I’ve always been fascinated by cults.
Cults embody our desire to gather and belong, and a singular leader’s ability to accumulate power at others' expense.
Cults begin with longing for community, certainty, or purpose. These same impulses that lead people to churches, startups, social movements, and tight-knit friend groups can be turned to manipulation and control.
I recently sat down with Bloomberg journalist Ellen Huet about her book Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult, which chronicles the rise and fall of OneTaste, a sex and wellness cult active in San Francisco beginning in 2004. OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone was recently convicted in federal court and sentenced to nine years in prison.
Here’s my interview with Ellen Huet:
My Brush with Cults
The topic of cults is personal.
When I first moved to San Francisco, I was looking for meaning and purpose. Fresh out of college, I was facing the harsh reality that everything I’d done in school did not prepare me for the working world. And I was in chronic pain.
I was lonely, struggling, and looking for answers: the perfect candidate for a cult leader to exploit.
I did join two high-demand, charismatic leader-led organizations. (As we’ll discuss, these are two characteristics of cults.) My parents frequently expressed concerns that I was being taken advantage of by the charismatic leaders of these two groups. Fortunately for me, those two organizations did not take advantage of their customers.
After reading Empire of Orgasm and interviewing Ellen for the Snafu podcast, I wanted to distill my thoughts about cults — and how best to avoid them.
The Characteristics of a Cult
One of the premises of Ellen’s book, Empire of Orgasm, is that cults exist on a spectrum. Within every cult is a seed of a good idea, and every organization has the potential to harm its members.
I find it useful to list out some characteristics of cults:
- Charismatic or unquestionable leader
- Closed or totalizing belief system
- High-demand structure
- Exploitation disguised as transformation
- Extraction of money, labor, time, sex, or loyalty
- A power structure that makes it costly to say no
- Insider language and reality distortion
- In-group / out-group dynamics
- Control of information and relationships
- Weaponized vulnerability
- Claim to be the only path toward healing, freedom, or enlightenment
I met a few members of OneTaste in 2009, and was unnerved by their lack of boundaries. The members I met were unconcerned by intimacy with total strangers.
OneTaste promised members that through attending the next workshop — whether that was an entry-level course for a few hundred dollars or a $100,000 multi-year membership — they’d be able to resolve their challenges: spiritual, physical, sexual, or otherwise.
I’ve come to believe a good test is not whether an organization is intense or demanding, but whether it expands or diminishes the agency of the people inside it.
Startups and Cults
Culture and cult share the same Latin root: cultus, meaning care, cultivation, worship, or reverence. The most successful organizations in the world — including unusual and well-regarded companies like Costco or Patagonia — create unusual and sticky cultures that foster belonging.
When leaders from Airbnb gave a talk at Responsive Conference 2018 about what Airbnb had learned from cults, the topic was provocative rather than alarming.
The mid-2010s were still an era of tech optimism: before Travis Kalanick’s ouster from Uber became shorthand for toxic startup culture, before WeWork exposed the dangers of founder worship, and before public consensus turned against social media.
In that context, studying cults sounded like an edgy way to understand belonging. Today, it sounds like a warning sign.
The Kernel of a Good Idea
One of the most interesting elements of a cult is that within every cult there is a seed of a good idea. Nicole Daedone coined “OMing” or “Orgasmic Meditation,” which was a prescribed sexual act that entailed a “Stroker” stroking the clitoris of a woman participant, using a specific procedure and for exactly 15 minutes.
While any organization-prescribed sexual activity should raise red flags, the idea of concentrating solely on your partner’s pleasure without regard to outcome is interesting. Dedicating time to female pleasure is a worthy idea. (For specifics, read the chapter on female pleasure in Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Body.)
Unfortunately, a good idea becomes dangerous when it is used to persuade people to override their own boundaries.
An Untouchable Leader
From Ellen’s reporting and conversations with former OneTaste members, it’s clear that Nicole Daedone was brilliant — and manipulative.
Nicole very carefully crafted an image of herself that allowed her to rise above challenges members faced within OneTaste, while simultaneously weaponizing her power and influence. She appears to have made herself both central and untouchable.
That combination is dangerous in any organization, but especially one built around intimacy, sexuality, or transformation. Members’ doubts were reframed as personal limitations. Coercion inside the organization was treated as evidence that people needed more practice, commitment, and surrender.
A good leader helps people trust themselves. A cult leader teaches people to outsource their judgment to the leader, the practice, or the group.
The safeguard against this kind of power is not cynicism. It is accountability: outside relationships, financial independence, the ability to leave, and people around a leader who can tell them no.
Zeitgeist
Another thing that stood out to me in reading Empire of Orgasm was how well OneTaste played into the culture zeitgeist in the 2000s and 2010s. This period saw the rise of yoga, boutique fitness, wellness as identity, self-optimization, #GirlBoss feminism, and Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.
Technology companies were held in high regard, and startups routinely promised world-changing outcomes.
- WeWork promised community.
- Theranos promised medical revolution.
- Airbnb promised belonging anywhere.
Ellen recounts two large public tech-style conferences put on by OneTaste, which brought OMing to the general public – with hundreds of people gathering in a convention hall in downtown San Francisco with women stripping to the waist while their partners helped them OM.
Nicole Daedone brilliantly positioned OneTaste as a wellness company promising orgasm and female pleasure as the path to enlightenment.
