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12 min read

The $18,000 Hug

MDK instructor Steve Eckert has said the common thread among his attendees is a past shaped by abuse. The thing they're paying for used to be free: a few buddies, a hard thing to do together, someone who'd tell you the truth. Now it has a cover charge. Welcome to the age of artificial intelligence.
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The $18,000 Hug
Men doing log drills at the 3-day "Alpha Male" Camp.

By Matt Stone

For $18,000, a man could crawl shirtless down a railroad track, get blasted with a fire hose, fight a stranger, and cry about it afterward. For five years, the Modern Day Knight Project (MDK) in Chino Hills, California, sold him all of it in a 75-hour weekend, as long as he qualified as an entrepreneur, an executive, or a leader. "Your family deserves the best version of you," the website told him.

I earned my Ranger tab the other way. I joined the Army for a job, because I was a 20-year-old skater punk that ran out of options, not a 40-year-old man with a family at home. The Army paid me to suffer. I ran fast, so they asked me to suffer more, and I agreed. The suffering continued for years, and nobody hugged me at the end. I was given a piece of paper and told not to let the door hit me where "the good Lord split me." I am not the guy you impress with three days in the mud and a few cold plunges.

But these camps aren't really selling mud. They're selling to a specific man at a specific moment: often middle-aged, successful on paper, and quietly coming apart. The marriage has gone flat. The friends from his twenties drifted off one kid's birthday party at a time. He has money and nobody to call. He begins to ponder his life had he made different choices. He wants to test himself, to see what he is made of. That isn't weakness. It's a wound, a real one, and some fitness guru figured out it's worth $6,000 a day.

What he actually buys is three days of not being lonely. When New Yorker writer Charles Bethea embedded in these camps this year, he found the warrior posturing was mostly a shell over men in real pain, desperate for connection.

That's not just a feeling. In 1990, 3 percent of American men said they had no close friends. By 2021, it was 15 percent. MDK instructor Steve Eckert has said the common thread among his attendees is a past shaped by abuse. The thing they're paying for used to be free: a few buddies, a hard thing to do together, someone who'd tell you the truth. Now it has a cover charge. Welcome to the age of artificial intelligence.

To be fair, MDK didn't send men home alone. The $18,000 included a twelve-month "Mastermind": three retreats at a private Southern California ranch, monthly group coaching with Keuilian and guest experts, and an online community. But when you read the syllabus, the "brotherhood" starts to look like a business seminar. It promised more financial freedom, personal brand building, audience development, and systems for scaling a company, alongside networking with eight- and nine-figure entrepreneurs. The men showed up wounded. For the next year, they got taught how to grow their audience.

The man who built the most famous of these camps is not a Ranger or a SEAL, or anything special within the armed forces. Bedros Keuilian founded Fit Body Boot Camp, a fitness franchise he grew after rebuilding his gyms around direct-response marketing and sales. Eckert is a Marine veteran who picked up a personal trainer certification while serving and went on to run boot camp classes. To lend the place a résumé, the roster added former Navy SEALs and a retired Air Force SERE specialist.

SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape; those instructors train pilots and aircrew to live off the land behind enemy lines, avoid capture, hold up under interrogation, and get out if they're caught. The military teaches SERE in levels. Level A is basic awareness, a classroom course nearly everyone in uniform takes. Level B is for troops at moderate risk of capture. Level C is the real thing, reserved for aircrew and special operations, where students live off the land, evade hunters, and go through a resistance training lab that simulates captivity and interrogation. MDK never claimed to teach any of it, but it borrowed the Level C flavor: sleep deprivation, physical punishment, simulated drowning, instructors breaking men down on purpose. What it didn't borrow was the structure. Real Level C runs under tight controls, with medical support and psychologists watching every student, precisely because simulated captivity can hurt people.

MDK looked like Level C and ran nothing like it. In other words, MDK hired a man whose career was preparing airmen to be taken prisoner, then charged executives $18,000 for the experience. One promotional post billed the whole thing as "BUD/S for Life," a nod to Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, the selection course every Navy SEAL has to survive. For life. I do wonder what the real Navy SEALs have to say about that.

