The Exchanges

Q often you see people who are either part of these houses or, you know, in their orbit, They attend certain programs, right? Programs like Landmark, for instance, or programs like Hoffman, which you have also spent some time reporting on. So talk a little bit about, you know, what these, their self-actualization programs are, basically programs built for the type of people that gravitate to Silicon Valley. Am I right?

A Yeah. I mean, I, I want to, you know, be careful to caveat with like, you know, not everyone falls into all these categories, but I think if we're speaking broadly, like you're right. People who gravitate to Silicon Valley, they're looking to make a difference. They tend to be very ambitious. Um, they want to do things. You know, from first principles and or slightly differently than maybe how they perceive others in the past have done it, and I think that type of person is drawn to often these programs that I would call personal development or personal transformation. There's kind of a whole industry of them, and some of them you might recognize, you know, Landmark actually has a decades-long history associated with this, like, predecessor group called EST. Um, Tony Robbins is kind of like a classic example of these, um, but some of the ones that I know are popular among tech types right now include the Hoffman process, which is, um, yeah, something that, like, I am curious about and, like, definitely want to, like, potentially report more on, but that's, like, a week-long intensive Therapy-ish retreat, um, that kind of helps you process some of the, um, stories and narratives in your life. Oftentimes these programs will help you like reassess the stories in your life with the idea that it can help you unlock like a new level of performance. Um, I know a lot of people who have…

AI assessment note: “some of the ones that I know are popular among tech types right now”

Q I mean, what is it? It's interesting that that has to be said out loud. Um, like what would be the alternative be that you sort of go with the flow and yeah.

A Or that you feel like you're, you're kind of like a victim of your circumstances. Um, what's interesting to me about agency being popular in my view, among a certain like circle of tech people is that. Agency is a different way of saying this idea of like, oh, you should consider yourself like radically responsible for your life experience and the things that are What's happening in your life? And that's very much an idea that comes from these personal transformation workshops and lineages. So that is something that you would find at landmark. That's something you'd find at Tony Robbins for sure. That's something that comes up a lot at one taste, um, in conscious leadership group and also this. And so it's sort of been reframed as agency, but it's all getting at the same thing. Um, and I would say the opposite is yeah, someone, you know, you can imagine someone who laments The circumstances of their life without thinking about how they might change it, you know, and, and they, they're like, oh, I was just born, you know, without the ability to like charm people. It's like, well, guess what? If you were more agentic, you would think of yourself and your personality as more malleable. You would think that you could learn skills that you might otherwise like dismiss. So it's people, it's drawing a distinction between people who kind of are like throw up their hands and say like, w…

AI assessment note: “Or that you feel like you're, you're kind of like a victim of your circumstances.”

Q And the people that came in, didn't they call them something like?

A Oh, marks. Yeah. Sometimes they would, um, jokingly, but also it's obviously somewhat serious. They would, um, refer to these potential customers as marks, um, which is a suggestion of, you know, one of the allegations leveled at this company by, by many of its former members is that its sales practices were very predatory. So again, the way this, the way that The way that One Taste made money was by selling courses, and it wasn't just courses on orgasmic meditation. If you got deeper, it would be courses about, like, how to live your life in alignment with the philosophies of orgasmic meditation, and these courses could cost upwards of 20 or 30,000 dollars, and they might be, like, two-week intensives or this kind of thing, and in that way, again, those group, those transformational, In a way, those transformational packages and courses are similar to like what you might find at like, you know, intensives at like Tony Robbins or landmark or that kind of thing. So again, yeah. So the typical person like comes in, they, they go to these intro evenings where again, everyone's close day on and you just play communication games where people like talk openly and vulnerable, vulnerably about their feelings. And maybe there's like a little bit of, Suggestive or sexual like undertones, but it's not like a sexual experience, but then like the people who work at one taste are so friendly…

AI assessment note: “Oh, marks. Yeah. Sometimes they would... refer to these potential customers as marks”

Q Ok, so then, um, just stick to the details of the court case, but where do things go wrong?

