Welcome to REINVENTED with Jen Eckhart! If you like pushing the boundaries and living on the edge — this episode is for YOU! In this first episode of 2022, Jen goes one-on-one with U.S. professional motorsports competitor, extreme stunt performer, and judge of NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” Travis Pastrana. He is known for his heart-stopping extreme stunt performances. Travis won the first-ever X-Games, landed the first-ever double backflip in Motocross history, built an empire with Nitro Circus, drove in NASCAR, and even replicated 3 of daredevil Evel Knievel’s most famous jumps without injury in record-breaking fashion! But did you know that he’s also a CHEER DAD?
In this can’t-miss episode, Travis and Jen discuss tales of his most extreme stunts – including jumping out of an airplane with NO parachute, his biggest regret - including how he has broken more than 60 bones and survived 25 concussions, his secret behind being fearless and successful at every stunt and project he puts his mind to, how he has managed to reinvent himself and his mindset over the years, being a cheer dad to his two precious daughters, and why his family comes before everything. They even discuss a major stunt and event that remains on his bucket list that he is anxious to conquer before ANYONE else!
Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to REINVENTED with Jen Eckhart on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. You can also follow @JenniferEckhart on Instagram and Twitter. Thanks for listening!
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REINVENTED With U.S. Motorsports Competitor Travis Pastrana
JE: I've had a lot of people on this show that I consider badass. They all are in their own unique way. That being said, I'm pretty sure my next guest takes the cake for badassery. Yes, I just made that word up. He is known for his heart-stopping and extreme stunt performances. He won the first-ever X Games, landed the first-ever double backflip in Motocross history, and built an empire with the Nitro World Games and the annual extreme sporting event organized by Nitro Circus.
Not just that. He's also won championships and gold medals in Supercross, Motorcross, Freestyle Motorcross, and Rally racing. He's even driven in NASCAR and has replicated three of Daredevil Evel Knievel's most famous jumps without injury in record-breaking fashion. Ladies and gentlemen, it is an honor to welcome the legend Travis Pastrana on the show. Travis, welcome to the show.
TP: Thank you so much for having me on. That was a heck of an intro. I appreciate you.
JE: You can hire me as your PR agent after this. Before we start this interview though, I have to rag on you a little because I built you up so much. Now I got to tear you down a little to keep you humble. I have to know, what is it with you big-name high-performing athletes who have AOL email accounts? It truly cracks me up.
I interviewed seven-time wrestling world champion, Chris Jericho, not long ago on this show. He too has the most ridiculously dated AOL email address. I even played some of the old dial-up sounds ahead of the interview. Is there some secret society you high-performing public figures are in where you all make a pact to hold on to your old AOL email addresses?
TP: It's just priorities. It's never been something that I've ever thought to change. It's been hacked a couple of times. We always get it back. They got the good firewalls on them.
JE: That's amazing. The only person I know in my life besides you and Chris Jericho with an AOL email address is my 77-year-old father. God bless him. I love him to death, but I just had to know if there was like a secret AOL society.
TP: Your dad leads the society, so I'm sorry to break it to you.
JE: I love it. Onto more important topics, Travis. I wanted to bring you on my show Reinvented because to me and to a lot of your fans, you exemplify reinventing yourself. You've raced Motocross, freestyle, X Games, Rallycross, NASCAR, offshore boat racing, you name it, you've done it. You've even jumped out of perfectly good airplanes.
Not to mention your TV success with your show, America's Got Talent. You're now a judge on NBC's America's Got Talent. A show where the world's most talented amateurs perform for star judges and compete for a life-changing prize. Having gone from one sport to the next exciting project, everyone out there wants to know the secret sauce for Travis Pastrana behind being so successful in everything that you do.
TP: It’s passion. My dad says, “No one could ever mess up in reverse as much as I've messed up,” because for every door that closes, something always opens. I was hurt a lot in Motocross. Motocross was my passion. It was my dream. Every morning, I woke up and that's all I wanted to do. We come from construction. It's not a big construction. It was a small family construction. He's like, “We'll all take pay cuts,” all of my uncles and my dad. “We can pay for us to go and have a chance to do the nationals or go down to Florida.”
As a third grade, it was a big choice. He was like, “You have to go and run 1 mile a day before school. I don't care if you're sick. I don't care if it's snowing. I don't care if it's raining, cold or hot. If you do that all through your school year in the third grade, then we will figure out a way to get you down to Florida.” I was like, “Yes, of course.” I was always challenged. My dad and my mom always said, “You'll never make it as a professional athlete, but as long as that keeps you motivated and it keeps your grades up.” Finally, I did. We won X Games. I say we because it was my family and everyone got me there.
JE: It's a joint victory.
TP: I kept getting injured. I had a broken wrist or broken ankle. Every time I was hurt, I would get on a go-kart a lot sooner or something that has four wheels. I would get back and start driving things or anything that I could get my hands on. As my professional career in motorcycles started to come to a halt because of injuries, every injury had led me to not be great by any means but good enough in a car like every redneck American thinks that you can drive. I was able to get some sponsorship for motorcycles and took it to car racing and it kept going from there. As I got hurt more and did different things, I needed to figure out a way to film it.
