Rusty Rahm was perched on a stool, his legs tethered to the piece of furniture and his arms bound behind him. A man stuffed a wad of gauze into Rahm's mouth and taped it shut, then shoved Vaseline up his nostrils.

He sat like that for more than an hour as an EMT watched.

"Obviously I was having trouble breathing at that point," said Rahm, a 47-year-old entrepreneur who owns seven different companies and lives in Kansas City, Mo.

'There is a primal nature in men that has been completely castrated.'

 - Garrett White

"But I was a smoker — and they told me if I continued to smoke, that's what my breathing would be like if someone tried to kick down the door and break into my home and I had to protect my family."

"They" are the coaches of Warrior Week — an intensive program for male executives from tech, finance and other high-pressure industries to learn the "hidden science of accessing (nearly) unlimited sex, power and money as a married business man," according to the program's website. Rahm shelled out $10,000 for the privilege of being bound, gagged and run ragged for five days and nights in Laguna Beach, Calif., in April.

Drills included being thrown off a boat into the Pacific Ocean while blindfolded, dunked into a tank of ice water, and visiting a cemetery where the men are told they will die in 20 minutes and must first write goodbye letters to their loved ones.

"We teach them how to be a man," said Warrior Week founder Garrett J. White, a 40-year-old blond with tattooed biceps who looks like a video-game soldier.

"Women are leading [both] across the board in business and at home . . . and living more powerfully than men today. And that's causing complete chaos for men."

White launched Warrior Week in 2012 to offer guidance to wayward souls like he once was. At 23, he was divorced, bankrupt and recovering from cancer. He pulled his life together and built a million-dollar real estate empire — then lost it all in the mortgage banking crisis of 2007. That's when he reinvented himself as a life and business guru: Tony Robbins meets The Rock.

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