The Navy actually answered that question the hard way. In February 2022, Seaman Kyle Mullen died hours after finishing Hell Week, the most punishing stretch of BUD/S. A Navy investigation found he didn't get the critical care he needed, and the Navy overhauled how it medically monitors Hell Week. That is what the real institution did when the real thing killed a man: it tightened oversight and owned the failure. When a man died at MDK, its founder blamed the man's heart.

Ranger School also learned that lesson in February 1995, when four students died of hypothermia in the Florida swamps during the waterborne phase of training. Congress stepped in. Lawmakers ordered the school kept at 90 percent of its required staff and created safety cells of people who knew the local terrain and weather. The Army put remote sensors on the Yellow River to track the water, rewrote its medical evacuation procedures, and assigned physician assistants to the training battalions. Every Ranger who has earned a tab since trained under rules written because of those four men. That is what accountability looks like when a hard school kills someone. It doesn't make the school softer. It makes the school answer for the men inside it.

I've also seen the other side of this. In 2018, I spent 105 nights under the stars as a wilderness field instructor at Trails Carolina, a program for struggling kids in the North Carolina mountains. We worked under rules I can still recite: 2 staff to every one kid, constant earshot or vision, maintaining communication, two students never left alone, etc. Those rules existed because somebody, somewhere, got hurt without them. The work was dangerous and consisted of me being the legal guardian of 10 teenage boys with behavioral issues. I took these boys deep into the wilderness and taught them to survive. I never lost a single kid, or even had a single injury. The reason for that was the strict rules we adhered to. And even they weren't enough. In 2024, years after I left, a 12-year-old boy died there. His death was ruled a homicide, and the state revoked the program's license. So I know what strict rules look like, and I know they can still fail. MDK ran grown men through simulated drowning without, according to the lawsuit, so much as an emergency medic on site.

For just $18,000 you too could be sprayed with freezing water.

None of this is stolen valor. As far as I can tell, the veterans on MDK's roster served where they say they served. It's something quieter: borrowed valor. Keuilian's own biography runs from immigrant kid to fitness franchise founder, with no military chapter in it, and he built an $18,000 product out of other men's service. He didn't fake a DD-214. He rented a few real ones and put "BUD/S for Life" on the sales page. The SEALs and the SERE specialist earned what they wear the hard way. The men who pay get the costume, and Keuilian keeps the margin.

Here's what that slogan leaves out. The yelling is the part civilians see in the videos. What they don't see is the medic standing by, the risk controlled down to the evolution, and cadre who know exactly why every miserable thing is happening and when to stop it. MDK copied the costume: railroad tracks, chains, men digging their own graves and lying in body bags while instructors shoveled dirt on top of them, an instructor screaming that he'll carve the tattoo off his own hand before he lets these "babies" graduate. No licensed therapist or medic appears anywhere in the public record of a program that deliberately drags up men's childhood abuse and then makes them fight each other. I shouldn't have had to dig this hard. MDK puts its SEALs, its SWAT operator, and its MMA expert on the website. If anyone was there to keep these men alive, they didn't make the brochure. They were not important enough to name if they existed at all.

In the summer of 2020, a man collapsed and died after a trail run during a session. His name was Richard Spoon, Ricky to the people who knew him back home in Mayville, New York. He was 30, a lineman for National Grid, married not quite three years, with a baby due that October. He found MDK through an Instagram ad. Watching the event's videos online, his wife, Kaitlin, grew worried about how exhausted he looked. She later said he took the no-quitting rule deadly seriously, and that he wanted badly to be a better person. Weeks later, Kaitlin filed a wrongful death suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of herself, her husband's estate, and the child she was carrying. She named Keuilian personally, his family trust, his companies, and a defendant listed as "The Modern Day Knight Project, form of entity unknown."

The $18,000 camp, in other words, wasn't clearly anything at all on paper. The suit alleged negligence, including that no emergency medic was on site. The parties settled without Keuilian admitting fault, and the case was dismissed in January 2024. When NBC News asked Eckert about it, he declined to discuss it, citing privacy and respect for what he called an extremely unfortunate matter. Keuilian, speaking to The New Yorker, blamed Spoon's death on an enlarged heart, not his program. "A lot of people got hurt," he said.

