William Munro applied to Camp Looksmax the way most people enter a raffle. “I applied [to the camp] thinking, like, there’s no way in hell I’m doing this,” he told USA Today.
Then, around 10 p.m. the night before camp started, the acceptance call came. By morning he was at Toronto airport, and his parents — who found his room empty — were on the phone in a panic.
Munro is 19, a first-year business and management student at Western University, living at home in London, Ontario. He hadn’t told them. On the call from the airport, he gave them what he calls a “really basic explanation” of looksmaxxing and a cover story: he’d won a giveaway from a YouTuber.
He hadn’t. He’d spent $2,000 on flights to LA and $5,000 on enrollment. His own money.
“It was a super radical decision,” he said. “I just thought, I’m a young kid. Money comes and goes. So might as well get the experience out.”
Where the $7,000 came from
Some of it was odd jobs, which he’s worked since he was 16. Some of it was that month’s online gambling — sports, and the card game baccarat. Munro is unusually candid about it: “It’s not good, but I’m a bit of a gambler.” And the logic of the purchase, in his words: “Let me just spend some money on this before I go out and lose it.”
That’s the most honest sentence anyone has said about Camp Looksmax so far, and it came from a customer.
What $5,000 bought
Fifteen young men, seven days, a house in LA, hosted by Clavicular (Braden Peters) and co-creator Hexumlite. Munro’s camp started 1 October — the first week, which our Season 3 follow-up logged as Season 1. (By Season 3, the site listed $7,500.) Livestreamed 24/7 on Kick. The website promised a mansion, a private chef, grooming, style and “cold-approach” tips, and: “Build your brand … Work on your on-camera presence.”
Day one, everyone shared their “stats” — height, weight, penis size — and their “blackpill moment.” Other days: clubbing, presentations on jaw surgery, and door-to-door sales for an online casino that sponsored the camp. A gambler, recruited to sell for a casino, at a camp he paid for with gambling winnings. The scene doesn’t need satire; it writes its own.
His favourite day was the yacht party.
The headline vs. the story
The New York Post ran it as a disappearance:
Parents panic after teen son vanishes from home - and they find out he spent $7K at Clavicular’s ‘Camp Looksmax’
— New York Post (@nypost) October 21, 2026
661,000 views, 6,997 likes, 155 quote-posts by 09:04 UTC this morning. The $7K is real — $2,000 plus $5,000, exactly. “Vanishes” is doing more work. He was a 19-year-old adult at an airport, reachable by phone, with a lie ready about a YouTuber. The panic was real too. The vanishing lasted about as long as a morning.
On X, the camp was already climbing before the Post found him. Posts mentioning “camp looksmax” or camplooksmax ran 110 on 16 October and 123 on the 17th, doubled over the weekend (226, 211), then hit 368 on Tuesday and 439 on Wednesday, the day both stories ran. Thursday had 262 by 07:09 UTC — already above any day last weekend, with most of the day still to go.
The next stat
The main thing he took home was social, not surgical: start talking to people. “Just go say anything. Go say hi.” Most of his friends, he says, “think it’s real cool.” One female friend unfollowed him.
But the camp also put a number in his head. Munro calls himself a “decent-looking guy” who needs to “put some more focus” on his “actual aesthetic face-wise.” He’s now looking at a $40,000 double jaw surgery, which he wants to pay for himself.
For the record, because this is the part with an operating table in it: USA Today notes that double jaw surgery is meant for severe jaw misalignment, and that patients risk jaw fractures and hearing changes, citing Healthline. It is major surgery with a medical indication, not a grooming upgrade, and anyone weighing it should start with a surgeon’s assessment of whether they have that indication at all.
His parents are the hurdle he’s thinking about. “I do see them understanding. I just have to give a nice, thorough presentation.” And: “It’s a lot of money, but for me, it’s worth it.”
The other read
Not everyone sees a kid buying an experience. Samuel Cornell, a research fellow at the University of Queensland, told USA Today that influencers like Clavicular are “manipulation specialists” at the centre of “this whole ecosystem online that basically just preys upon young boys’ insecurities.” Clavicular’s representative did not respond to USA Today. USA Today and the New York Post report that rape charges Clavicular faced in September were dropped on Oct. 13.
Munro doesn’t sound preyed upon so much as all-in. He found the stat he thinks matters, priced it, and came home with a slide deck to make. He learned the lesson every camp sells: say hi to people.
He’s just still deciding whether to say it with a new jaw.