A Well, um, basically the company was doing fairly well and, like, had a lot of, like, mainstream success. Again, Nicole, the founder, was speaking on stage at the Goop Health Conference in 2017. Um, they had these, like, endorsements. They were making money. And, um, in 2018, I wrote this big investigation for, um, Bloomberg Business Week where it was the first time that, um, people Um, in the company or former members of the, the group talked to me at length about these allegations that the group was a cult. Um, they basically said that they'd been exploited financially by being pressured to take on debt in order to buy more of these expensive courses. They said that they had been, um, exploited sexually by being pressured and sort of taught these lessons that, um, you know, pressured them to have sex that they didn't want to have in order to like further the company's business. So I wrote this big story, and the company kind of went into hibernation in response to that, and around the same time, and in all likelihood spurred by the story, the FBI started investigating, and then that led to many years of, like, the FBI looking into whether a crime had happened here, and then in twenty-twenty-three, federal prosecutors charged Nicole, the founder, and Rachel Cherowitz, who was kind of her, like, Second in command, the woman who had been head of sales for a long time, charged bot…

AI assessment note: “federal prosecutors charged Nicole, the founder, and Rachel Cherowitz... with, um, forced labor conspiracy”

Q know, I've lived in, I mean, I'm using Silicon Valley as a broader term for San Francisco and, and, um, the Valley itself. But, um, when you're out there, it seems like a lot of people just want to believe in something, right? You're there to do something. You want to believe in something. And so once you get going and you believe you have agency, it's tough to stop.

A Totally. And, and it also, once you've dedicated a lot of your life toward a belief, To change your mind and say, actually that belief might have been misguided, or it shouldn't have been implied in the circumstance. There is a lot of cognitive dissonance or sunk cost that comes up in a situation like that, where like, there were lots of people at one taste who had tough experiences and they had a moment where they could have thought to themselves, actually fuck this place. Like, I don't want, you know, this place is, is hurting me. But in order to say that they would have had to had, they would have had to grapple with the Cognitive dissonance of like, well, I also had invested five or six years of my life into this group. It's a really hard thing to admit to yourself and also sunk cost. It's like, I've already dedicated so much time of time, money, energy, social connection in this group, like to leave it feels very costly. It feels very painful. Um, and so you're totally right that like ideology has this stickiness to it, which is the more that you Orient your life around a belief. If it becomes part of your public or professional persona, if you know, if you are like, yeah, the startup founder who is fighting for, you know, X, Y, Z, the more you put yourself in that direction, the costlier it is for you to change course.

AI assessment note: “Totally. And, and it also, once you've dedicated a lot of your life toward a belief”

Q Right. So you've done a lot of reporting on open AI. Uh, what's your, like, assessment of where OpenAI stands in terms of, like, thinking through this? Like, is it a, like, a kind of a groupthink situation? Normal company? Do they have the goods? Is it just, you know, them whipping us up into a frenzy about this technology because they made, you know, this really good chatbot?

A Yeah, very powerful chatbot, which we'll get to, but I think, I mean, I think as these companies have gotten bigger, and I'm sure you have your own sense of this as well, so I'd be curious what you think, you know, OpenAI 10 years ago, or I guess nine years ago, OpenAI in its very early years, like, was explicitly formed around an ideology, right? And it was meant to be this non-profit with a mission, and the mission was what was gonna, like, differentiate it from other Groups. And, and it, and it did have this very strong sense of like, well, we're going to be open. We're going to be not for profit. And that is going to shape the type of work we do onto something early. Yes. Onto something early. They were, and they were. And like, what's interesting to me is that that is, is, has been watching that ideological vision Change over time in response to market forces or other, you know, I'd be curious what you think are some of the things that have shaped opening eye, but I think indisputably, obviously it has drifted In a very different direction than what you might have, you know, to go back and read those stories about the founding of open AI from like nine years ago, um, is to look at the company and be like, whoa, is this really like how it started? Like, I think a lot of people who are not familiar with the history would, would be, um, right.

AI assessment note: “indisputably, obviously it has drifted In a very different direction”