, you know, picked apart
like you're under a microscope.
And so she starts playing this game
with me, which is pulling desires.
And so she says, "What do you want?"
So, you know, she's fish...
She's pulling them out, so I say,
"I want to have more sex,
I to have want more orgasm."
"I want to have more fun,
I want more community."
So, she's going, "Come on, what else?"
This is how this goes.
And so, finally, I get down in my belly,
in my womb, to like,
"Wow." And I had never
spoken it out loud, and I said,
"I want to have a baby."
And I was like...
And she's like, "Not so fast. What else?"
I was like, "That's it."
"What else?"
And so finally I say,
"Okay, I wanna have a demo."
A demo is a demonstration
of a woman in orgasm for an hour.
And Nicole goes... And she looks around.
"Did you hear that? We hit bottom."
"That was it. That's the bottom desire."
And so, here I have said,
in front of all these people,
that I wanna have a demo,
knowing full well that
that was not at the bottom.
That was Nicole's desire.
So, I was just
fully giving over to Nicole.
The type of personal reflection
that they encouraged us to do
was all about finding your deeper desire.
Yet, they would do
this complicated psychological thing
of inserting their desire into you
and telling you that it's yours.
What's
your real big desire?
What's your real big, deep desire?
What turns on your pussy?
- I want to coach and teach for OneTaste.
- Fuck, that's awesome.
"This is how
Nicole manipulated people."
"She agreed that something was true
if it matched what she wanted to hear."
"If you said something she didn't like,
she called it a lie,
or, 'That's not the end of your desire.'"
"If you had any doubt,
she knew how to increase that doubt
until what she told you was true
became what you believed."
So, Bill and I pay Nicole $15,000,
which, according to Nicole,
at the time was a very good deal,
and my course begins.
A lot of people described to me
going to some event
where they were first exposed to OneTaste,
and maybe there was an explicit pitch
for the company or taking a class.
I'm gonna have one of our sales associates
Lindsay come up and talk to you
about a special offer
for all of you for attending tonight,
and also for being on the web.
And then the pitch
just gets bigger and bigger.
"Why don't you take
this week-long, intensive class?"
"Come and learn from Nicole,
or come help us teach a class."
"Why don't you come help us with sales?"
We need an initiation ceremony
or something edgier.
We need something that they are locked in,
they are in for the full weekend,
for the full ride.
Rachel would be pitching
the $15,000 coaching program.
And at the time, I was just barely
making ends meet as a freelance writer,
but somehow, it felt so good
to meet with her for a sales call anyway.
I told her in the beginning, "I don't
have money, I can't buy anything,"
and she just made it feel good to come
hang out with her and talk about my life.
And similar to my experience with Nicole,
I felt so good and so seen afterwards.
So when she asked, "Do you want
to take the coaching program?"
"We can put you on our payment plan,"
I found myself giving her my credit card
before I even realized.
So I gave her, you know, this card.
It was $1,000 a month,
which put me into debt immediately.
But then afterwards, I had to justify
my purchase, and that put me in deeper.
I've had people describe to me
this sales tactic of,
we play some sort of communication game
like hot seat.
Someone's sitting in the middle,
being asked a bunch of questions.
And in the back,
OneTaste staff are taking notes.
They're writing down, you know,
"This person's recently divorced."
"This man feels unsure
how to approach women."
And then they strategize
about who's the best OneTaste staffer
to be sent over to that customer
to try to win them over.
Imagine you come to me and you say, like,
"Well, yeah, I'm interested in OneTaste
because, you know, I've had trouble
keeping a long-term relationship,"
and I'd ask you something like,
"Can you imagine if that were true
for the rest of your life?"
You make the pain bigger,
so that what you offer as a solution
sounds more appealing.
Nicole's very brilliant
at seeing wounding.
And so that's what she hooks into,
and then becomes
the salve of that wounding.
So then, you're not feeling the wound
when you're in her presence,
but you're reliant upon her to guide you.
And then, on top of that, there was
this very strong connection between
how well you were doing spiritually
in the OneTaste teachings
and your ability to sell courses.
They really saw that as connected,
they thought that
a more turned-on woman
would sell courses better
because they would be projecting
their turn-on to the customers,
where it was almost like
channeling this divine force
that would help you in
such an earthly pursuit as closing a sale.
"I'm a turned-on pussy,
feeling and savoring
every stroke going through me,
sent back out
with power and love to shine."
Yeah!
We were supposed to talk about cock,
like, talk about, like, crass,
nitty-gritty sexual stuff,
'cause that's hot, that's what
we're trying to do at OneTaste.
