Charles Bethea

The website had a picture of a man's mud-flecked face alongside the all-caps wording, BUILD COURAGE, EARN CERTAINTY, BECOME ELITE.

The image, the font, the whole presentation suggested to me something very boot campy.

And when I learned that Brendan King was a former Marine, that made some sense.

I began talking before visiting to some former participants, and they were kind of cagey.

They didn't want to tell me too much about this thing.

three-day quote-unquote live event that was the culmination of the experience.

Prior to the live event, the guys texted with each other and with Brendan King, and he would give them prompts.

He would ask them, you know, to talk about ways that they'd failed in their life and stuff and to try to kind of open them up to some of the core issues that he would then deal with in a more dramatic way in the woods of central Virginia.

And that's where I went.

with these guys.

I trailed this van where they'd been, nine guys or ten guys had been tossed into it wearing blindfolds.

The stereo in the van was turned up loudly and it was this mishmash of like Jordan Peterson lectures and Marine Corps drills and loud sounds and it was all very disorienting.

According to King, it was supposed to

put some distance between where they'd come from and where they were going.

Yeah, and so I found myself wanting to kind of put it, this program in particular, the first one I visited, rise into a box immediately.

I was like, okay, so this is a military boot camp.

Or no, this is fraternity hazing.

And at every turn, Brendan King would, I think kind of cleverly to give him some credit, make it more complicated than that.

But at the beginning, I was almost rolling my eyes watching these guys get tossed into a van like a scene from old school.

You know, but Brendan King, I already knew enough about him in our previous phone calls prior to my visit.