Travis Barker On Why He & Kourtney Kardashian Open Up About Miscarriage in ‘Louder Than Fear’ Doc: ‘A Story a Million People Can Relate To’

Travis Barker pulls back the curtain on some of the most challenging and painful moments of his adult life in the upcoming Hulu documentary Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear. The decade-in-the-making film due out on Aug. 16 covers Barker’s rise to rock stardom as the drummer of pop-punk legends Blink-182, as well as the fatal 2008 Learjet plane crash that took the lives of two of his closest friends, bodyguard Charles Monroe Still Jr., and assistant Chris Barker, and severely injured his best friend, Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein; Goldstein was found dead a year later in his New York apartment from a drug overdose.

And, in a new interview with The New York Times‘ Popcast, Barker tells hosts Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli that there’s a good reason he and wife Kourtney Kardashian chose to discuss one of the most difficult periods in their relationship in the film instead of on the family’s long-running Hulu reality series The Kardashians.

“I think when there’s things that can benefit people or help people like relate to something, I think that’s always like a green light, especially she’s always trying to do something like that,” Barker said of Kardashian opening up about the 2008 miscarriage she suffered just six months into the couple’s relationship. “Our journey of miscarriages and then IVF and it’s like failed, resulting in us having a baby naturally, like I feel like that’s a story a million people can relate to.”

The pair married in 2022 and welcomed a son, Rocky Thirteen, in 2023.

Like many of the Kardashian family partners who enter the always-filming family’s orbit, Barker — a veteran of the reality genre via his own fly-on-the-wall family series, Meet the Barkers — had to get used to living life under the glare of the reality TV cameras. Luckily for him, the learning curve was not so steep given that the film documentary crew had been following him around for years at that point, as well as his previous experience on the two-season MTV reality show. “I kind of don’t even realize I’m on the show,” said Barker, who also noted that he doesn’t watch finished episodes and doesn’t have any say over edits.

Despite the Kardashian show cameras often catching tense or dramatic moments, Barker said he and Kourtney decided to tell the miscarriage story in the documentary and not on TV because of the way the doc was filmed. “The way the documentary happens is through a series of interviews. I’ll say something, and then they’re like, ‘Oh, well tell me more about that,’ ” he explained. “And that’s how that came up. So no one knew about that.”

Louder Than Fear includes commentary from the Roots drummer Questlove, as well as late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, Rancid singer/guitarist Tim Armstrong, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and Barker’s longtime Blink bandmates bassist/singer Mark Hoppus and guitarist/singer Tom DeLonge.

Watch Barker discuss the decision to talk about the miscarriage below.