ARMCHAIR
HUMANITY

There is a recurring dream that runs through this conversation, and it is not about sex. It is about belonging. Ellen Huet sits across from Dax and describes living in a six-building compound with twenty adults and eight children under four, a Wi-Fi password that reads 'not a cult,' and a woman named Julie who comes twice a week to cook so that Phil — the shitty cook who is also something of a visionary — doesn't ruin dinner again. And Dax, who has spent years publicly wrestling with the question of whether AA is a cult, leans in with something close to longing. He remembers the COVID pod, the Palm Springs rental with the pool in the middle, how someone always handled food, how someone else's house got wrecked and it was only your problem once a week. He calls this lovely. He is not wrong.

The book that prompted this conversation — Empire of Orgasm — is ostensibly about Nicole Daedone and the rise and fall of OneTaste, a San Francisco wellness company that sold courses on orgasmic meditation, a fifteen-minute partnered clitoral stroking practice performed in a nest-shape, gloved, prescribed, goalless. But what the conversation actually excavates is something older and more universal: the human compulsion to find someone who knows what you want better than you do, and the terrifying ease with which that compulsion can be exploited.

Nicole Daedone grew up loving a father who was a convicted child sex abuser. She spent her twenties in an acid house, worked as an escort, ran a gallery, lived at the edges — not as a victim, but as someone in furious pursuit of intensity as enlightenment. She built a religion out of her wounds, which is, as Dax quietly notes, what all of us are doing. He quotes David Sedaris without naming him directly: all of my books have a singular goal of making you love my mother as much as I did. That is what every story is about. That, he says, is what is happening at the center of OneTaste. A little girl, under ten years old, trying to make her father make sense.

The conversation never quite stops being about that. It moves through Juicero and WeWork and the VC boom and the defamation technicalities around calling Scientology a cult, and always returns to the same question: how do you know when the thing that is helping you is also hurting you? How do you know when the group you are in has crossed from community into extraction? Ellen's answer is careful and hard-earned. She has spent seven years embedded in this material, and what she has concluded is not that cult members are stupid. It is that they are human. That status and approval are more powerful than any ideology. That we are such finely tuned social creatures that we don't even need to be told what the rules are — we infer them instantly and comply without being asked.

Dax finds this both fascinating and self-implicating. He monitors himself. He is on record, here, of regularly checking whether he is becoming a narcissist or 'cult leadery-like.' He points out that podcasters turning into gurus is a well-worn path. He notes that AA checks a lot of boxes — no leader being the one thing that has kept it functional for eighty years. He is doing, in real time, what he asks his guests to do: holding his own experience up to the light and asking what it looks like from the outside.

Ellen, for her part, is a precise and generous narrator. She fact-checks herself mid-sentence. She corrects her own characterizations. She is careful not to overdraw Nicole as a monster, even while describing a woman who joked to a room of course participants that they should print t-shirts reading 'I got raped and all I got was a victim story.' She keeps returning to the kernel of value at the center of each terrible idea — the notion that female pleasure deserves attention, that victimhood mentality can be disempowering, that pushing toward the edges can produce growth — and showing how each kernel becomes a weapon in the right hands.

At the end of the episode, after Ellen has left, Dax and Monica sit with the aftermath. Monica is moving into a new house in less than two weeks. She has been having murdery nightmares. Dax tells her robbers aren't killers, that she has an alarm now, that he thinks she'll be shockingly comfortable very quickly. Then he tells her about Malcolm Gladwell's new Revisionist History episodes — the ones about genius types, about country music and hip-hop and specificity, about the reason the more specific you get the more universal you get. He accidentally listened to the wrong series first and thought Malcolm was taking forever to get to the murder in Alabama.

This is the Armchair Expert in its truest form: a conversation about an orgasm cult that is really about how we love the people who hurt us, how we build communities to survive loneliness, how we submit to authority in exchange for belonging, and how, if you are not careful, you will listen to an entire season of a podcast before realizing you are on the wrong show.