A Culture of Sales
Before reading Empire of Orgasm, I hadn’t realized how sales-driven OneTaste was.
Not the kind of sales I’ve discussed within Snafu — where the salesperson is in service of the potential customer — but the worst of the sales stereotype, where the pushy salesperson will do anything to get the customer to pull out their credit card.
When an organization encourages people to go into debt to buy more access, training, or belonging, it is no longer helping them choose freely.
Ellen documents countless examples of the sales team encouraging customers to take on credit card debt in order to afford the next course and using vulnerable details from private conversation to coerce people to buy the next course. That's not just selling; it's extraction.
Good sales respects hesitation. Bad sales treats hesitation as an obstacle to overcome. Cult sales treats hesitation as evidence that the person needs the product even more.
Follow the Leader
Tony Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos, attended the first Responsive Conference and hosted us at Zappos in 2019.
When we arrived at his compound the day before the 2019 conference, Tony offered everyone on our team bottles of Fernet – his favorite drink – and continued to press them on us throughout our stay. I was also struck by the abundance of alcohol throughout the Zappos offices.
I don’t mention this to criticize Tony, whom I admired, but because leaders create permission structures.
I’ve seen this in much smaller, more benign ways, too. For years, I’ve studied with a group of acrobats and athletes in San Francisco. When the teacher adopts a short haircut, many members of the group do the same. When he wears a certain kind of tough athletic pants, others follow suit. Nobody is told to copy him. We just do.
That is human nature: we imitate the people we admire. Culture spreads through mimicry long before it becomes doctrine.
The danger of a role model like Elon Musk is that admirers often copy the wrong things. They want the boldness, speed, and appetite for impossible problems. But they imitate the bullying, contempt, and willingness to treat people as disposable.
In healthy groups, imitation remains optional. In cults, imitation becomes a test of belonging. The question is not whether people imitate leaders. We do. The question is what leaders make admirable.
Influence and Manipulation
Some forms of harm are easy to recognize.
Physical abuse, forced labor, unpaid work, sexual coercion, and explicit punishment are obvious abuses of power. Nicole Daedone was convicted in federal court of forced labor conspiracy because OneTaste extracted labor from its members. Ellen describes salespeople being punished when they failed to sell enough courses, pressured to work without pay, and reprimanded when they questioned authority.
But influence does not always look like a command. It can look like a group norm nobody wants to violate or the threat of being excluded from a community that has become your whole world.
Ellen recounts examples of couples who joined OneTaste and were pressured to break up, while others were told to get married. Ellen reports that some members were pressured to have sex with people they had not chosen. If they resisted, they risked being ostracized.
Consent becomes murky when someone’s housing, income, belonging, status, spiritual progress, or relationship depends on saying yes. Influence becomes manipulation when the cost of saying no is unbearable.
Look for Indicators
There’s very little chance I get taken in by a cult again. But one of the reasons I remain interested in cults is that, in my early twenties, I can see how easily I could have been a target.
I was lonely, in pain, and looking for meaning, community, and answers. These are human needs, but also openings that a manipulative leader can exploit.
The clearest indicator Ellen offers for identifying a cult is a leader claiming that their approach is the only path to healing, enlightenment, or freedom. As one interview subject in the book says, there are many paths to enlightenment. Anyone who says otherwise is selling you something.
Teach Independence
An unexpected conclusion from Ellen’s book and our conversation is that independence is one of the best defenses against manipulation.
When people are financially dependent on an organization, they have fewer choices. They may stay in harmful situations because leaving would cost them their income, relationships, or sense of belonging.
Financial independence does not make anyone immune to coercion. Plenty of smart, successful, financially stable people have been drawn into cults. But money gives people options. It makes it easier to say no, ask questions, or withstand the social cost of dissent.
One of the best ways to protect people from exploitation is to teach self-reliance. The more options we have, the harder we are to control.
3 Things I’ve Loved This Week
Book I’ve Loved:
Ellen’s book is well worth the read. She does a great job of telling the story of the rise and fall of OneTaste, weaving in stories from a myriad of sources and telling the story of OneTaste in the context of San Francisco in the 2000s and 2010s.
Documentary I’ve Enjoyed:
Released on Netflix in 2022, Orgasm Inc was a groundbreaking documentary with direct interviews with dozens of members and former OneTaste members.
Talks I’m Revisiting:
How Not to Join a Cult was a talk given by organization designer and former OneTaste member Bob Gower at the first Responsive Conference in 2016.
Belonging at Airbnb at Responsive Conference 2018. Throughout the 2010s, Airbnb studied cults to understand how organizations create cultures of belonging.
Want more?
|
Stuck, uncertain, or trying to figure out how to do something new? This Might Work is a collection of practical, first-person experiments in learning by doing.
Inside, you’ll find essays on writing, fasting, raising a puppy, buying a used car, buying a house, telling better stories, selling your work, and navigating change.
In a world changing faster than ever, This Might Work is a field guide for trying something small, safe, and reversible — then adjusting course and trying again.
Download it for free or buy a physical copy on Amazon.
|
|
The way we work is changing faster than ever. AI, distraction, burnout, and constant uncertainty are reshaping how we lead, collaborate, and pay attention.
Responsive Conference brings together executives, operators, and people leaders to ask a simple question: how do we build organizations where humans can do their best work?
Join us September 23–24, 2026 at the Oakland Museum of California for two days around the future of work.
|
Until next week,
Robin