That silence is selective. MDK built its business on being watched. The camp posted footage every time a class was in session, and the clips have pulled millions of views: men chewing ice, crawling under floodlights, a TikTok caption ordering them to "kill your inner bitch voice." When the internet started laughing, the camp found its voice fast. Nick Koumalatsos, a former Marine Raider and MDK instructor, went on Instagram to argue there's nothing wrong with men wanting to do something hard, and that the program isn't just screaming and yelling.

Keuilian and Eckert went further, sitting down together for a video titled "Finally Addressing The Haters of The MDK Project." In it, they admit the polarizing clips are deliberate, a way to draw in the men who need the program and weed out the ones who don't, and they diagnose their critics as men who won't take responsibility for their own lives. Their policy for the worst of them is block and delete. That's about twenty minutes on the haters, and not a word about Richard Spoon. Keuilian and Eckert have since opened their father-and-son program to a New Yorker writer. The suffering is content. The man who died in it gets a privacy statement and a diagnosis.

I tried to ask them about it myself. MDK's website doesn't list a phone number or a press contact. The only email address anywhere on it is buried in the privacy policy, a support inbox on Keuilian's own domain. My request for comment about Richard Spoon bounced back undelivered. Requests through every other channel I could find went nowhere. For a company that posted every crawl, every ice bath, and every scream for millions of strangers, it is remarkably hard to ask a question, unless you are Fox News apparently.

MDK was the most expensive of these camps, not the only one. It shut down in September 2024; Keuilian has blamed both Trump's return and the cost. RISE, short for Ruthless Integrity and Simple Execution, in central Virginia, charges $3,000 and drives blindfolded men to the site with Jordan Peterson lectures and Marine Corps drills blasting through the van speakers. Peterson, for the record, is a Canadian psychology professor who never served a day in uniform. Men of War Crucible has men bear-crawl through rivers. At Warrior Week, you dig your own grave. And the Squire Program, Keuilian's newer venture out of Chino Hills with Eckert coaching, brings in boys from 12 to 17 alongside their fathers, at $900 a pair. They train beside the dirt patch where MDK men once dug their own graves. Sell Dad, then sell the kid.

Say any of this out loud and someone will call you a liberal. A buddy of mine already did, mostly to bust my balls. But political scientists have spent sixty years showing that most Americans don't hold coherent ideologies at all. Philip Converse found it in 1964, and Lilliana Mason's more recent work argues the labels now work like team jerseys. "Alpha" has become one of them. Question the camp and you've apparently switched teams. That's a pretty convenient arrangement for a man charging $18,000. Simply calling it stupid paints you as a "liberal" in a country that couldn't tell you the difference between a liberal and communist. Or a Democrat and a Republican, for that matter.

We keep trying to fit a whole life into two boxes: red or blue, Democrat or Republican, alpha or beta. Nobody actually lives in one. The only people who benefit from pretending we do are the ones selling the way out. The ones running "Alpha Male" camps.

What these men are starving for doesn't come with a hose or a price tag. It's the guy next to you who still picks up the phone six months later. Nobody can sell you that in a weekend. The crucible of shared suffering is real, and it builds real relationships. But there are many ways to find that without spending $18,000 to LARP as a Navy SEAL for a couple days.

Richard Spoon worked on and climbed power lines for a living. He had a wife who chose him and a child on the way. By every measure that matters, he had nothing left to prove. He had accomplished everything a man sets out to accomplish in life. Somebody sold him the idea that he had not done enough. Somebody told him that three days of suffering brings about the same results that SEALs, Rangers, Green Berets, and Pararescue jumpers get from years of training. The point is: Somebody lied.

If this sounds like you, you don't need a weekend in the mud. You need somebody to talk to. If it's heavy right now, call or text 988 (veterans, press 1). If it's not a crisis but you're carrying it alone, a warmline connects you with a peer who's been there: find one at warmline.org. Veterans can call Vets4Warriors at 855-838-8255 to talk to another vet, any hour, or reach a Vet Center at 877-927-8387 for free counseling. And if you'd rather talk shoulder to shoulder than face to face, F3 Nation (f3nation.com) and Men's Sheds (usmenssheds.org) are free groups of men who show up for each other every week.

There are people out there who care. They exist.

RIP Richard Spoon

Sources

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Matt Stone

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