JE: As you cheated death more, you needed a way to film it. I like saying cheated death.
TP: Everything that I've done has been because of a failure somewhere else or an injury. There's no way to film rally car racing or offshore power boats or even shenanigans like a Nitro Circus where we started a company. When Evel Knievel passed away, Johnny Knoxville called up and said, “I need a list of a couple of stunts.” I gave them fifteen pages and he said, “Can you do any of this?” I said, “I don't know but we'll try them all.” We had to show an MTV two weeks later.
All the things that you accomplished have been because of failure somewhere else.
JE: I have to circle back to something that you did say. You said your father always challenged you. Starting in the third grade, did you have to run a mile every morning when you woke up? I have to know this.
TP: I didn't have to run a mile, but if I wanted to go to Florida to race motorcycles for the winter. We're from Maryland. Florida was twelve hours away. My mom was a flight attendant. She would generally work on the weekends and be with me during the week. My dad would work the weeks. He'd pick me up from school at 3:00 PM on a Friday. We would drive 13 to 14 hours down to Florida. He'd drive all night, then we'd race. He'd work on the bike all night from Saturday night to Sunday night. He'd drive all night back and we'd give it back. Sometimes he drop me off at school and he'd go straight to work.
I was very blessed and fortunate to have a family that sacrificed everything. Not so I could succeed or make it but just so I could follow my dreams. That was the biggest key for my dad and my mom growing up. Results never matter to them but the effort did. That was what they always preached. It was like, "Give it your best." My dad always said, "You will never make it in Motocross. You'll never make it as an athlete. There's no way, but every day that you try your hardest, we'll support you.”
JE: I love that. It sounds like they paved the way for you to follow your passion and look at you now. You're on top of the world still cheating death and still doing crazy insane stunts. Seriously, my audience needs to go to YouTube. If you haven't heard of Travis Pastrana, you have like 4.2 million followers on Instagram. You have quite a fan base going on. You need to watch what this guy does. He defies the odds. It is insane.
Speaking of parenting, I had Rick Macci, who's the coach of Venus and Serena Williams on the show. I don't know if you've seen the movie King Richard. He has a healthy style of parenting. When I interviewed the coach who is best friends with Richard, the girl's father, he was like, "He always tried to keep him a kid. Instead of pushing them into every tennis tournament, he took them to Disney. They didn't let it go to their heads. He demanded that they got straight A's." Were your parents sticklers about grades or schoolwork?
TP: That's funny but I haven't. I need to watch the movie. I need to research more. It looked great and I follow the William sisters all the way through. It's been an amazing journey. It sounds very similar to my father and my mom. If I didn't stay on the honor roll, it wasn't straight As but you know. I graduated high school at fifteen with a 3.9 GPA. It’s not because I was smart but because I needed to get good grades for my parents to keep what I saw was all the sacrifices they were making.
My friend and I went for a run and at that point, it was 5 miles a day by the seventh grade. My dad came around the corner and saw my friend just sitting, watching his watch, and waiting for me to come back. He said, “I was so happy. I was hoping so much that I would see you right next to him having told us that you were going on a 5-mile run and not running.”
He said, “We would stop the motorcycles. I would stop driving all night. We'd stop all this stuff.” For me, quitting was never an option. My parents never expected or necessarily even cared if I did well in sports. They wanted to make sure that I had the best possible and most motivated upbringing with the most driven friends if you will.
JE: You go from one sport to the next, and to the next exciting project faster than Leonardo DiCaprio goes through his girlfriends. The thing is you win in all of these extreme sports. It's not like you just participate in them. You win all of them. Talk to me about the element of being able to reinvent and fine-tune yourself as an athlete as you age and get older.
TP: What you find is there's no such thing as an overnight success. Everyone says, "You're so lucky," and I am. I was very lucky to be in a situation where I had a lot of support growing up from an amazing family. At the end of the day, there are a lot of injuries that go with getting to any impact sport. There are a lot of dangers. There’s a lot of luck that goes into not being paralyzed and sitting in a wheelchair for four months, having shattered my hips and pelvis in the third known case not to have blood out on my 15th birthday.
Motorsports Competitor: There's no such thing as overnight success in extreme sports. At the end of the day, there will be a lot of injuries and dangers in everything you do.
It's tougher for families and for parents to say, “I'm going to let you continue living your dream even though this has happened.” There's a lot of luck that goes in there. At the end of the day, everything that you do, it's not like you step into a car and you do amazing. A good example is Brandon Semenuk. He's the best in the world of mountain biking. He won Red Bull Rampage. He won for the first time when he was fifteen years old, a prodigy. He's 31 or 32 and he won it again. In 2022, he got third in the US Rally Championship. He's not only the best in the world on a mountain bike.