You know, it turns people on
when they get
that flutter in their stomach
when you just said,
like, "cock" or "pussy,"
which actually probably,
like, embarrasses people.
I don't know if that's turn-on
or discomfort.
At one point Nicole is, like,
"We're gonna teach this thing
called 'orgasmic rebalancing.'"
And she did a demo
of what orgasmic rebalancing was.
You know,
you can kind of see from the footage,
the closest thing would be like reiki,
where you're moving energy in the body.
I'm sure the footage...
I haven't looked at it in a while,
but I'm sure it looks crazy.
I was
immediately taken by Nicole.
I thought she was just very charismatic,
but at the same time,
I could see that she was a hustler.
Tell me a bit about that.
Is Nicole Daedone a con artist?
Yeah.
You got to dissect that word though.
It means "confidence."
It's like, yeah, she can say things
in such an enthusiastic way
and have so much knowledge around it
that she is a fantastic salesman.
I am interested
in letting my body be used
in the transmission of the experiences
that have been given to me.
There is an experience of beauty
that one feels
when something is in harmony.
This was that kind of beauty.
Today, I am immersed in it.
I feel here that there is something
inside of me connected to everything.
There's an intimacy that I feel
with my partner, the bed, the plants.
The world becomes
one giant network of neurons,
and this entity that I call Nicole
is part of this.
If you're looking at
that footage from the Stinson demo,
what you're seeing is...
batshit nuts. Come on.
Someone's up there, completely naked,
getting her pussy stroked,
there's someone with snakes there and...
Right? Like, all this stuff...
Like, what is going on?
And to me...
...all that stuff was just there
to create a certain kind of aura
for the people in the room,
like investors.
I wonder if the New York Times
reporter was there.
The Stinson Beach demo,
it's very intense. It seems like...
Sometimes she's laughing,
sometimes she's crying.
There's a lot of moaning.
You hear people in the audience
expressing their sensations.
You know, "It's like a warmth in my belly,
or like a tingling in my face."
Rachel Cherwitz shepherds
some of the audience members up
to, like, touch Nicole's thigh
while the demo is going on.
They describe it like
it's meant to be like
you can feel the energy
of this experience.
You realize, "Holy shit,
I'm actually experiencing things
in tandem with this woman
who's getting stroked in front of me."
"Like, I'm actually
feeling stuff in my body too."
And even though I think most people
would watch that and think, like, this is
bananas... Um...
it looks like the people in the room
feel like something really is happening.
I hope you really got a sense tonight
of what it's like to have a woman,
a fully-trained woman, get off.
And see the places that she can go.
It's just unmatched.
I mean, there's nobody else that...
who I stroke,
that can do what she does,
and I want all of you
to be able to do what she does.
I'm in agreement.
- Please.
- Me too.
When I took the course,
by that point,
we had both female and male OMing,
and my partner was very skittish
about doing a male.
So, Nicole stepped in personally,
and I had a meltdown.
I started shivering, crying.
Tears were rolling down my cheeks.
Then she sort of moved me to her breasts
and started stroking my head.
And the part of me
that wasn't having a meltdown,
the rational little control center there,
was thinking, "Oh yes, Nicole,
I know what you're up to."
"You're making yourself my mommy."
"You're holding me
gently, tenderly in your lap
next to your breasts, and stroking my head
and looking lovingly at me."
"You're trying to imprint me as mom."
It didn't work.
I guess if I didn't have that
little skeptical bit in my consciousness,
maybe I would've really bonded with her.
Maybe I would've gone all in for OneTaste
and been one of her really fervent
members and defenders.
But I didn't.
You're all welcome to come get stroked,
and we have darshan from 11:00 to 1:00,
Monday through Friday.
and it would be my honor
to stroke anybody in this room
and have you have...
If you look at Zen Buddhism
or any of these things,
there's levels of being ready
for the next piece of truth.
Whenever it became public that
there was also a male stroking practice,
all the men were like,
"I want that, I need that."
Like, "I empathize with what these women
experience about starving."
"I'm starving too,
I wanna get stroked as well."
And it would become a quagmire.
So, we kept it private.
As soon as that was on the table,
it changed everything.
So we just had it not be,
"It is not on the table."
"It is not on the table
that there is a male stroking practice."
Someone joked around,
"Oh, it's like a spiritual hand job."
And right, so that's the problem, is,
it can devolve into a hand job,
and we wanted it to be
something very different than that.
Like, a woman stroking a man's penis
brings up a whole bunch of cultural things
that the reverse simply does not.
