In a conversation on the Ivan Paychecks podcast, Chet Hanks, son of legendary actor Tom Hanks, opened up about one of the most jarring experiences of his adolescence: being forcibly removed from his home in the middle of the night and transported to a wilderness therapy program in Southern Utah.
“It was May 30th, 2008. I’ll never forget the date,” Chet recalled. “I wake up and it’s four in the morning. I look at the foot of my bed and there’s two huge dudes standing there. They’re like, ‘You’re coming with us. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.'”
Chet was 17 at the time, in his junior year of high school in Pacific Palisades, California. His parents had discovered he was using weed, which sparked a significant power struggle at home.
With no warning, two hired escorts drove him nine hours from Los Angeles to a remote location in the Southern Utah desert, where he was enrolled in a program designed for troubled teens.
Life at the program was deliberately harsh. Participants slept on dirt with a thin piece of foam, fashioned their own shelter from tarps and rope, and carried packs weighing up to 80 lbs (36 kg) while hiking up to 12 miles per day in 120-degree desert heat.
Meals consisted of beans, rice, granola, and the occasional tuna packet.
What troubled Chet most, however, was not the physical discomfort but the psychological uncertainty of not knowing when he would be released.
“They can keep you as long as they want,” he explained. “Your parents sign over legal guardianship to the facility. They’re a private corporation. There’s no state or federal regulation or oversight.”
Chet spent longer at the program than any other participant he encountered, largely because, as he later realized, the facility billed parents by the day and had financial incentives to extend stays.
“They knew my parents were whales,” he said plainly.
Among the program’s more psychologically challenging elements were “solo” periods, where participants were blindfolded, led in circles to disorient them, then left alone in the desert for an entire week with no books, no writing materials, and no human contact.
“A day feels like a week, and a week feels like a month,” Chet said of the experience.
After the wilderness program, Chet was transferred to a restrictive reform-style boarding school, also in Utah, where he completed his high school credits. In total, he was away from his home and friends for approximately a year and a half, with no internet, no phone, and no contact with his former classmates.
“One day I just stopped going to school and no one I had known had any clue what happened to me,” he said.
Despite the difficult nature of the experience, Chet acknowledged it left him with some lasting strengths, particularly around solitude and self-reliance. It was during his solo periods that he says he found God.
Chet went on to attend Northwestern University, pursue acting, and eventually launch his Self Mastery Program, a coaching platform built around fitness, nutrition, meditation, and mindset development. He credits that with transforming his life after his most difficult personal period in 2021.