Everyone is like, “He came out from nowhere. He has money. That's why he got in.” No, he's been rallying since 2002. He's been rallying since he has his driver's license. He's built all his cars from the ground up. He knows every aspect of it like me with rally cars. I've always been in field cars in the backyard, and always sliding around the shop since I was two years old. I've had a go-kart. My life has always been motors, wheels, and anything exciting and fun. All of those trials and tribulations as a child help you to build that foundation for what you're capable of doing after you're eighteen. I was very fortunate to be in a very redneck family that like bulldozers, construction, and sliding cars. My uncle was drag racing.
JE: You’re getting your hands dirty. You're not afraid of dirt, Travis Pastrana, but you have broken tons of records. A friend of mine, Danny, recalled watching you do your longest jump in Long Beach. After you broke the record by about 100 feet, you did a flip off the barge and landed in the ocean. You mentioned that you take inspiration from Evel Knievel. In fact, you paid tribute to the legendary stuntman by breaking a few of his records.
In 2018 in Las Vegas, you safely cleared three record-breaking big jumps which consisted of 52 cars, 16 buses, and a fountain respectively for a total of 484 feet of jumps in a single night. That third jump over the Caesar's Palace Fountain was a jump that Knievel himself wasn't able to land in 1967 when he crushed his pelvis and his femur. How did you reinvent your stunts to do them again but just bigger and better?
TP: As you said, Evel Knievel did it in the 1960s and 1970s. We've got a lot more on our side. We have a lot more understanding of what flies. Evel invented the wheel. I thought it was pretty cool because my dad and his generation said, “Back when men were men, bikes were crap. Basically, the stuntman is gone.” The new generation doesn't know about Evel Knievel. When I asked my kids and their friends, they didn't know who that was. I was like, “That's a parenting fail on my part.”
JE: They're like, “Is he on TikTok?”
TP: It was an amazing opportunity in history to take a company that we started with Nitro Circus, and to have the opportunity to pay homage to the stuntman that showed a motorcycle could fly. He paved the road for X Games, Nitro Circus, all the stuff that we do now in action sports, all the scooter riders and the BMXers, and all the people going to the Olympics and skateboarding.
Motorsports Competitor: Evel Knievel paved the road for X Games and Nitro Circus. He may have not been the best motorcycle, but he had salesmanship, which is gone in modern-day sports.
The pioneer was this showman. He wasn't a very good motorcycle rider, but he had the courage to be able to go into these places like the Caesar’s Fountain, sell himself and say, “This is what we're going to do,” and also the courage to back it up. That's one interesting thing that is lost now with modern-day sports. The salesmanship of the stunt has gone. Evel Knievel was Mr. America.
He had the stars and bars, the V. If you think of a stunt, you think of a white suit. It's basically the stars that go down in the V shape that was Evel Knievel. He had the cape. We wanted to have an opportunity to show and bring three generations together. My dad's generation, my kid’s generation, and our generation.
It’s not necessarily to beat his stunts. It would've been a letdown for Evel Knievel if 50 or 60 years later, we're still doing the exact same stuff he's doing. We took motorcycles, ramps, locations, and things that he jumped on that are very similar. We were able to show what he did and the modern changes that allow us to go bigger.
JE: When some people grow up, they look up to people who aren't exactly daredevils. They want to be a nurse or an actress.
TP: Thank goodness for nurses and doctors.
JE: Thank goodness for nurses and doctors out there. You're talking about Evel Knievel, a man who has broken more bones than anyone else ever. I don't even know if you have him beat. The list of injuries goes on and on for you. What is the allure of doing these crazy stunts that put your life in danger? I know you get a rush like an adrenaline junkie doing these kinds of things. What is it that drew you to do these crazy stunts in the first place?
TP: Honestly, it was my family. I have two uncles on my mom's side and five uncles on my dad's side. My Uncle Allen was a quarterback for Denver Broncos back in ‘69 and ‘70. He said football was too dangerous. He didn't ever teach me how to throw or catch. I was the run of the family. I was the one that always got beat up when we had our Thanksgiving football games.
The only way for me to prove myself was being able to jump higher bridges into water or do more flips or when I got a motor, it was to be able to twist the throttle. I surely wasn't as strong or as fast as all my cousins. They were all Division-1 football and wrestlers and all-American lacrosse. I didn't have those types of skills but what I found was I was extremely durable. In action sports, that's a huge quality to have.
It sounds silly but I could take a fall. When I was falling, I always worked my way out of it. I got a lot of injuries obviously but I was very good at making the best of bad situations. For example, when you're in the air and you're going 60 miles an hour, you're 45 feet or 55 feet off the ground, and something is going wrong. You have to make the decision now, “I have to now jump off of my motorcycle. I can neither run 60 miles an hour nor take a five-story drop to my feet. I can push off of this and land on that downside or there's a hay bale over there. How can I make this hurt the least?”
As a stuntman, you have to make decisions like choosing to break your neck or both your ankles.