What it means for a woman
to be a sexual service provider
and for a man to be
in the position of being
on the receiving end
of sexual service providing.
So, like, you couldn't just have them
reverse and say, "Now this is OM."
It ends up not being an OM.
We have a female identity
in our culture, right?
The female is the victim.
And if I, in any way, don't buy into that,
then there's only two options with victim.
There's villain.
Your practice session
where women are being OMed,
orgasmic meditation,
by men who are not present,
don't know who they are,
aren't clear in their sense of purpose.
A woman cannot
open her legs to a man at that level,
and I think it's really important for you
or someone who's highly trained
to be here in these practice sessions.
When the man impresses his shape
into her, her whole body feels that,
her whole consciousness is ignited,
but I think that you need to
tighten up the practice sessions.
What you say, for me,
feels like, uh, protection of women
in such a way that it continues
an idea that we need to be protected.
And that idea keeps me
not taking responsibility for my sex.
So, I have a story, and I am no victim.
The problem with the victim story,
it takes away your power.
If you wanna know
the real way to deflect rape,
it's to turn on 100%.
Because then there's nothing to rape.
Nicole had some very barbaric messages
when she talks about
the darkness that she has
or the darkness that she came from.
Trauma is just stuff that's
stuck in the body that needs discharge.
I think what you do...
I mean, this is gonna be my suggestion
every time, is you OM a lot.
As you OM,
whatever is in there begins to come out.
It just progressively
and gently opens you and releases,
and then you can just
face and be rid of, face and be rid of.
And then pretty soon what you just notice
is your capacity to sit in pain decreases,
and you just gotta get that shit out fast,
and then you're clear again.
You know, my dad was a child molester,
and he had experiences with young girls
and used me as bait.
And so that exact behavior...
Whoa, of me colluding
with somebody who would cause harm.
And I got that seed out.
I got free.
I could forgive everybody
in the whole experience
'cause I got free of that.
I think I told the story in here
when I was a stripper
and they put a knife up to my throat.
Nicole's biography is
kind of a matter of mystery.
You're never really sure
what's actually true.
I think her biography
went through a lot of revisions
as the company became
more and more prominent.
But she did talk about
having worked as a stripper.
Well, I have great cred.
I come from darkness.
She was a very highly paid call girl.
She would tell stories about, you know,
getting $700 for a trick,
I think is the term.
Then she had a thing where she would
play around socially with people,
like, mess with their heads.
Guys, especially.
Friend of mine was like,
"Oh, she's a monster."
"She's a monster."
Like, "Stay away from her," and stuff.
And that was very intriguing.
We had done some LSD earlier one day,
and she proposed to me.
Having your wife be
a sex cult leader was like...
It was pretty interesting for me.
It's like, I was totally ready
to go buy a Harley and ride up the coast
and be in a sex cult, are you kidding?
And take LSD.
I totally wanted to do all that stuff.
Our mission plan,
our business plan was this:
800,000 people trying to practice
orgasmic meditation,
10,000 people at the level of mastery,
or teachers,
and a center in the major cities,
all the major cities of the world.
Rob Kandell was
Nicole's first business partner.
He was a guy who used to work
kind of in a tech-finance job,
and met Nicole, and they decided
to start OneTaste together.
When I first met Rob,
he was married to Carol.
They were part of Nicole's
little cadre of followers.
Nicole wanted Rob
for his unending devotion,
and also his bank account.
You know, he was kind of like
a nebbish-y guy, looking for approval,
and Nicole had
a really good sense of style,
and so she would groom him,
so he became hot.
I was stroking a hot young thing
on a warm Tuesday morning.
She would
borrow things from Scientology
or, like, these different cults,
even going back
to stuff like Lifespring and est.
The shamans say that a medicine man begins
by falling into the power of demons.
Now, in Kabbalah,
it's called chesed and gevurah.
In the darshan...
There's a thing called Satguru...
The desire sutras...
It's sacred...
In the more esoteric practices.
I want to go see Amma.
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.
Kalimah said... Wilke said...
Think about the Buddha.
Malcolm Gladwell.
Rumi. BKS Iyengar. Krishnamurthy.
The Tibetan Buddhist...
Sort of like Mother Teresa.
A universal sanctuary light-bearer.
Shabbat. The love of Jesus.
That is religion, and the dukh has it.
All of this fucking crazy shit
about sacred and spiritual and woman.
Usually, if you touch the absolute,
you have this realization.
The realization is, "I am God."
One taste, which is a Buddhist concept.
The Buddha said, "Just as the ocean
has one taste, the taste of sal