EMPIRE OF ORGASM

A surpassingly strange tale of an “orgasmic meditation” company.

Nicole Daedone, by Bloomberg News reporter Huet’s account, was a young woman at constantly loose ends with “a taste for methamphetamines and psychedelics.” Along her unstructured way, Daedone became acquainted with a sexual practice that she would eventually brand as “orgasmic meditation,” the short-form “OM” pronounced “ohm,” with a multitiered company behind it called OneTaste. As Huet writes, Daedone’s timing, though accidental, was fortuitous, for the “wellness industry” was growing into a $4 trillion leviathan, funded and populated largely by people who were abandoning traditional medicine and religion for its alternative and New Age variants. Early on Daedone presciently noted, “There’s a high potential for this to be a cult,” and that’s just what it became, Huet says, with members performing sex acts and giving the group their “money, time, professional work, and energy.” The more money and effort given, the higher the person’s status within the organization—and given, as Huet notes, that people crave status, it was just the right incentive. Daedone had undeniable skills as both a leader and a businessperson, building OneTaste into a small San Francisco–based empire that, by 2016, was bringing in more than $11 million annually through a network of about 500 full-time adherents who in time developed their own private language (“Feeling compressed in a good way…Money is one of the biggest scarcity hexes”). After having collected millions through sales of courses and deluxe memberships at $60,000 a year, OneTaste saw a wave of defections—and soon after, an FBI investigation and federal trial on the charge of conspiring to force their members to labor without pay. In June 2025 the trial ended, as the author chronicles in her epilogue, in a guilty verdict that Daedone’s attorney “vowed to appeal”—so stay tuned.

A carefully written exposé of an “infinite game” built on lust for wealth and power—but on mere lust, too.