If I stay on the motorcycle, I'm going to break my neck. This 250-pound bike is going to smash me into the ground. This is where time slows down for me. I'm able to roll out of things that other people aren't. It's like a football player that can see everything in slow motion, “This 300-pound man is running at full speed towards me and I got to hit this person over here running at full speed this way. It's been interesting and I've been able to see it with my kids now. I have a 6 and an 8-year-old.
JE: Two daughters.
TP: Yes. One of them has my stuntman mentality where when things hit the fan, she smiles. She starts talking faster. Her brain starts working more quickly. She's never hurt. She does the dumbest stuff. She falls out of trees all the time. She flips off the trampoline. She's doing all these crazy shenanigans and never had any injuries. My youngest is focused. She's a good worker and coordinated, but the second things hit the fan, she doesn't do anything outside of her comfort zone.
JE: She like freezes or?
TP: She freezes if something happens that shouldn't happen. She doesn't do anything dangerous and yet, she's the only one that's had any type of injury. Nothing was broken, thank goodness, at this point but always has black eyes and skinned elbows. She's like, "How is it that my oldest sister gets away with everything." That mentality has so much to do with how I've been able to stay alive this long in the sport.
JE: It's so true. You have to be quick on your feet and you have to almost do the math when you're in the air. You have to be a quick thinker because it is a matter of life and death.
TP: Also, most people can't make the decision. If you're in the air and you say, “If I stay on the bike, I'm going to break my neck but if I jump off, I'm going to break both ankles.” Most people say, “It's all bad.” I can go, “I'll take the ankles.”
JE: You'll take the less painful of the injury if you will.
TP: 100%. I ended up breaking my back when I was fifteen because I got broken both wrists. I was like, "I got my cast off," and that's bad at fourteen years old when your mom and dad have to wipe your butt when you go to the bathroom because you got your full arms in casts. It's an embarrassing time for that.
JE: It's humbling.
TP: Yes, but I just come up with two broken wrists and I'm like, “Let me lean back. I'm going to take all of this on my legs. I'm not going to break my arms again,” then I broke my back. I learned that maybe a third option would've been better.
JE: I'm a big fan of yours because you conquer fears. We're a big fan of that here on Reinvented. I did do a little research on you. I am a journalist. On September 26th, 2007, you jumped out of an airplane over Arecibo, Puerto Rico without a parachute and a carefully choreographed stunt. You met up in mid-air with another jumper, then latched yourself into a harness to make a safe tandem landing. That was insane. You apparently got in a lot of trouble due to its illegality. I have to know what happened and what the punishment was for doing such a crazy stunt. I'm pretty sure that is illegal jumping out of an airplane with no parachute.
TP: It came down to the pilot being FAA. You can't have a door open without everyone in the plane with a parachute on. We went to Puerto Rico, which I found out is a territory of the US, which I should know because I have ancestry in Puerto Rico. I was like, “I should be able to do this here.” We're on a beach. It's in the middle of nowhere. Everybody was either military or ex-military, so they all had their licenses but they didn't do that for a living per se.
JE: Did I see correctly in that YouTube video, were you chugging a beer before jumping out of the plane?
TP: No, that’s Red Bull.
JE: I know Red Bull is a sponsor of yours.
TP: They call it the Red Bull Air Force. All of the best skydivers in the world are Red Bull. That's what their marketing was at the time. That's whom I went to first and they said, “Absolutely not. We can't lose our licenses. This can't work. You don't have enough skydives. This is a bad idea.” Everyone was like, “How much did they pay you?” I'm like, “I almost lost my Red Bull ride for doing this.”
JE: How did you convince them? How were you like, “I promise I'm good at what I do. I'm going to stay alive.”
TP: It was mostly the military guys. They came down and they're like, “This will be simple.” We did one test run and they're like, “That worked out great.”
JEL: “We survived. We live. Let's jump again.”
TP: They never leave a man behind. I was like, “I got this.” I thought they'd renegotiate on the way down, like, “How much is it worth now?” I’m joking.
JE: Speaking of other crazy stunts, you rode your dirt bike off a ramp and did a back flip as you fell 2,000 feet into the Grand Canyon. You were also the first to land a double backflip at the 2006 X Games in LA, which earned you a gold medal. I got chills watching that footage back on YouTube. I love how the camera pan to your mom and she was like, “What is my son doing?” Out of all the crazy stunts you have done, and you've done a lot, is there anyone that shook you to your core that left you a little rattled or a little scared to move on?
TP: For me, scared doesn't come during the stunt. Scared comes at the moment when you decide to do it. Coming from the military, my dad was a Marine. He’s like, “You're a man of your work. If you say you're going to do something, you got to do it.” That left me in trouble a few times when I opened my mouth and I said I was going to do something. I then realized at the moment that I wasn't either good enough or the bike wasn't fast enough or the jump was too big, and I still have to do it anyway.
As a stuntman, being scared doesn't come during the stunt, it comes at the moment when you decide to do it.
