From Skiing Park to Working for NASA: LJ Strenio
BLISTER Podcast
BLISTER
4.8 • 560 Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2019
⏱️ 83 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
Last week, the well-known and well-loved park skier, LJ Strenio, posted a photo of a letter — from NASA — that was congratulating him on being accepted as an intern to the Armstrong Flight Research Facility. Wait, what??
How does a park skier from Vermont, this star of the LINE Traveling Circus, this guy who once served as Vin Diesel’s stunt double, and this guy who has a 29-minute crash reel that is, frankly, almost as hard to watch as it is inspiring to watch — how does this guy get accepted to work for NASA? We talked to LJ to get the whole story, and it’s a great one.
TOPICS & TIMES:
- LJ’s acceptance at NASA last week (4:30)
- Rollerblading to skiboarding to contest skiing (8:25)
- Getting connected with LINE Skis (16:10)
- Specializing vs. Not Specializing (18:55)
- LINE Traveling Circus (28:34)
- Being Vin Diesel’s Stuntman (38:26)
- Real Grit: LJ’s Real Ski & Real Attempt videos (43:14)
- More on NASA (1:10:42)
- Envisioning the next 5-10 years (1:18:22)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Blister Podcast, a program dedicated to interesting people, the great outdoors, and a bunch of other stuff we like. |
| 0:09.4 | I'm Jonathan Ellsworth, the founder of Blister, and you can check out everything we're doing and reviewing over at blisterreview.com. |
| 0:19.5 | Last week, I was mindlessly scrolling through my phone while walking over to Blister HQ |
| 0:24.6 | when I was suddenly stopped dead in my tracks. |
| 0:28.3 | The well-known and well-loved park skier, L.J. Stranio had posted on Instagram a photo of a letter |
| 0:34.7 | from NASA that was congratulating him on being accepted as an intern to |
| 0:39.9 | the Armstrong Flight Research Facility. Wait, what? I stopped to try to remember what the date |
| 0:47.0 | was. Was this an April Fool's joke? No, it was actually the 18th of July. And then I remembered |
| 0:53.8 | that the 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing and Neil Armstrong's |
| 0:57.1 | moon walk was just two days away. |
| 1:00.3 | So obviously, LJ was just making some joke about going to work for NASA while simultaneously |
| 1:05.0 | giving a shout out to the Moon Landing, which wouldn't be at all out of character for someone |
| 1:09.3 | who's been being funny in line |
| 1:11.0 | traveling circus videos for years. But I looked at the letter again, and then I looked again at |
| 1:16.7 | what LJ had written along with it. He said, quote, I'm so excited to find out that I've been |
| 1:22.6 | accepted as an intern for NASA at the Armstrong Flight Research Facility for this fall. |
| 1:28.3 | I will be helping write code for their project developing their fiber optic sensor system, FOSS." |
| 1:35.3 | Okay, that doesn't sound at all like a joke. |
| 1:39.3 | But how on earth does a park skier from Vermont, this star of lines traveling circus, this guy who once |
| 1:46.4 | served as Vin Diesel's stunt double, and this guy who has a 29-minute crash reel, that is, if |
| 1:52.2 | we're being honest, almost as hard to watch as it is inspiring to watch, how does this guy get |
| 1:58.8 | accepted to work for NASA, to write code? |
... |
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