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Sickboy

Seizures & Brain Surgery with TJ Miller

Sickboy

CBC

Society & Culture

4.8524 Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2017

⏱️ 48 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

I’ve been following Silicon Valley since its first season and have fallen in love with Ehrlich Bachman as he parades around with in his kimono, taking bong hits and pretending as if he is cut from the same technological and entrepreneurial cloth as Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, simultaneously unable to collect rent from the characters on the show that live in his pizza box ridden home. It can be easy to forget that some of our favourite characters on our most beloved shows are real people, with real lives, with the same shitty hands the rest of us are sometimes dealt. TJ Miller is one such person that flirted with death at a young age when he found he had been living with a brain malformation for his entire life. Most people with this condition simply die unexpectedly in their mid 30’s, having never known of the fatal malformation that was always there. Luckily for TJ, the copious alcohol consumption and lack of sleep while filming Yogi Bear 3D lead to a hospital visit that revealed his brain malformation and made him confront the decision of going under the knife and risking death on the surgeon’s table to fix his brain. It’s the things that come up for us when death is strolling around in our neighbourhood, nearby, but not quite knocking on our door. What does it mean to communicate with your sick partner? How do you go about solving the mental puzzle of a manic state? How can a community of people who have such a profound experience in common like being chronically ill elevate each other by telling their story? These are a few of the topics we tackled with in our conversation with TJ Miller, and we couldn’t be more excited to share it with you. TJ Miller is an original cast member and star of HBO’s Silicon Valley as well as appearing in blockbusters such as Transformers, Deadpool & the upcoming Deadpool 2, and of course, Yogi Bear 3D. Although big screen success has been good to him, he is first and foremost an extremely talented and international standup comic.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

What's the connection between being an astronaut and being a novelist? I hadn't really thought about it

0:06.8

until I talked to the astronaut-turned-writer Chris Hadfield about his new thriller, Final Orbit.

0:13.5

Every week on the podcast bookends, I sit down with today's best authors for candid conversations

0:18.8

about their writing, inspirations, and lives.

0:22.8

You'll get to see the world through the eyes of your favorite writers, and they might even

0:26.6

take you to outer space, too. Bookends with Matea Roach is available now wherever you get your

0:31.8

podcasts.

0:34.3

This is a CBC podcast.

0:40.5

Hey everybody.

0:41.5

Welcome to Sick Boy podcast.

0:43.0

We're going to do something a little bit different this week.

0:45.0

Taylor, what happened this week?

0:46.3

What do we do?

0:47.1

We had our first phone call conversation.

0:50.5

Which we promised we would never do.

0:52.8

But we broke our promise.

0:57.0

Because T.J. Miller decided to call my cell phone and you guys didn't arrange so that i could be there well you told us that day that you couldn't be there

1:03.4

yeah and then you said that you had a window of opening and we could have definitely recorded it

1:07.6

at that time but then we decided that we just keep it to the original time where you couldn't make it.

1:12.1

Yeah.

1:12.5

Sorry, Bri.

1:13.2

That's okay.

...

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