The dumbest thing that I've ever done is doing something that you know is going to fail before you start. I had a lot of respect for Evel Knievel who had that same mentality when he went to Wembley Stadium. The motorcycle didn't have the speed to do the jump that was set up. He didn't realize this until he was moments before the jump, the stadium was packed, and live TV was there. He went on the microphone and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not going to make this jump but I promised you all a show. I said I would do it. I told the ramp builders how far to make it. I told the bike builders what bike I needed. I was wrong. Enjoy the show.”
That could be possibly the dumbest thing that anyone has ever done but also, I liked it because you do one thing as you do all things. In this day and age, taking accountability for your failures is something that doesn't happen very often. You see most successful people don't place blame on other places. If you look at it, at the end of the day, you sign off on the people that are going to be building your ramps or you're building the ramps yourself. You sign off on your motorcycle, you tell the TV or you tell whoever that you're going to do something. That is now your responsibility to come through with what you promised. That goes in relationships and every aspect of life. I try not to open my mouth as much now as I used to. That's what I learned from that situation.
Motorsports Competitor: In this day and age, taking accountability for your failures is something that doesn't happen very often. That is why most successful people don't place blame on others.
JE: Your mouth can get you into trouble, but that's so profound what you said. Anything worth doing is worth doing right. Be a man or a woman of your word. Put your money where your mouth is. If you say you're going to do something, follow through, but also take accountability and own up if you think you can't do this. You've sustained so many injuries, Travis. A dislocated spine, torn ACL, PCL, LCL, MCL, how many Ls are there? All the CLs. I'm pretty sure you covered that turf. Broken tibia, fibula, all the ibulas you broke. You once separated your spine from your pelvis when a motorbike landing went wrong. I have to know, do you have any regrets?
TP: All of my regrets at this point are things that I didn't do. Things that I was too afraid to take the chance on. There's hindsight is 20/20 and there are a lot of things that I wouldn't do knowing the outcome, but you go into every circumstance. As long as you've done your homework and you understand what the risks and the rewards are, that's always changing. To take the risk that I took when I was sixteen doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
I've had a great career and am very fortunate to continue living my dreams. I have an amazing wife. I have two young girls. Not to say that you don't have as much to live for when you're sixteen, but at sixteen, my option was construction. As a family construction, that's great but you have an option to maybe be the best in the world. Do something that no one has ever done. That was worth it at the moment. Now when someone's like, “So and so did a triple back flip. What are you going to do?” I'm like, “No real interest. That sounds great. I'll be there watching. I'll be there cheering the next guy on. I'm proud of that.” Risks and rewards are always changing.
JE: Aside from doing all of these stunts, you're just a regular guy from Maryland. In fact, we have a mutual buddy, which I mentioned prior to starting this interview, Tommy Passemante.
TP: Street Bike Tommy.
JE: He's so great. I asked him, what's one thing you can tell me about Travis that no one out there would know? It’s nothing bad. He said that it's pretty hilarious that you live in a regular neighborhood. You play pickleball with the neighbors. You like to drink and carry on at the Legion. It was nice what he said. He said nothing. I mean nothing comes before your family. As a family man, how do you manage to balance that with being on the road all over the world for almost the entire year?
TP: That's a tough question. It's getting tougher as the kids start school. For me, I want to show the kids and my kids what it takes to make it look like it's easy, the amount of work that goes in and the amount of time that we spend. My wife is a two-time world champion and three-time X Game champion on skate.
JE: She's a badass. She’s welcome on the show anytime she wants.
TP: Lyn-z is amazing. Even more than that, she's an amazing mom. She took to motherhood and I was encouraging her. I said, “I'll take a year or two off.” It was at the time when skating came to the Olympics. I said, "You can do this." She went and won the world championship again at 30 years old, a year and a half before the Olympics. She said, "I miss my kids too much. The work that it takes to be the best, I'm missing these moments and these times that are more important for me as a mom."
She was in Spain for the world championship for skate. She goes, "I was standing on that podium having won the world championship thinking I cannot wait to get home." Even at that moment, it was more important for her to be with the kids. I'm so fortunate to have a wife that is so passionate and is okay with being home as I'm gallivanting around the world. What is cool about my job is that when I'm home, I'm home. I feel like most dads especially, but most parents might be home but they're always working.
JE: They're not present.
TP: They leave for work before the kids wake up or they get back late or they're doing whatever. When I'm home, I am 100%. I get to have these amazing weeks. I had two weeks off over at Christmas and New Year's. It snowed. We went out back together. We had all this amazing play and we were able to do things with the kids. Their reality's a little bit different. We jumped into a 500-foot canyon and my eight-year-old runs off and jumps. She's like, “Cowabunga.” It’s literally a 400-foot vertical drop, then the rope catches and it's like a big swing.
JE: I want to play in Travis Pastrana's backyard. Paint a picture of how is your backyard. When I think of your backyard, I picture ramps, canyons, bungee jumping cords, and rock climbing walls. Maybe there's a plane back there. What does the backyard look like for Travis Pastrana? I have to know.
