This week, we dive into a story that starts with wellness, empowerment, mindfulness, and healing and somehow ends with forced labour, coercive sex, cult-like control, and prison sentences. We're talking about OneTaste, the organisation that convinced thousands of people that repeatedly stroking someone's clitoris for exactly fifteen minutes was a revolutionary spiritual practice called Orgasmic Meditation. What began in early-2000s San Francisco as a supposedly progressive movement centred on female pleasure eventually became one of the most bizarre and disturbing cult stories of the modern era. In this episode, we trace the rise and fall of OneTaste, from its founding by Nicole Daedone and Robert Kandell to its transformation into a multimillion-dollar business built around workshops, communal living, and increasingly invasive control over its members' lives. We look at how trauma survivors were recruited with promises of healing, why the media spent years treating the organisation as a quirky sexual wellness experiment, and how celebrity endorsements and TEDx talks helped legitimise something that, in hindsight, had more red flags than a Soviet military parade. This episode blends comedy commentary, offbeat learning, and deeply uncomfortable reporting into a story about manipulation, charisma, pseudoscience, media failure, and the surprisingly lucrative business of selling enlightenment. Packed with quirky insights, weird historical detours, and the kind of random topics that somehow become darker the more you investigate them, it's lighthearted education only in the sense that we occasionally laugh to stop ourselves from screaming. Important links: 1. OneTaste's website - https://onetaste.us/the-world/om 2. Touchy-feely "researchers" want to build community through the practice of orgasmic meditation — one stroke at a time - https://web.archive.org/web/20090421093822/http://www.sfweekly.com/2007-04-04/news/sex-and-sensuality/ 3. The Pleasure Principle - https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/fashion/15commune.html 4. TEDxSF - Nicole Daedone - Orgasm The Cure for Hunger - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZjRH1FmxfM 5. Inside Gwyneth Paltrow's Exclusive Goop Health Summit with Cameron Diaz, Miranda Kerr and Nicole Richie - https://www.wmagazine.com/story/gwyneth-paltrow-goop-health-summit 6. Onetaste Founder Nicole Daedone Sentenced to Nine Years in Prison for Forced Labor Conspiracy - https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/onetaste-founder-nicole-daedone-sentenced-nine-years-prison-forced-labor-conspiracy 7. My Encounter with the Orgasm Messiah - https://donlattin.substack.com/p/my-encounter-with-the-orgasm-messiah 8. Great Orgasms – Psychic Energy vs. Physical Technique with Ray Vetterlein, Master Practitioner of Extended Orgasm - https://podcasts.personallifemedia.com/podcasts/230-expanded-lovemaking/episodes/3031-great-orgasms-psychic-energy-vs-physical/ 9. Anjuli Ayer: Navigating a Life of Spirituality, Business, and Controversy - https://www.awesomeindia.in/anjuli-ayer/ 10. In 'Orgasmic Meditation' case, did a zealous media strategy backfire? - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/nyregion/onetaste-orgasmic-meditation-publicity.html 11. Recommendation of the week - The Orgasm Cult - https://www.bbc.com/audio/brand/p08xzk5h Don't Know, Do Care is the brainchild of Ashmita, Sandy, and Prakhar, three friends from different backgrounds and interests. Ashmita works in sustainability, Sandy's an entrepreneur (puke) who'd rather not be, and Prakhar works with Sandy and is just trying to make sense of it all. Three mildly confused friends, one weirdly specific topic each week. We don't know much, but we care just enough to talk about it for up to an hour each week. Don't Know, Do Care is produced by "Ghar Pe Productions", edited by Prakhar and Sandy, critiqued (thoroughly) by Ashmita, and enjoyed mostly by our friends. Thanks for giving us a listen!