TP: It went from an action sports mecca where all the best in the world from every different country come, especially when action sports went in the Olympics. That's where people did stuff and still do stuff that had never been done before. Now, it's more of a kid’s land. It's all downsized for my kids and their friends. We have a rock climbing wall that's like a cave.
JE: I knew you had a rock climbing wall.
TP: We had a mechanical bull. Ask Tommy, that was the most dangerous thing we had. We got rid of that, but we have slips and slides.
JE: Did somebody get injured? You can't just tease that and not tell the story. What happened with the mechanical bull? Did someone fall out?
TP: As it turned out, as you got better at driving the mechanical bull. You could keep people on that who were trying to fall off and beat them to death if we threw them off. Not that I ever did that. It’s just hypothetically speaking.
JE: You mentioned your wife. She is an absolute badass, Lyn-z. What makes her so cool is she is part of a very small elite group of female professional skateboarders.
TP: Unicorns.
JE: She is a unicorn. She is like a little Avril Lavigne, except she like skates. In 2001, you stopped the show at the Nitro Circus Live World Tour in Las Vegas. Got down on one knee and proposed, which was so sweet. You then went on to have these two girls. Do you see your daughters in the future doing dare double stunts like their dad? Do you want them to follow in your footsteps?
TP: I want my daughters to do whatever makes them happy. Whatever their passion is. I hope that they're not as passionate about motorcycles or BMX or skateboarding as their mom is about skaters or as I am about motorcycles. Cars, I could encourage that at some point. Now, they're both in a competitive cheer. They're very competitive against each other.
JE: I was a competitive cheerleader. That's music to my ears. I'm so excited about that.
TP: Maryland Twisters. We went to Disney and they won the ONE. Tell me this, they won the area qualifier and got national championship jackets. They're like, "We won the national championships." I'm thinking there's every cheer gym and every area has national championships. That was a little off, then they went to regional, which was down in Disney.
They won that and they said they won, I forget what that one was called. They then went on the ONE, then they won the ONE. Everyone was like, "We won the ONE." I think Disney was worlds, then after that, I'm like, "Whatever above world is nationals.” You guys have a very confusing system on how to say the national champ. I was super proud of them. I feel in my head, I'm doing the math. I feel like they won the national championship in their division, but the scoring system is way off.
JE: Our scoring system is a little off. I also think for younger competitive cheerleaders, it can be that way but it's a serious sport. Can we have you on the record saying, “Yes, cheerleading is a sport?” That is a big controversy in America. A lot of people are like, “That's not a sport.” It is physically so demanding and challenging, and it is a matter of trust having to trust your fellow teammates. I was a flyer. I wasn't on a dirt bike like you, but I would get thrown up hundreds of feet in the air and I would have to trust whoever below me was going to catch me.
TP: Did you say hundreds of feet in the air?
JE: Maybe not hundreds. I might have exaggerated a little bit.
TP: I need to see that. That would be amazing.
JE: I might've exaggerated a teeny bit but it's a serious sport.
TP: Interestingly enough, my oldest was a flyer. My youngest was a flyer. My youngest moved up two levels. My oldest moved up one level. My youngest beat her out for the job of the flyer. My oldest cried for a week. There are two tumblers and she moves. She's like, "I am not being a base for my younger sister. I refuse. I quit now."
JE: She's like, “I'll drop her out of spite.”
TP: They were like, “This is what you need to do to be one of the tumblers.” She learned a couple of things right off the bat. She's like, “I can do standing back tuck and I can do this and that.” The most I felt that I've let down my kids at any point in my life, and my wife as well, we had the same feeling, is when my six-year-old learned a standing back tuck. She said, “Mom, dad, let's get a picture of us all doing backflips. Now we can all do flips." My oldest is like, "Yes.” Lyn-z and I looked at each other. I'm like, “I need a dirt bike to do a flip.” She's like, “I need a skateboard to do a flip, any trampoline?” We were so devastated.
JE: That's so cute. I remember how monumental it was. It was a big moment for me when I could do my round-off backhand spring back tuck. That was a big deal. I have to give props to your little girl because I could never do a standing back tuck. That's hard, so props to them. It sounds like you are raising little daredevil athletes. That's awesome. I love how they hear about you as the extreme sports athlete but peeling back the layers on Travis the dad. In watching a video of you landing a double back flip on a dirt bike, it was a sweet moment when the camera panned to your mom, who could not bear to watch you doing the stunt.
TP: That was not a sweet moment. I've never come so close to wringing a reporter's neck. Before the stunt, I'm like, “Mom, I've got it. I know I have this. No problem.” A reporter then came around the corner. This is a super nice girl and I had known her from doing other events. She's like, "Your son could die today. How does that make you feel? What would you think of yourself as a parent if he kills himself and he breaks his neck or he is paralyzed?” My mom broke down and melted into a little ball, and I'm getting ready to go do something that could be such an amazing thing.
JE: That is a matter of life and death.
TP: I'm holding my mom who's crying on the ground while the cameras are live. I'm like, “How on earth?” The girl at the time wasn't a mom. I hope she's tuning in to this. How can you do that to a parent?
JE: How insensitive.
TP: I thought my mom was going to have a heart attack. I honestly was more concerned for her when I was going up to do this stunt than I was for myself. I would be fine. It broke my heart. Anyway, sorry but for me, that wasn't a cute moment.
JE: No, it's not. As a journalist, that pains me to hear because reporters can be pretty relentless when it comes to this kind of stuff. It's self-serving in a way because they're looking out for that one soundbite that makes the news.
TP: To be fair, that's the moment that you remember. It's the moment that made the stunt that I was doing or the silly circus trick on a dirt bike real. It made it powerful. I've been in the limelight. I understand. You've been in the limelight. People are harsh. It is what it is. You have to know what the facts are. As a parent, when you break it down to how you feel as a parent to allow your kid to do something that might kill him, that's a tough moment.
Never ask a parent of a stuntman how they feel as a parent to allow their son to do something that might kill him.
JE: That’s awful, but you did it and you landed it. I hope that reporter learned a lesson from this like, “Don't go there.”
TP: They didn't. I'm sure. I didn't strangle them, so there was that.
JE: Has there ever been a time that your mom or even your wife has been like, “Travis, you can't do this. You are a father now. You need to stop?” Have you ever had a come-to-Jesus moment of like, “We got to sit this guy down and we got to talk to him” Have they always been supportive?
TP: When I broke my back, I shattered my pelvis, which is a dislocated spine. I dislocated both SI joints.
JE: Your spine got dislocated from your pelvis?
TP: In layman's terms, yes. I dislocated both sacroiliac joints. My SI joints or whatever get that static pain. Everything is fused for me, so I don't get that pain, which is nice, but I bled out two-thirds of my blood volume over three days. It's something that you don't necessarily come back from too quickly. I woke up in a different state. I was sedated and was in a medically induced coma for ten days. When I woke up, my mom was there and she had been by my side the whole time. She looked 50 years older than when I had crashed. I'm coming to and figuring out what's going on. My mom's like, “Please tell me this is it. No more X Games. No more dirt bikes.” I’m fifteen years old and at that moment I said, “Mom, this is what I love. Is that jump still there? I want to try it again. I know what I did wrong.”
Tears came down her eyes and she started giggling. She's like, “I can't take that from you. Why do you do this to me? I cannot take that dream, passion and love if in the most pain you've ever been in and all you can think of is getting back out there and doing it.” At the time, I didn't even know if I’m going to be walking again. She's shaking her head. I was very fortunate that she didn't pull everything off at that point because my life would've been very different.
I still would've had a lot of the injuries that I had. My knee still would've been messed up. My back would've messed up, but I wouldn't have followed through with this dream. I would've never known if I was good enough or if this was a passion that I would've always had doubt and regret. I probably would've had a lot of animosity toward my parents for not allowing me to chase my dreams. All my friends in construction would've said, "You would've never made it," I would have been the guy that’s like, “I would have. I was good.”
JE: You proved all those naysayers wrong. I have a friend of mine, Shea Adam, who's a pit reporter. I consulted with her and Tommy ahead of this interview. We both want to know, you've competed in almost every facet of racing and yet, you've only done a handful, I believe five total, of sports car races. You did two Super Cup races and the Rolex 24 of Daytona back in 2012, but I don't think you've come back since. What is it about that area of sport that spooks you or scares you?
TP: To be honest, it was like NASCAR. I've realized that my strength is not necessarily being more precise or more consistent. It's not understanding the vehicle and being able to talk to my pit crew to tell them how to make it better. My expertise is pushing the limit, understanding where that boundary is, and being willing to take more risks where it can make time. In a sports car, in anything pavement, you can't make up for a lack of talent with a little bit more risk, a little bit more dare, and a little bit more chance.
Motorsports Competitor: In sports cars, NASCAR, or anything pavement, you make up for a lack of talent with a little bit more risk. Because by the time you're taking a risk, you're already burning off your tires.
By the time you're taking a risk, you're already burning off your tires. You're already slowing down. You're already sideways and messing up. It’s precision driving. It’s the more OCD type or very meticulous. You can see it in the F1 drivers, how they dress, how they talk, and how they present themselves compared to the NASCAR drivers. They are a little bit more loose, and the rally drivers.
JE: If you are not first or last, kidding.
TP: NASCAR has an interesting persona because the drivers are some of the smartest guys in racing. They're very articulate in their own way. In NASCAR, you can slide a little bit more and there's a little bit more freedom, whereas, in open-wheel racing, you have to be even more precise. Your breaking points don't change. In NASCAR, the tires go away. You slide a bit around. You got to play the wind. There's a lot more that you have to do at the spur of the moment, whereas in open-wheel racing, you're as good as your car.
In open-wheel racing, you're exactly as good as your car.
You have to be very meticulous about how you talk to your team and how you change what you're doing. You can only go as fast as the car will let you go. If you try to go faster, your tire goes slower. I'll give you something that no one will probably understand but it still confusing for a while. I went to Jimmie Johnson, a seven-time NASCAR champion, doing indie car. I said, “Jimmie, how do I go faster?” He said, “Travis, if you think you're going fast, you're not. If you think you're going slow, you are. If you think you can go faster, you can't,” and he walked away.
JE: It's like a riddle.
TP: That confused me for the majority of my NASCAR year. What he meant was, if you think you could have gone faster, that means you were probably right on the edge. That's probably as quick as you can go. Even if someone is going faster, you got to figure out a way to make the car work better. That's probably as fast as you're going to get. If you think you're going slow, you are. If you ever think I left a little bit on the table, you did. If you think you're going super fast, that means you're sliding out of control and losing that drive. I probably lost everyone.
Motorsports Competitor: If you think you could've gone faster, that means you were probably right on the edge and that's as quick as you can go. If someone is going faster than you, you have to figure out a way to make the car work better.
JE: Not at all. I followed it. That’s an interesting perspective. Do you see yourself getting back into sports car racing at all in the future?
TP: No, I'm not good enough.
JE: You're good at everything. You're Travis Pastrana, what do you mean?
TP: In rear-wheel drive, “when in doubt, throttle out” doesn't work. In motorcycles, we have a saying, “When in doubt, throttle out.” It means when everything starts getting sideways, you grab a handful of throttle and it'll straighten the motorcycle back out. With rally cars, we have all-wheel drive. When in doubt, as long as the front tires are pointing where you want to go. Don't get me wrong. You can have too much speed and fly off the road but, you're never too sideways to make the corner work.
With rear-wheel drive, when in doubt, lift. Use the brake and get off the throttle to get it settled. It's innately opposite of everything I've ever learned. When I'm pushing the envelope, I have a tendency to push the throttle and that spins me into the wall, which is hard to get a ride or sponsorship when you're crashing all the time.
Also, with pavement, it's not about being aggressive like dirt. If you're aggressive and you're sliding, you can always make time. You can grab time. You can take the risk. With pavement, the time is not messing up. When you look at the entire 40-person NASCAR field, being able to qualify within half a second on a mile-and-a-half course from first to last, you're not going to gain time but it's easy to lose.
JE: That's a fair point. It’s safe to say, no sports car racing in Travis's future.
TP: I would love to do 24 hours Le Mans. I would love to do all this stuff but it's expensive to do. You either have to pay for it yourself or you have to be good enough to win. I am not good enough to win that type of racing. I have not convinced my wife that I need to buy a Porsche or Ferrari or any of those vehicles to go in a race that I usually crash.
JE: It's safe to say that whatever comes next for you, you will only continue to add to your legacy of pushing the boundaries of extreme sports that you compete in, and completely amaze people. You do amaze me, Travis. Before we go, what event have you never participated in that's on your bucket list or even a stunt, something that remains on that bucket list for you?
TP: Despite my better judgment, I do have one trick on a motorcycle that I believe could be awesome. I know I should pass it down to someone pushing themselves in the industry now. I think I could do it, so maybe on that. Drag racing, I've never done. The four wide drags, top fuel drag racing, just one time to go down as fast as I can will be amazing. It's not something I want to get into but it's something that's on my bucket list that I never tried.
JEL: Are you able to share the motorbike thing that you would do or the stunt that you would do that you would pass on?
TP: Absolutely not because then someone else would do it before I had a chance to decide if I were to do it.
JE: I didn't even think of that. Of course, they would. We will be keeping our eyes on you, Travis. I don't know about you but this interview has made me want to go out and do some gnarly stunts on a city bike here in Manhattan, New York.
TP: Send me the video.
JE: That is as crazy as it gets for this city girl. Travis, thank you so much for taking the time to come on to the show to share your incredible story and how you've managed to reinvent yourself over the years as an athlete, father and husband.
TP: Thank you so much for your time. It's good talking.
JE: I have a koozie here that says, “What would Jonathan Taylor Thomas do?” My friend Travis gave it to me. We got to get a “What would Travis Pastrana do?” koozie in the studio.
TPL What is Jonathan Taylor Thomas doing? I haven't heard his name in forever.
JE: That's a great question. In fact, if he's tuning in, he ought to come on and talk about what he’s been up to. If I'm ever in LA at the same time as you, it would be a bucket list item of mine to go skydiving one day with Travis Pastrana. That is my biggest fear of mine jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. Although, I prefer to jump out of the plane with a parachute if that's okay with you.
TP: That would make sense. Be careful what you ask for because you might get it.
JE: Keep kicking ass and pushing the limits. Be sure to look out for Travis as a judge on NBC's America's Got Talent. Be sure to rate, review and subscribe to the show. That's available wherever you listen to podcasts, Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. You name it, it's there. I'm Jen Eckhart. That was Travis Pastrana. Thank you for tuning in.
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